Max Mosley, a former racing driver and chief of the governing body behind Formula 1, is dead at 81. The BBC reports that he was also a privacy campaigner, but only in passing why: he was famously accused by British tabloids as having organized a "Nazi-themed sex orgy", secretly filmed by a dominatrix in cahoots with The News of the World.
He took the Sunday newspaper to court in 2008 and won a landmark privacy case.
He successfully sued the News of the World for claiming his five-hour bottom-spanking, whipping and fantasy session with women in striped prison pyjamas had a 'Nazi theme'.
For five days over the summer that year, the High Court in London heard evidence from Mr Mosley and four dominatrices about their S&M party. The fifth dominatrix had secretly filmed the orgy for the News of the World, and did not appear in court.
Just because the dominatrix is wearing a Luftwaffe jacket and you're counting the lashes in German and someone's shouting "We are the Aryan race — blonde!" doesn't mean it's provably a Nazi-themed orgy—especially given that it was a set-up and the paper failed to get the Nazi salute or uniform on camera that it desperately hoped for. (In England and Wales, libel law demands the defendant prove their published claim; in other jurisdictions, such as the U.S., the plaintiff must prove the claim was defamatory and maliciously false)
Mr Justice Eady, ruling for the plaintiff in a verdict that further examined whether the sex workers' striped pyjamas connoted the garb of concentration camp prisoners, ultimately concluded that there was no Nazi element and therefore no legitimate public interest in the orgy or its participants. In the above interview, Mosely is happy to explain the orgy from his perspective.
"There was, of course," Justice Eady wrote, "plenty of spanking."
Mosley, the son of Britain's most famous fascist leader, saved his closed fist for his father's enemies.
