Kinky Sex, Please, We're British

What is it about British public figures and sex scandals? Not only do they seem to have more of them, they tend to be more picturesque, more frequent, and more overexposed than anyone else's. From the Profumo scandal in the cold war, when a British minister and a Russian spy were sharing the same call girl, to the trials of David Blunkett, the Home Secretary in Tony Blair's Labour administration, they're a regular feature of the public life in a country with an aggressive tabloid press that often is ready and eager to make itself part of the story.

Even here, though, few scandals can match the current one stirred up by the weekly paper News of the World against Max Mosley, the British president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA, after its French acronym). Over the past two weeks, the Sunday mass-circulation tabloid published claims that Mosley took part in a Nazi-themed sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes, some dressed as prisoners and at least one as a prison guard. Video of the encounter—reportedly taken by one of the women with a camera in her bra—shows Mosley speaking to the role-playing hookers in both German, which he speaks fluently, and German-accented English. Other images showed Mosley apparently having his head checked for lice. The newspaper posted the video on its Web site, but when Mosley sued, it was briefly taken down and then reinstated Wednesday with the permission of a British court. The Nazi charges were particularly sensitive, since Mosley, 67, is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the notorious British fascist-party leader and a friend of Hitler's. Exiled from Britain after the war, Mosley sent his son Max to a boarding school in Germany. Max later went to Oxford, rising to become one of the most powerful men in auto racing. He has headed the FIA, the highest governing body of motor sports, as well as a federation of the automobile associations from 130 countries, for the past 15 years.

It's another facet of British sex scandals that their subjects don't go down very easily but only after protracted exposure in the press—often as a result of something other than the original peccadillo. The Tory politician and novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer, for instance, denied charges that he had frequented a prostitute and even sued his accusers for libel only to be prosecuted years later for perjury and sentenced to four years in jail after the accusations had been proven true.

Mosley has responded furiously to the charges against him, even while apparently conceding that he was indeed the subject of the video posted by the News of the World. "Not content with publicizing highly personal and private activities which are, to say the least, embarrassing, a British tabloid newspaper published the story with the claim that there was some sort of Nazi connotation to the matter," he wrote in a letter addressed to Peter Meyer, the head of Germany's ADAC automobile club. "This is entirely false." He went on to add, "It is against the law in most countries to publish details of a person's private life without good reasons. The publications by the News of the World are a wholly unwarranted invasion of my privacy."
 The News of the World responded by calling him a "liar as well as a pervert" in its edition last Sunday and publishing more allegations from the hookers it said were involved.

In addition to saying he would sue for libel and invasion of privacy, Mosley called an extraordinary session of the FIA's governing body, an expensive affair requiring representatives of car clubs worldwide to fly into Paris. That meeting is scheduled now for June 3. But in the meantime, a growing chorus of automobile clubs, manufacturers and Grand Prix racing drivers have called for Mosley to step down for the good of the FIA and Formula One racing. BMW and Mercedes were particularly tough on Mosley. "The content of the publications is disgraceful. As a company, we strongly distance ourselves from it. This incident concerns Max Mosley both personally and as president of the FIA, the global umbrella organization for motoring clubs," they said in a joint statement. Honda and Toyota expressed concern, too, with Toyota worrying particularly about "any behavior which could be understood to be racist or anti-Semitic," according to a statement from Toyota Motorsport.

Mosley issued a pointed reply to the German companies in a statement he gave the news agency Reuters. "Given the history of BMW and Mercedes Benz, particularly before and during the Second World War, I fully understand why they would wish to strongly distance themselves from what they rightly describe as the disgraceful content of these publications. Unfortunately they did not contact me before putting out their statement to ask whether the content was in fact true." He was apparently referring to the auto companies' role in supplying vehicles to the Nazi military.