Max Mosley has told the Leveson inquiry that the News of the World retaliated after he launched a legal challenge against the paper. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features Max Mosley, the former Formula One boss who was caught up in a News of the World video sex sting, has told the Leveson inquiry that the tabloid's publisher set out to "destroy him" for challenging what they had done. He told Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry into press standards on Thursday that after he challenged the Sunday tabloid in court, it responded by sending a film of him participating in an alleged sado-masochistic orgy to the governing body of world motorsport. In Mosley's evidence to the inquiry, he said that News of the World publisher News International sent the "entire video" inviting the FIA to "show it to all members". It was "several hours long" and sent on behalf of the company by its lawyers, Farrers. The News of the World video was sent to the FIA in the week after it had splashed on a story headlined "F1 boss has sick Nazi orgy with five hookers", which was originally published in March 2008. The tabloid released an edited version of the film on its website, without copy protection software "so the video was then copied all over the world". Mosley subsequently launched a legal action against what he described as a "straightforward invasion of privacy" and eventually won £60,000 in damages in the high court, the largest sum ever awarded by a UK court in a privacy case. "What they had done was so outrageous, I wanted to get these people into the witness box and prove they were liars," Mosley said, even though he knew that "by taking the matter to court, the entire private information I was complaining about would be rehearsed again in public". The former head of the FIA repeated the circumstances of the publication of the article and the legal battle that followed it, noting initially that he had no forewarning and that the tabloid had chosen not to do so "to avoid any danger of me finding out about the article and ordering an injunction to stop it". When the inquiry resumed after lunch Mosley found himself taking in a surreal exchange, during which he attacked Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, who had previously criticised him. "Dacre said that I was guilty of unimaginable depravity," Mosley said. "Well first of all it reflects badly on his imagination." He continued: "Well I have no idea what Mr Dacre's sex life is, all I know is that he has this sort of preoccupation with schoolboy smut in his website, Ms X in her bikini, Ms Y showing off her suntan … so maybe he has some sort of strange sex life but the point is it's not up to me to go into his bedroom, film him and then write about it."
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