The explosive true story behind new Amazon show ‘A Very British Scandal’

nypost.com:

A Very British Scandal” premieres Friday on Amazon Prime, it will be the first time that most Americans learn all about Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll; her husband Ian Campbell, the Duke of Argyll — and the ill-fated string of pearls that proved to be her downfall during their bitter and lascivious divorce battle.The duchess was the Kim Kardashian of her day, a socialite photographed every time she stepped out on the town and famed for a string of affairs.But it all came crashing down when Campbell used photos he had stolen of his wife “in flagrante” with another man to shame her in court during their 1962 divorce.

It worked, with Judge Lord Wheatley blasting her as “a completely promiscuous woman” whose attitude towards marriage was “wholly immoral.”The judge, a highly conservative Jesuit and a relative of Campbell, added: “I consider her to be a highly sexed woman who had ceased to be satisfied with normal relations and had started to indulge in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debase sexual appetite.”As The New York Times reported at the time, the photos “reportedly showed a naked man gratifying himself and pictured [the duchess], dressed in nothing but three strands of pearls, performing a sex act on a naked man in the mirrored gilt and silver bathroom of her Mayfair apartment.”“Margaret really invented the tabloid scandal, which now is such a huge industry,” show writer Sarah Phelps told The Post. “I thought of all those terms like ‘slut shaming’ while writing, although that’s been around forever and a day!”Phelps said the duchess was like Kim Kardashian “In terms of how much she was looked at … and she loved that, when it was good.  “She’d been engineered, she’d been groomed and guided and educated to be.