Here’s part of a fascinating Guardian interview with Max Mosley, where he talks about BDSM and press intrusion:
“..Sadomasochism has been such a regular part of Mosley’s life for decades that when he first saw the News of the World’s scoop in March, he couldn’t at first work out when they had shot the footage. Then he recognised what he prefers to call “the party”.
“The Nazi element – that to me was barking mad. There was never a thought or a hint of such a thing. And it was never in my mind. I would have found it the opposite end of the scale from erotic, particularly because of my antecedents,” he says. The alleged SS inspection manual was in fact a page torn out of an exercise book. “And to talk about it being a concentration camp scenario when the opening words of the woman were, ‘Welcome to Chelsea’, and she was Officer Smith and I was Mr Barnes …”
Mosley had already done his soul-searching about his preference for S&M long ago. And although he continued to practise it throughout his years as a working lawyer, his career in motor sport and as part of the formula one governing body, he doesn’t think it was in any way reckless. “I’ve been doing it for 45 years, I’ve been extremely careful, I’d never got caught.” He has known the women at this particular “party” for around two to three years. One was German, and he now knows she would have been “mortally offended” by any Nazi themes. “One of the girls … might easily have been Jewish,” he adds. He feels the News of the World thought they were “Lithuanian drug addicts or something of that kind” but they were all graduates whom he describes as “intelligent and competent”; one has nearly finished her PhD. He rented the flat and paid them, but says they took part in administering and receiving beatings because they liked it.
The descriptions of them as “hookers” or prostitutes is wrong, he feels. “First of all, all those women sometimes do what they did for nothing, just for the fun of it. And even with me, on at least two or three occasions, they’ve done it for nothing. It’s what they do. Of course, they utterly resent the description of hooker because for them, that [sadomasochism] and sex are two different things. Clearly there’s a sexual element, but there’s a sexual element when an actress kisses an actor on screen, but she’s not a prostitute. It’s a different thing: to them it’s acting; sex is something different. So they don’t see it as prostitution and I agree with them. The legal definition you could argue about, but morally they are not prostitutes.”
He says the details of the scenario were made up by the “ladies”. He found the inspection for head lice and the medical examination unerotic and quite boring but it would have been rude to stop the game and tell them that. “You tend to leave it to them. Really, all I’d said beforehand is we’ll have one part of the thing with me as what they call ‘sub’ [submissive] and one part with me ‘dom’ [dominant]. And they were quite happy with that because they all switch as well, so it just works for everybody. As soon as you stand back from it, it’s completely mad, but that’s how it worked.”
The prison scenario was quite mundane. “The reason they did the medical thing on me, they told me afterwards, is that they’d tried it on some sub and he’d found it tremendous. So, you know, they were just being nice.”
Mosley says it’s a “matter of principle” that people should be allowed to do what they like as long as it’s legal and consensual. He doesn’t believe in an “old-fashioned”, puritanical view that someone “whose sex life isn’t quite the same as the majority” should have to resign from their job.
But he kept it private, I say, away from the people who shared his life. “To anyone who’s not into it, it’s an absurd activity. Like, for example, being a transvestite is absurd to anybody who’s not into it. Therefore if you are into it you keep it secret from people who are not into it, and that could include your family.”
In formula one circles, he has a rule that people are allowed three jokes and that’s it, otherwise it goes on and on. “I mean, in the end, I did it, and it is funny. Sex is funny. Most people’s sex lives, if you had the whole detail, would be quite funny. That’s the point – why you don’t have the detail – because it’s not right to laugh at people in that way…”