Mosley's S&M sex session with five vice girls 'was no Carry On caper'

MAX Mosley's sadomasochistic session with five prostitutes was no "Carry On Spanking"-style caper, the High Court heard yesterday.

Making his closing speech in the motorsport boss's landmark privacy action, Mark Warby, QC, for the News of the World, said Mr Mosley was trying to make out that what the newspaper called a "sick Nazi orgy" was "nothing more than hanky-spanky".

"There was a general attempt both in the written evidence of the women and in oral evidence to present it as some kind of worthy activity attended by the most strict health and safety precautions, as though it was all being carried out under the guidance of the Bondage and Sadomasochism Regulatory Authority.

"There was an attempt, we suggest quite deliberately, to turn it all into some kind of farce, or to make it sound like a tremendous giggle."

But, said counsel, the newspaper's case was that the events in a Chelsea flat in March were "truly grotesque and depraved".

He told Mr Justice Eady in London: "If nanny stumbled in on Jason and Flora playing the game you have seen on the videos, she would be more than concerned – appalled – and so would the children and grandchildren of the victims of the Nazis."

Mr Mosley, the 68-year-old son of the 1930s fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, says that his life had been devastated by the exposé and is asking for an unprecedented award of punitive exemplary damages.

His counsel, James Price, QC, has said that the "gross and indefensible intrusion" was made substantially worse by the entirely false suggestion that Mr Mosley, president of the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile) was playing a concentration camp commandant and a cowering death camp inmate.

A ruling is expected sometime in the middle of next week after Mr Justice Eady yesterday reserved his decision. The newspaper's editor, Colin Myler, has said that he believed the story was one of "legitimate public interest and one that I believe was legitimately published".

Mr Warby said there was no basis for punitive damages, because the newspaper, as Mr Myler and reporter Neville Thurlbeck had said in evidence, honestly believed what was written and that it was legitimate to publish.

He said: "We say that whatever one may think of the merits of their views, we suggest they were patently sincere in what they said about those views."

He added there was also a complete failure to put any case of cynical calculation of wrong-doing for financial motives.

Mr Warby asked why, if there was nothing Nazi about the session, Mr Mosley and woman A were so desperate to try and cover up what went on, such as through the deletion of e-mails.

He said: "I invite you to conclude that what went on in the flat suggests that, just as he has remained committed to an unfortunate interest in S&M, some of the old racist sentiments which he was prepared to endorse also remained with him – and the public are entitled to know that."

He said that the canings which Mr Mosley received might not be at the top end of S&M activities but did reach the point of criminal wounding. Mr Mosley's "unhealthy addiction" was vicious, and the amount of money he devoted to it – £75,000 in one year – was a measure of how much it had taken over his life.

Making his closing speech, Mr Price said Mr Warby's words were aimed at the press in court, rather than the judge, and were deliberately designed to increase Mr Mosley's humiliation in return for him having the temerity to bring the action.

He told Mr Justice Eady: "We shall invite you to reflect on the outrageous things which have just been said in your award of damages."

Mr Price argued that compensation for intrusion of privacy should be greater than those for defamation "because invasion of privacy can never be repaired and the claimant has to live with it for the rest of his life".

He told the judge that it was "now beyond argument that there was no Nazi element".

And he added it was not accepted that if there had been a Nazi aspect it would have justified the intrusion or publication of the salacious detail and film.

The QC said the outrage from the Nazi era was the abuse of human beings and human rights.

He said: "To dress up in Nazi clothing is tasteless and puerile, but it is not an abuse of human rights."

He told the court: "The defendant's motivation was to publish a scandalous exposé. End of story. Nothing else."

Mr Price accused the News of the World of a "contemptuous disregard for the claimant's rights".

Case whips up media frenzy and uncomfortable truths about attitudes to sex

COMFORT, most of its practitioners would concur, is not something readily associable with acts of bondage discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism (BDSM) – at least not when they are executed with a degree of expertise.

It is fitting, therefore, that the ongoing court action against the News of the World by Max Mosley has revealed British society is still ill at ease with certain sexual peccadilloes.

The hearing brought by the president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile has been widely reported by the press, with every disclosure of the 68-year-old's inclinations lapped up by their readerships. Key to his counsel's case is the contention that the News of the World vastly misjudged the public appetite for such detail.

Mr Mosley's counsel, James Price, QC, has argued the newspaper is "out of touch with the instincts of decent British people" adding that "most people probably think S&M behaviour – spanking of bottoms, whips, and role-playing doctors and nurses, sheikh and harem, guards and prisoners – is permissible and private and even funny".

Tentative research into BDSM seems to support this claim. Brett Kahr's book, Sex and the Psyche, polled more than 20,000 British adults, and found that some 13 per cent fantasised about spanking someone, while marginally fewer longed to be spanked. Desire and deed, however, are two separate things, and the reaction to proceedings at the Royal Courts of Justice reveals our own worst vice is prurience. How else to explain the fact that an online video showing Mr Mosley's liaisons with a group of consenting adults has been viewed more than three million times?

The Lady Chatterley trial may have been held nearly five decades ago, but the titillation it revealed amongst the public has not dissipated. Little wonder then that, when reporting the story, Newsweek used the headline: "Kinky sex please, we're British."

Whatever the outcome of Mr Mosley's case – not forgetting its repercussions upon privacy laws and the power of the media – we ought to take heart in the fact it might lift certain veils.

After all, how else would we have learned the plural of dominatrix is dominatrices?

Martyn McLaughlin