Jon Ronson - So You've Been Publicly Shamed

“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 shameworthiness 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 11am 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.