Trial About Privacy in Which None Remains (how much of a spanking do you want?)

[groovedaddy]

LONDON — At moments, it seems like British satire at its whimsical, Monty Python-style best: a judge and a bank of lawyers, all stern-as-you-like in horsehair wigs, exploring the finer points of bottom-spanking with an aging multimillionaire and several young women who joined him in a Chelsea flat last winter, for a $5,000 fee, for what was described as five hours of sadomasochistic “fantasy” play.

The Victorian Gothic edifice in central London that is home to the Royal Courts of Justice has witnessed many bizarre trials in its 126-year history, but the one now under way amid the rich oak paneling and stone-arched windows of Court 13 — the case of Max Mosley versus The News of the World — would have a claim on any list of the most unusual.

How often could any court hear a disquisition on the pleasures of caning from a woman who specializes in sexual fantasy play, giggling as she compared taking 12 strokes on the bottom to the joy of finishing a marathon? And how many courts have been treated, as was this one, to an audiotape featuring what one of the tabloids feasting on the trial, The Daily Mail, described as “the sounds of slapping and thwacking” during the Chelsea session?

Much of the testimony so far has centered on an aspect of the Chelsea “party,” as participants have called it, that has turned a run-of-the-mill sex scandal into something altogether more contentious: whether the motif for the event was that of a Nazi concentration camp, as alleged by the tabloid that splashed an account of it across its front page in March, or, as the participants say, an occasion when the use of guttural commands in German, an old Luftwaffe jacket and military-style caps and boots had nothing at all to do with Nazi fantasies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/world/europe/09mosley.html?th&emc=th