Motor racing chief Max Mosley launched legal action against a British tabloid newspaper on Monday, denying involvement in a ”sick Nazi orgy” but admitting an interest in sadomasochistic sex.
Mosley (68), president of Formula One’s governing body the International Automobile Federation (FIA), is suing the News of the World Sunday newspaper over a story that claimed he had taken part in a Nazi-themed encounter with prostitutes.
Lawyers for Mosley, son of Britain’s 1930s Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, said the paper had unjustifiably breached his privacy.
The FIA chief had been interested in sadomasochism from an early age, his lawyer James Price told London’s High Court, but there were no Nazi connotations to the events covered by the paper, which involved five women in a flat paid for by Mosley.
”If the newspaper was hoping to get pictures of Mr Mosley doing a Nazi salute and saying ‘Sieg Heil’ or doing anything else connected to a death camp, they were to be completely disappointed,” Price said.
The pictures ”were a gross and indefensible intrusion of his private life” and made worse by the ”false suggestion that the events depicted involved him in playing a concentration camp commandant, mocking the humiliating way Jews were treated by SS death camp guards in World War II”, the lawyer said.
Mosley faced pressure to quit his job after the story was published in March along with a series of photographs and video footage on the paper’s website. However, he won a vote of confidence at an FIA extraordinary general assembly last month.
The News of the World said it was justified in publishing the story because of Mosley’s public role. However, Price said the paper was out of touch with Britons on matters of private sexual behaviour and had been acting like a ”peeping Tom”.
Price said the story had been driven entirely by Mosley’s family name and the paper’s pursuit of ”sexual titillation”.
”Bottom-spanking, whip fantasy and role-play scenarios are an interest Mr Mosley accepts he has had since quite a young age,” Price told the court.
”Most people probably think that S & M behaviour — spanking of bottoms, whips and role-plays, doctors and nurses, Sheikh and harem, guards and prisoners — are permissible and private and even funny.”
He said people’s private lives should remain so unless they involved the exploitation of children or vulnerable people.
”There is nothing of that kind here,” he said.
The hearing, expected to last about a week, continues. — Reuters