Privacy: The Prince & the Monk

Like a ghost out of his own past, the frail Russian prince sat in a darkened Manhattan courtroom and watched a TV re-enactment of one of history’s most famous assassinations—the 1916 murder of Rasputin, the lecherous monk who held Svengalian power over the Czar and Czarina. Then the lights went on, and Prince Felix Youssoupoff, the man who did the deed, now a 78-year-old Parisian, got down to business—his $1,500,000 suit against the Columbia Broadcasting System for invasion of privacy.

Pray! Hard of hearing now, stumbling over questions as translators worked with him in French, the last living participant in the all-but-forgotten plot described the fateful night of Dec. 29, 1916. He invited Rasputin to a midnight snack in the basement of his Moika palace, the prince told the court. There, while accomplices played Yankee Doodle on the phonograph upstairs, Youssoupoff fed Rasputin cakes and wine sprinkled with cyanide “sufficient to kill several men instantly.” Rasputin merely “coughed,” looked “drunk,” and asked the prince to sing. Appalled, and in no mood for warbling, the prince ran upstairs to consult his friends and get a gun from the Grand Duke Dmitri. Creeping downstairs again, the prince finally told Rasputin to pray—then put two bullets into his body.

“Gasping and roaring like a wounded animal,” Rasputin still had enough energy to try to choke the prince. Like an actor in the TV play he disapproved of, the old man dramatically clutched his own throat in demonstration. After that, the dying monk staggered into the courtyard, where he showed remarkable stamina by surviving four more bullets before the prince beat him to death with a club and the plotters tossed the corpse into the ice-filled Neva River.

Jamais! Indignantly, the prince charged that the telecast recounting the murder had been shown in 1963 without his permission. Its “sexual atmosphere” falsely implied that he lured Rasputin to his palace by “pandering” his beautiful young wife to the Siberian mystic. The still-striking Princess Irina Youssoupoff took the stand to state that she had never known nor ever seen Rasputin. And in angry French, denying that he used his wife as “seductive bait,” the prince cried, “Jamais!”

Though the details vary with the teller, the tale is not new. The prince himself has recounted his grisly story in two books, in one of which (Lost Splendor) he clearly suggests that Rasputin went to the palace because “he had long wished to meet my wife,” who was actually in the Crimea at the time. But the book does not specifically spell out a “sexual atmosphere” in the conspiracy, and under New York privacy law, public media become liable for damages whenever they fictionalize historic facts about living persons without their written consent. The burden, though, is on the plaintiff, and the prince must prove that CBS went so far beyond the facts that it “tended to outrage public opinion or decency.” Since CBS insists that its drama was mainly based on Youssoupoff’s own books, the Manhattan jury must now decide whether the TV film strayed too far from those earlier histories of what happened 49 years ago in St. Petersburg.