by Max Mosley
In addition to finding out about the legal risks, I also had friends and relations urging me not to sue, though Jean and both our sons were not among them. It should not be forgotten that, at this stage (before Leveson and the phone-hacking scandal), UK tabloid newspapers and Murdoch’s in particular were extremely powerful. Their influence included close relationships with senior police officers and politicians, in addition to Murdoch’s enormous wealth. Bernie told me he had been telephoned by an Australian friend of Murdoch, asking: ‘Does Max know what he’s taking on?’ Bernie replied that he thought I probably did, but he wasn’t sure about Murdoch.
As far as I was concerned, Murdoch and his News of the World had started a war. You can’t fight a war without casualties. I was determined to fight and I intended to do my best to see that, in the end, their casualties were heavier than mine. In particular, I intended to try to put an end to the News of the World’s business model, which primarily consisted of illegally publishing private information about individuals for no better reason than financial gain. I thought it scandalous that they did this safe in the knowledge that hardly anyone would be prepared to tolerate the additional publicity or be able to afford the financial risk of taking them to court. I was very aware it might take a long time and cost a lot of money, but that’s how wars are.
I resolved to see it through whatever the cost. I told the lawyers I would not accept any Part 36 offer, no matter how big. I was going to force Colin Myler and his reporter, Neville Thurlbeck,8 into the witness box and expose them for the liars they were. If I ended up paying all the costs, so be it. At this stage I knew nothing of the further information that would eventually emerge about illegal activities at the News of the World.
As it was, they never made the Part 36 offer. It seems they thought that once I understood how much additional publicity there would be from a trial, and that it would cost me tens of thousands of pounds even if I won, I would not go through with it. And they certainly thought the ladies, named Women A to E in the legal proceedings to protect their identities, would refuse to come to court. It became clear later that they had completely underestimated the people involved. Also, I suspect they didn’t want me to accept their offer and be able to tell the world I had won. Their arrogance in those days was such that they would have found even that small reverse hard to swallow.
That arrogance cost them a million pounds – a seven-figure mistake, by Murdoch’s lawyers. Had they made the offer, it would certainly have been for more than the very modest (even if record) damages awarded by Mr Justice Eady, so I, not the newspaper, would have ended up paying the £1 million costs. But the lawyers, I suppose, had even bigger worries at exactly this time because of the chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Gordon Taylor.
Taylor was one of the phone-hacking victims mentioned in court when the News of the World’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and the paper’s private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, pleaded guilty to phone hacking at the end of 2006. The News of the World management were desperately trying to maintain their lie that only Goodman, their ‘rogue reporter’, had hacked phones. They were trying to pretend that no one else at the paper was involved, but Taylor sued them, claiming they had hacked his phone. Moreover, he had evidence that the hacking was done by someone other than Goodman and that there were a very significant number of additional victims. Had the Taylor story become public, it would have shown that illegal phone hacking was a fundamental part of the News of the World’s business and being conducted on an industrial scale.
We later learned that it was at the beginning of June 2008, about five weeks before my case came to court and after receiving leading counsel’s opinion, that the News of the World’s in-house lawyer Tom Crone sent James Murdoch the notorious ‘unfortunately it’s as bad as we feared’ email referring to the hacking of voicemails. Having received that email, the only way James could later claim he was not fully informed about the extent of phone hacking was to say he never read it. Needless to say, I find his explanation absurd.
A few days later, notwithstanding his claimed lack of knowledge of the contents of the email, James authorised a settlement with Taylor for a reputed £700,000, far in excess of any damages Taylor could conceivably have won had he pursued the case in court. If James didn’t know about the phone hacking, it follows that he didn’t know why he was paying all that money. Yes, it’s an unlikely tale but presumably it was either that or admit to covering up criminality. The newspaper’s secret was protected by a stringent confidentiality clause in its settlement contract with Taylor.
Given the management’s simultaneous battle with Taylor, they certainly had their hands full. Nevertheless, in the middle of all their worries about Taylor, the News of the World probably realised within a day or two of the story appearing that I was likely to sue. They were not expecting this. Their calculations were always based on the cynical assumption that their victim would be deeply ashamed, retreat into hiding until things died down and be too intimidated to fight back.
But, if I sued, they knew they had a major problem because the ‘Nazi’ element was a lie. Without it they were in a hopeless legal position on privacy – what took place was merely lawful consensual sexual activity between adults. It might be unconventional but it was entirely legal. If you could publish pictures like those, you could publish a video taken with a camera hidden in a hotel room of two celebrities making out. If there were no public interest in publishing the story, the victim’s right to privacy under the Human Rights Act prevailed.
Their Nazi invention was intended to give their story a supposed public interest defence. The idea was that, as head of a world body with members from a great variety of ethnic backgrounds, I should not be doing something that was (falsely) described as ‘Nazi’.
Having concocted then published the ‘Nazi’ falsehood, they now desperately needed to find a way to back it up in court. The solution was typical of their approach to journalism. It involved one of their tried and tested techniques: they would attempt to blackmail the women, or at least some of them, into confirming the story. Blackmail was, after all, one of the News of the World’s standard practices, as we were all to learn a few years later when the criminal trials started.
As a seasoned Murdoch man, Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s chief reporter who had written the story, knew exactly how to go about this. He obtained the email addresses of two of the participants and wrote to them, saying he would publish their pictures openly and without pixelation the following Sunday. He attached the unpixelated pictures to his emails so they could have no doubt about what he was threatening to publish.
On the other hand, he explained, if they co-operated with him he would pay them £8000 and give them what he called ‘anonimity’ (sic). He knew the girls were vulnerable to this sort of blackmail because of what he had learned about them and their families from Woman E. He also knew three of them had significant careers. They all led very normal lives apart from their unusual sexual interests.
Criminal blackmail was so much a part of the News of the World and News Corporation ethic that Rupert Murdoch could not see anything wrong with Thurlbeck’s approach when his paper’s conduct in my case was put to him during the Leveson Inquiry into the UK press, set up by the prime minister in 2011 following the revelation that the News of the World had hacked into the phone of a murdered teenager. He told the inquiry: ‘A journalist doing a favour for someone in returning (sic) for a favour back is pretty much everyday practice.’ No doubt under pressure from his lawyers, he later put in a second witness statement devoted almost entirely to this matter in which he finally admitted Thurlbeck’s conduct was wrong.
Three days after the story broke, I arranged to meet Woman A. Before doing so, I needed to ensure we were not observed or overheard or, worse still, photographed together. I asked Quest, a security firm headed by Lord Stevens who had the necessary expert personnel, to provide counter-surveillance. It was all very cloak and dagger. Quest t
old me to collect Woman A from an agreed spot in Hyde Park using a taxi and then go to a mysterious garden off the Kings Road which they already had covered. While there, they gave both of us equipment to ensure future communications were secure.
With Woman A’s help, I quickly identified who had made the film, later known as Woman E. She was a close and trusted friend of Woman A. They saw a lot of each other and sometimes looked after each other’s children. For Woman A, it was a horrifying betrayal. In the world they shared, confidentiality was fundamental. Among other details, Woman A knew Woman E’s husband worked for MI5, the UK’s internal secret service. He was a surveillance expert and a former Royal Marine. Later, I arranged for his employers to be informed that he had set the whole thing up with the News of the World. MI5 immediately got rid of him.
Sitting in the Kings Road garden, Woman A was adamant that she and the others would stand firm. Neither the blackmail nor the bribes would work. That was very courageous as she, like the other three, had a great deal to lose if the newspaper published her name and photograph. She also said they would all be prepared to give evidence if I took the paper to court and they could do so anonymously. The lawyers were surprised and delighted when I told them this. It was vital because I particularly needed to prove the Nazi allegation was false. This was important, not just to destroy the newspaper’s public interest defence but also for my own reputation.
The women, of course, could confirm that nothing Nazi had occurred or had been discussed or even remotely contemplated. Having the participants there was also going to be bad for the newspaper, who would have liked people to think I was abusing women who were vulnerable or had in some way been coerced. The last thing they wanted was for it to become obvious that these were successful and independent women who happened to have slightly unconventional tastes. The Daily Mail went on peddling the abused women thesis long after the facts became known. In truth, the ladies were more into what they did than I had ever been, but I don’t think the Mail has ever worried very much about the truth.
When we finished the discussion, one of the Quest operatives hailed a taxi in the Kings Road. He called Woman A and me and we jumped in so that I could take her to a mainline station to get a train home. Then, in the taxi, her mobile phone rang. It was Woman B, who had just had a phone call at her workplace from Thurlbeck. He was threatening her even more strongly than he had in his emails. He said he would expose her if she didn’t co-operate and she was very alarmed that he had traced her to her place of work. Woman A told her not to worry, we were preparing a counterattack.
Meanwhile, the legal action was well under way and the lawyers had put together an application for an injunction to get the video and pictures removed from the News of the World’s website. The need for an injunction arose because, having initially agreed with my lawyers to remove the article, pictures and video from their website, they decided a few days later to put it all back.
The application was heard by Mr Justice Eady on the Friday, with judgment reserved to the following Monday. When the judgment came, Eady refused the injunction, saying that he did so ‘with reluctance’. He said there was no public interest in their continued publication but the pictures had already had such wide circulation (the newspaper claimed millions of hits globally) that to make an order to stop them now would be futile. The judge said he did not want to be like King Canute trying to hold back the waves.
Had we appealed, I think we would have won – after all, each new publication of the pictures is a fresh invasion of privacy – but there was a vital element in this first judgment that we could not put at risk. He had granted an expedited trial. This was extremely important. Had the trial come on in the normal way, I would have had to wait 18 months or so before I could prove the News of the World’s editor and his journalists had invented and then lied about the Nazi element. With an order for a speedy trial, a full hearing could be scheduled in July, about three months after the publication, an almost unprecedentedly quick timeframe for a full High Court trial. An appeal would have made that impossible.
A delay of 18 months would have made everything academic as far as the FIA went, as, by then, my mandate would have finished and my long-planned retirement from motor sport started. For the same reason, we did not sue for defamation over the Nazi allegation. This would also have taken upwards of 18 months to come before the court and they would have tried to have both cases heard together. With an expedited trial in our pocket, the best course was to stay with it. In the short term, the most important thing for me was to show the Nazi story was untrue. The newspaper was going to have to try to stand it up to have any hope of winning the privacy action. And we knew they would fail – it would fall to pieces in court because it was a lie. This would achieve my first and main objective.
When Thurlbeck’s attempts at blackmailing the women didn’t work, the newspaper published another story the following Sunday in an attempt to back up the first one. It was also clearly intended to intimidate me and underline that you don’t take on the News of the World. Intimidation of anyone who challenges them is an established tabloid tactic, also used regularly by the Daily Mail as became very clear during the Leveson Inquiry. This second series of stories was another Thurlbeck effort. He wrote what purported to be an interview with Woman E, supporting his Nazi story. He then met her in a hotel near her home and offered her £8000 to sign it.
This was not as generous as it sounds because he had originally promised her MI5 husband £25,000 but only paid £12,000 once he had the story, another standard tabloid trick. Woman E signed her so-called interview at Thurlbeck’s request but he then rewrote it extensively, claiming later in court he had telephoned her each time he changed it. The paper also included statements from someone purporting to be an expert on Nazism. When we checked out their so-called expert, a Dr Keith Kahn-Harris, we discovered that his principal expertise (on which he had written extensively) was heavy metal music. Perhaps even more revealing was an article on his website titled ‘How to talk about things we know nothing about’. He was an example of the way they had dredged up all sorts of people to criticise me on the basis of their invented story.
When neither blackmail nor intimidation worked and they grasped that I was pressing on, the newspaper’s management was beside itself. They set out yet again to demonstrate that you don’t take them on. This time they wrote to the president of the FIA’s Senate in Paris, enclosing copies of both the original edition of the newspaper and the follow-up edition from the second Sunday. They also included the secretly filmed video and invited the Senate to circulate everything to the entire FIA membership.
This was to land them in a criminal court in France when I invoked French privacy laws and the French authorities prosecuted the newspaper and some of its personnel. The News of the World’s publishers were eventually convicted and fined. This also resulted in what must have been a very embarrassing appearance for Crone (taking time off from his employers’ desperate rearguard action on phone hacking), Thurlbeck and a senior lawyer from Farrers (a firm of solicitors in London which has allowed its reputation to be destroyed by being prepared to act for the News of the World) in front of the juge d’instruction in Paris. It must have been very obvious to them in the corridor outside that they were in a full-on criminal environment, with policemen handcuffed to prisoners also waiting their turn. As it turned out, that was perhaps a taste of things to come for some of them in the UK.
Having launched proceedings against the newspaper and its editor, Colin Myler, as well as Thurlbeck, I now had to think about the FIA. There were calls for my resignation from a few motor sport figures who disliked me, hoping in a rather contemptible way to take advantage of the situation. Urged on by one of them, Bahrain very publicly cancelled my planned visit to their Grand Prix. This was surprising. I had always had good relations with the crown prince, HRH Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, to give him his full name. He was the driving force behind getting Formula One to Bahrain. I even
took part in the ground-breaking ceremony for the Bahrain circuit with him and had been to at least one Bahrain Grand Prix. His letter finished with the words: ‘I don’t want to add to the difficulties in which you find yourself.’ I couldn’t help wondering why, if that were true, a copy of his letter had been given to the press, but then discovered this had all been done by Bahrain’s rather stupid London PR agency, not by the country itself.
There was very extensive coverage of all this in the press. Looking back now at the cuttings, it’s quite amusing to note how almost all the papers said I would have to resign and would not even last the weekend of the Bahrain race. The pressure was considerable but these demands that I resign were utterly non-sensical. So an element of my sex life had been exposed – so what? I thought the uproar was childish and probably, in many cases, hypocritical. And the suggestion that all this was more important than working to save thousands of lives on the roads struck me as mind-numbingly stupid. Clearly I would have to ask the FIA membership but there was no question of just walking away.
Cancelling my Bahrain visit was frustrating because I had not wanted to go in the first place. A quick phone call would have settled it if they really were worried that my presence would distract from their Grand Prix. I had already decided to cancel because of everything that was going on and I believed the message had reached them. I made no announcement because I didn’t want to appear to be changing anything as a result of the newspaper story. But by deliberately making such a lot of noise about cancelling their invitation they, or rather their PR advisers in London, seemed to be wilfully trying to embarrass me. An equally public official invitation to attend the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix (which I refused) did not really make amends.