Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case

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Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case

Postby admin » Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:17 am

Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case
by Leigh Holmwood and Caitlin Fitzsimmons
24 July 2008

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Max Mosley said outside the high court that he was 'delighted' with the judgment. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP

Formula one boss Max Mosley today won £60,000 in his privacy action against the News of the World after the Sunday tabloid had falsely accused him of taking part in a "sick Nazi orgy".

Mosley, 68, the son of the 1930s British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, sued the Sunday tabloid paper for grossly invading his privacy after it printed pictures and published video of him indulging in a five-hour sadomasochistic sex session with prostitutes in a Chelsea apartment.


He failed in his bid to seek an unprecedented award of punitive exemplary damages, but the £60,000 damages are the highest in recent legal history in a privacy action. Mosley was also awarded costs.

Outside the high court, Mosley told the waiting media scrum: "I am delighted with that judgment, which is devastating for the News of the World.

"It demonstrates that their Nazi lie was completely invented and had no justification."

In his judgment Mr Justice Eady said that Mosley had a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in relation to his sexual activities no matter how "unconventional".

He found no evidence of Nazi themes in the orgy and said Mosley's life had been "ruined".

"I found that there was no evidence that the gathering on March 28 2008 was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behaviour or adoption of any of its attitudes. Nor was it in fact. I see no genuine basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust," Eady said.

"There was bondage, beating and domination which seem to be typical of S&M behaviour.

"But there was no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording, for the publication of the resulting information and still photographs, or for the placing of the video extracts on the News of the World website -– all of this on a massive scale.


"Of course, I accept that such behaviour is viewed by some people with distaste and moral disapproval, but in the light of modern rights-based jurisprudence that does not provide any justification for the intrusion on the personal privacy of the claimant."

Eady added: "It has to be recognised that no amount of damages can fully compensate the claimant for the damage done. He is hardly exaggerating when he says that his life was ruined."

Both Mosley and the News of the World editor, Colin Myler, were in attendance in a packed court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice to hear the verdict. Neither reacted when Eady read out his judgment.

Mosley added outside court: "It also shows [the News of the World] have no right to go into private premises and take pictures and films of adults engaging in activities that are nobody's business but their own.

"We are very pleased with the result. I have nothing further to say."

Reading a prepared statement outside court, Myler defended the paper's reporting and said the judgment was further evidence of a "creeping law of privacy".

"Unfortunately, our press is less free today after another judgment based on privacy laws emanating from Europe," Myler said.

"How those very general laws should work in practice has never been debated in the UK parliament. English judges are left to apply those laws to individual cases here using guidance from judges in Strasbourg who are unfriendly to freedom of expression. The result is that our media are being strangled by stealth.

"That is why the News of the World will remain committed to fighting for its readers' right to know."

Myler said the paper believed its coverage was legitimate and lawful.

"The judge has ruled that Mr Mosley's activities did not involve Nazi role-play as we had reported, but has acknowledged that the News of the World had an honest belief that a Nazi theme was involved during the orgy," Myler said.

"The newspaper believed that what it published on March 30, 2008 was legitimate and lawful and, moreover, that publication was justified by the public interest in exposing Mr Mosley's serious impropriety."

The paper had alleged the session had "Nazi overtones", but Mosley -- the president of the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile) -- strenuously denied this in court.

The News of the World's informant, known as Woman E, was not called as a witness for the paper because of what the paper's QC, Mark Warby, said was her "emotional and mental state".

The News of the World had argued that there was no basis for punitive damages, because the newspaper believed what was written and that it was legitimate to publish.

Mosley's counsel, James Price QC, 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".

The case, which has made headlines around the world, saw Mosley give evidence about how the allegations had caused his wife and family great distress, while the News of the World editor, Colin Myler, defended the paper.

The judge awarded all costs to Mosley and refused the News of the World's argument that there should be a deduction because the paper had won on the issue of exemplary damages.

The previous highest award a court has made for breach of privacy was £5,000, although there have been several cases of higher settlements out of court.

Actors Catherine Zeta Jones and her husband Michael Douglas were awarded £14,600 against Hello! magazine in 2001 after it published unofficial pictures of their wedding, although the sum included other payments not related to breach of privacy.

David Engel, a partner in the media litigation team at Addleshaw Goddard, the firm that handled the Hello! case on behalf of Zeta Jones, Douglas and OK!, said the couple were awarded compensation £3,750 each for breach of privacy.

The payment also included £50 each for breach of the data protection act, and a further £7,000 for the inconvenience and additional costs of having to rush through approval of the photographs for OK!

Model Naomi Campbell won £3,500 against the Daily Mirror in 2003 after it printed a photo of her leaving a drugs counselling session.

Recent out-of-court settlements have included £37,500 to actor Sienna Miller from the News of the World and £58,000 to actors Hugh Grant, Liz Hurley and her husband Arun Nayar.
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Re: Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case

Postby admin » Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:38 am

Google battles lawsuit by Max Mosley over sex party images
by Estelle Shirbon
January 14, 2015

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Google Inc. sought on Wednesday to block a lawsuit filed against it by Max Mosley in the High Court in London over access through its search engine to images of the former motor racing chief taking part in a sex party.

Google wants to avoid a legal obligation to monitor and limit the flow of data on the Internet. Mosley, who was present in court, argues the firm is breaching his fundamental right to privacy by allowing users to access the pictures.

The images were first published in 2008 by Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World, which said they showed a Nazi-themed orgy -- an incendiary story, as Mosley's father Oswald Mosley was a British fascist politician in the 1930s.

Max Mosley later won 60,000 pounds ($91,290) in damages from the newspaper after a court ruled the party had no Nazi theme and the story was not in the public interest. Mosley, 74, has remained in the public eye in Britain ever since, mainly as a campaigner for privacy rights and against media intrusion.

He launched legal action against Google and its British subsidiary in July last year, seeking damages and asking the court to compel the search engine to prevent any user accessing the sex party images in future.

Google's lawyers say it has removed the images from search results in instances where Mosley has notified the firm of specific search terms being used, and has provided the detailed location of the images.

However, the firm does not wish to go further and set up a filtering system that would prevent users from accessing the images, arguing that would amount to an obligation to monitor the Internet.

At the first court hearing in the case, Google's lawyers argued on Wednesday that Mosley's lawsuit should be thrown out because the images had been so widely available for so long that he had no realistic expectation of privacy left.

They also disputed Mosley's position that Google should be considered a "publisher" of the images for legal purposes.

The court hearing was scheduled to last two days. Judge John Mitting is then expected to rule within two to four weeks on whether the case should be thrown out or go to a full trial.

Mosley has won similar lawsuits against Google in France and Germany.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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Re: Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case

Postby admin » Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:43 am

Former Formula One Chief Max Mosley Settles Legal Dispute With Google: Harbinger of battles to come in Europe’s developing ‘right to be forgotten’
by Ulrike Dauer and Lisa Fleisher
May 15, 2015

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Max Mosley had pressed Google to remove Internet images of a sadomasochistic orgy that he took part in seven years ago. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Google Inc. and Max Mosley, the former Formula One chief, have settled a long-running legal dispute in three European countries related to images from a secretly filmed orgy, representatives from both sides said Friday.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and it wasn’t clear whether Google had agreed to automatically censor the images.

The dispute stems from a sadomasochist romp in London involving Mr. Mosley and several prostitutes. Video recordings of the private event in 2008 were made public in the same year.

Mr. Mosley pressed Google to automatically filter out links to images as they surfaced on sites across the Web. Google, however, wanted to stick with removing links to images or websites one by one, allowing it to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to remove results.

The fight, involving suits in Germany, France and the U.K., has provided a preview of battles forming around Europe’s “right to be forgotten,” a still-evolving principle that people should be able to control what information appears about them online.

In a review of complaints, Europe’s top court last year said Google had to remove links in search results for people’s names if requested by the parties involved. The search engine was ordered to balance the public’s right to know with an individual’s right to privacy, especially in cases where the information is deemed outdated, irrelevant, incorrect or otherwise inadequate.

According to people familiar with the issue, the court’s ruling and the “right to be forgotten” might not be relevant to Mr. Mosley’s fight in part because he is a public figure.

Mr. Mosley, who is 75 years old, is famous in Britain. At the time of the London orgy, he was president of the governing body for Formula One racing, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile. Also, his father, Oswald Mosley, founded the British fascist party and supported Hitler before World War II.

In 2008, Mr. Mosley sued and won roughly $95,000 in damages from the now-closed News of the World for invading his privacy by publishing stories about the orgy, as well as photos and video. The U.K. tabloid was owned by News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Mosley also won legal battles against Google in Paris and in Hamburg, Germany, where courts required the search engine to filter out photos from the episode. Google had appealed those verdicts. In January, the U.K. High Court of Justice allowed Mr. Mosley’s claim to proceed to trial, recognizing that he might have a case under the U.K. Data Protection Act.

The German appeals court, the Oberlandesgericht Hamburg, was due to announce its decision in the matter on May 19. A court spokeswoman couldn’t immediately confirm the settlement because the court hadn’t received the necessary documents.

“The dispute has been settled to both parties’ satisfaction,” said Tanja Irion, Mr. Mosley’s lawyer in Germany.

A spokesman for Google Germany GmbH, Klaas Flechsig, also said the dispute has been settled, thereby resolving the court cases in Germany, the U.K. and France.

Both parties declined to comment further on financial, technical or other details of the settlement.

Write to Ulrike Dauer at ulrike.dauer@wsj.com and Lisa Fleisher at lisa.fleisher@wsj.com
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Re: Max Mosley wins £60,000 in privacy case

Postby admin » Thu Apr 14, 2016 4:29 am

Excerpt from "So You've Been Publicly Shamed"
by Jon Ronson
Copyright © 2015 by Jon Ronson

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Seven: Journey to a Shame-Free Paradise

F1 BOSS MAX MOSLEY HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS EXCLUSIVE: SON OF FASCIST HITLER LOVER IN SEX SHAME

Formula One motor racing chief Max Mosley is today exposed as a secret sadomasochist sex pervert. The son of infamous British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley is filmed romping with five hookers at a depraved NAZI-STYLE orgy in a torture dungeon.

Before hammering away at the girls he plays a cowering death camp inmate himself, having his GENITALS inspected and his hair searched for LICE-mocking the humiliating way Jews were treated by 5S death camp guards in World War II ...

At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old yells "she needs more of ze punishment!" while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette's naked bottom. Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German: "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fiinfl Sechs!"

With each blow, the girl yelps in pain as grinning, gray-haired Mosley becomes clearly aroused. And after the beating, he makes her perform a sex act on him.

His Jew-hating father-who had Hitler as guest of honor at his marriage-would have been proud of his warped son's command of German as he struts around looking for bottoms to whack. Our investigators obtained a graphic video of his sick antics.

-- NEVILLE THURLBECK, News of the World, MARCH 30, 2008


Max Mosley sat across from me in the living room of his West London mews house. We were alone. His wife, Jean, was at their other house, where she now spends most of her time. As Max told the Financial Times's Lucy Kellaway in 2011, "She doesn't like going out, she doesn't want to meet people."

Nobody I could think of had ridden out a public shaming as immaculately as Max Mosley had. A powerful and hitherto not especially well-liked society man and the head of the FIA, Formula One racing's governing body, had been photographed by the News of the World's hidden cameras in the most startling sex situation imaginable, especially given his particular Nazi associations, and he had somehow managed to emerge from the scandal completely intact. In fact, it was even better than intact. People liked him more than ever. Some people thought of him as a standard-bearer for our right to feel unashamed. That's how I thought of him. And now Max was every shamee's aspiration. I wanted him to talk me through how he did it.

But he looked embarrassed by my question. ''I'm no good at introspection," he said.

"But you must have some clue," I said. "You stood at the newsstand that Sunday morning reading the News of the World article ... "

"It was immediate," Max said. "It was a whoosh. It was, 'This is war.'" Then he trailed off and gave me a look to say, I'm sorry, but I really don't do introspection.

I think he was as curious about the mystery as I was. But he didn't know the answer.

"You had a strange childhood ..." I tried.

"I suppose my upbringing toughened me up a bit," he said. "From a very early age, I realized that my parents weren't like other people's parents ..."

Until that "Sick Nazi Orgy" headline, the thing Max Mosley was most famous for-unless you were a Formula One racing fan-was his parents. Max's father was Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder in 1932 of the British Union of Fascists. He gave Nuremberg-style speeches in London during which hecklers were illuminated by spotlights and viciously beaten in front of the crowd. Oswald Mosley stood onstage and watched. Max's mother was the beautiful socialite Diana Mitford. She and her sister Unity were so besotted by Hitler-with whom they both became friendly-they'd send each other letters like this one, from Unity to Diana:

23rd December 1935

The Fuhrer was heavenly, in his best mood and very gay. There was a choice of two soups and he tossed a coin to see which one he would have, and he was so sweet doing it. He asked after you and I told him you were coming soon. He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely.

With best love and Heil Hitler, Bobo.


Hitler attended Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford's wedding, which took place at Joseph Goebbels's house in 1936. Max was born in 1940, and when he was a few months old, his parents were interred for the duration of the war at Holloway Prison in North London. Those were his first memories-visiting his imprisoned parents, "which doesn't strike you as unusual when you're three, but as you get older, you realize they're disliked by a big section of society. Still, they were my parents, so I was completely on their side. When someone argued with me about my father. it was easy for me to win because I knew all the facts."

"What did people say about your father that wasn't true?" I asked.

"Oh, you know, 'He was a friend of Hitler.' Well, without going into whether that was a good or a bad thing, I knew he only met Hitler twice and he actually didn't like him. My mother was a friend, undoubtedly, and her sister, but not my father."

"Why didn't your father like Hitler?" I asked.

"I think he thought he was ... " Max screwed up his face.

"A bit blah?" I said.

"Something of a poseur," agreed Max. "To that sort of Englishman. But then again, he quite got on with Mussolini, of whom the same could have been said. I suspect he saw Hitler as this other man who was in the same line of business as him but much more successful. And my mother liked him. I don't think there was any affair but ... well, you can see it. Anyway. To me the whole thing has been an enormous nuisance and encumbrance."

Max drifted into the motor-racing world. Nobody cared about his father there. As he told Autosport magazine in 2000, he knew he was where he belonged when he overheard someone say, "Mosley. He must be some relation of Alf Moseley, the coachbuilder." Max was in his mid-twenties when he started in the racing world, and he had just begun going to S&M clubs.

"Are S&M clubs comfortable places to be?" I asked him. "Are they relaxing?"

"Well, yes," Max said. From his look, I guessed he considered them places of integrity-nonexploitative, shame-free retreats from a world that overvalues shame as a weapon.

"Were you worried about getting caught?" I asked.

"I was careful," he said. "Especially when I began seriously annoying a big section of the car industry." What Max meant was that by the early 1990s he had become a campaigner to reform car-safety laws, forcing manufacturers to carry out crash tests. "And when you think of what they did to Ralph Nader ... "

Ralph Nader. In 1961 a young man named Frederick Condon crashed his car. Back then, sharp edges and no seat belts were considered stylish in car interiors. But the sharp edges turned Frederick Condon into a paraplegic. And so a friend of his-the lawyer Ralph Nader-began lobbying for mandatory seat-belt laws. Which was why General Motors hired prostitutes to follow Nader into stores-a Safeway supermarket and a pharmacy-to seduce and then blackmail him.

"It happened twice," Nader told me, when I telephoned him. "They were women in their mid-to-late twenties. They were pretty good. They both acted in a very spontaneous manner, not a furtive manner.

They started a little small talk.

Then they got down to it."

"What did they say to you?" I asked him.

"The first woman said, 'Would you help me move some furniture in my apartment?' And the other one said, 'We're having a discussion on foreign affairs. Would you like to join it?' Here I was, at the cookie counter!" Nader laughed. "'Foreign affairs'!" he said.

"And all because you wanted them to put seat belts in cars?" I said.

"They didn't want the government to tell them how to build their cars," he replied. "They were very libertarian that way, to put it mildly. They had private detectives follow me everywhere. They spent ten thousand dollars just to find out if I had a driver's license. If I didn't have a driver's license, they could have called me un-American, you see?"

Eventually, General Motors was forced to admit the plot and apologize to Nader in a congressional hearing. The incident proved to him, and later to Max, that the car industry was not above trying to shame its opponents into silence in its battle against safety do-gooders, and that people in high places were prepared to ingeniously deploy shaming as a means of moneymaking and social control. Maybe we only notice it happening when it's done too audaciously or poorly, as it had been with Ralph Nader.

***

One Sunday morning in the spring of 2008, a PR man telephoned Max to ask him if he'd seen the News of the World. "He said, 'There's a big story about you.' So I went to the newsstand."

And as Max stared at the grainy photographs that millions of Britons were simultaneously staring at-a naked Max being bent over and spanked by women in German uniform-a line from Othello came into his head: "I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself and what remains is bestial."

All he'd worked for had been pushed away by a thing he had always considered a tiny part of his life. He took the newspaper home and showed it to his wife. She thought he'd had it specially printed as a joke. And then she realized that it wasn't a joke.

Max's behavior from that moment on was the opposite of Jonah's. He gave an interview to BBC Radio 4 in which he said that, yes, his sex life was strange, but when it comes to sex, people think and say and do strange things, and only an idiot would think the worse of him for it. If our shame-worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world, Max was narrowing that gap to nothing. Whereas Jonah's gap was as wide as the Grand Canyon.

And Max had an ace up his sleeve. The News of the World had made a fatal mistake. The orgy was definitely German-tinged. But it was not Nazi-themed.

And so Max sued.

JAMES PRICE QC [Max Mosley's barrister]: I'm going to ask you to go through [the photographs] quite carefully with me, if you would. On page 291, nothing Nazi there?

COLIN MYLER [News of the World editor]: No.

PRICE: Page 292, that's Mr. Mosley having a cup of tea, nothing Nazi there?

MYLER: Correct.

PRICE: That is the SS style inspection sheet?

MYLER: Yes.

PRICE: You can quite clearly see from the photograph that it is a plastic spiral-bound notebook. I suggest to you that it is inconceivable that anybody could possibly honestly describe that as a SS style inspection sheet.

MYLER: I disagree.

PRICE: What do you know about medical examinations by the SS?

MYLER: I'm not a historian of them.

PRICE: Would it be fair to say you know nothing about SS medical inspections?

MYLER: Not in great detail, no.

PRICE: Anything at all?

MYLER: Not in great detail, no.


When Colin Myler and the paper's investigative journalist, Neville Thurlbeck, were asked in court to specify exactly where Max was mocking Jewish concentration-camp victims, they pointed to the photographs of the women guards shaving a naked Max and pointed out that Jews were shaved at concentration camps. But, as James Price QC indicated, they were shaving Max's bottom. That wasn't resonant of concentration camps at all. Furthermore, as Max explained during his evidence, if they'd wanted to look like Nazis, "it would have been easy to obtain Nazi uniforms online or from a costumier." Yes, there were uniforms, but they were generically German military.

The News of the World's case crumbled further when an e-mail exchange between two of the women guards was read out in court.

Hi ladies. Just to confirm the scenario on Friday at Chelsea starting at 3. If you're around before then, I'm doing a judicial on him at noon so if you'd like to witness that, be here for 11 am but don't stress if you can't make that.

Can't wait it'll be great ... My bottom is so clear for a change. Lots of love.


A "judicial"? A Nazi scenario might have been called a "Volksgerichtshof trial" or maybe a Gerichtsverfahren. But a judicial? James Price asked the News of the World to explain why, if the orgy was so Nazi, one of the guards was constantly referred to on the tape as "Officer Smith." They had no answer. Max won the case.

He won big: costs plus £60,000 in damages, the highest in recent British legal history for a privacy case. And now, as Max told me, people regard him "primarily as someone who has been wronged and who has pushed rather successfully for certain things. I'm a lot better off than I would have been if I'd gone off to hide."

Within three years, the News of the World was no more. In July 2011, The Guardian revealed that a private investigator working for the paper had hacked into the voice mail of a murdered teenager, Milly Dowler. In an attempt to control the scandal, Rupert Murdoch shut the paper down. Later, Neville Thurlbeck pled guilty to phone hacking and was imprisoned for six months. Colin Myler wasn't implicated and is currently the president and editor in chief of the New York Daily News.

Max felt like he'd been fighting not only for himself but also for the dead who preceded him. He meant people like Ben Stronge. "He was an English chef living in northern France, divorced, and he was a swinger. A man and a woman from the News of the World swung by his place. He gave them dinner, disappeared upstairs, and apparently came back down wearing nothing but a pouch." Max paused. Then he said, softly, "Pathos."

That was June 1992. When Ben Stronge discovered that the people looking at him weren't swingers but News of the World journalists, he started crying. He telephoned the paper's editor, Patsy Chapman. According to Max, "He said, 'Please don't publish, because if you do, I'll never see my children again.' Well, they published anyway. They didn't give a damn. So he killed himself."

Then there was Arnold Lewis. In the spring of 1978 the News of the World decided to infiltrate sex parties in caravans in the forests of Wales. The journalist Tina Dalgleish and her photographer, Ian Cutler, answered a small ad in a swingers' magazine. It had been placed by a lay preacher and teacher, Arnold Lewis. They met in the local pub.

The turnout was small. Five people showed up, three of whom were Tina Dalgleish, Ian Cutler, and Arnold Lewis. Arnold left a coded note for potential latecomers with an arrow pointing in the direction of the caravan and the exact walking distance: "3.8 miles."

At the caravan they drank sherry and ate biscuits, and an orgy occurred (which Ian Cutler and Tina Dalgleish witnessed but didn't participate in), and then a few days later Tina Dalgleish telephoned Arnold to reveal her identity.

Later, after I left Max, I managed to get Tina Dalgleish's photographer on the phone. Ian Cutler was recovering from a major stroke, but he wanted to talk. He'd never stopped thinking about Arnold Lewis, he said. For thirty-five years it had plagued him.

"Arnold told Tina that if she published the story he would kill himself," Ian said. "He was a preacher. Fucking hell. He was a preacher in a small Welsh village."

The News of the World published and Arnold Lewis killed himself. He inhaled exhaust fumes. His body was found in his car the morning the story appeared. The headline read "If You Go Down to the Woods Today You're Sure of a Big Surprise."

***

Max and I spent the afternoon trying to work it out. There was something about his behavior in the aftermath of the News of the World story that made the public totally uninterested in annihilating him. He just naturally seemed to get the formula right. People melted. But what was it?

At one point he raised with me the possibility that he might be a sociopath. Maybe he'd survived it all by drawing on special sociopathic powers. Maybe his instantaneous "whoosh" of resilient fury at the newsstand was a sociopathic whoosh. Maybe that was what we liked about him-that resilient fury. He told me that in 1991, two years before getting the job as president of motor racing's governing body, they "commissioned a psychiatrist to analyze me, and the man concluded I was a sociopath." As he said this, he gave me an anxious glance.

I sighed.

"Do you feel empathy?" I asked him.

"Yes!" he said. "The motive of most of the main things I've done in my life is feeling sorry for people. And the psychiatrist never met me. He just did it from the outside."

"Well, I don't think you're a sociopath," I said.

"Phew!" said Max.

"Anyway," I said, "a psychologist once told me that if you're worried you may be a sociopath that means you aren't one."

"Thanks, Ron, another phew," Max replied. He paused. "Jon," he said, "I meant Jon."

"More proof you're not a sociopath, because sociopaths wouldn't care about calling me Ron," I said.

"Another phew!" said Max.

***

It was getting dark by the time I left Max's house. We both felt we hadn't quite managed to solve the mystery, so we agreed to keep thinking about it.

"Oh, by the way," I said, on my way out. "Have you heard of an S&M place in America called Kink? I think I've got an invitation to visit them."

"Kink?" said Max. His eyes widened. "That is the place! I've only seen it on the Internet. They've got machines. They've got electrics. They've got water. You name it, they've got it. I'm quite envious!"

"Exciting!" I said.

***

A few weeks passed. And then I received an interesting e-mail from Max Mosley. Like me, he'd been thinking a lot about what it was about him that had helped him to stave off even the most modest public shaming. And now, he wrote, he thought he had the answer. It was simply that he had refused to feel ashamed.

"As soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed," he said, "the whole thing crumbles."
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