Mathias Döpfner becomes the story: the return of scandal at Axel Springer

Germany’s most hotly awaited book of the year, published on Wednesday, begins with a disclaimer: “This novel is partly inspired by various real events, but it is a separate and independent fictional story.”

Yet the parallels in Noch Wach? (Still Awake?) between the TV editor at the centre of the plot — a swaggering former war correspondent who sleeps with his female staff — and Julian Reichelt, a controversial former editor at the German tabloid Bild, are not exactly subtle.

The novel has dredged up allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power at the German media giant that it had sought to put behind it.

It has been seen at the publishing house as part of a broader attempt to damage Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of Bild’s owner Axel Springer who has faced accusations of protecting his young protégé Reichelt before eventually sacking him in 2021. The former Bild editor continues to strongly deny the allegations against him, insisting that his relationships with female staff were consensual and did not constitute an abuse of his position.

The publication of the novel, written by Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, an ex-employee at Axel Springer and former friend of its chief, topped off a bruising 10 days for Döpfner, who is a household name in Germany and craves a role as a global media player.

He faced calls to resign, including from a government minister, and was forced to apologise after the German daily Die Zeit published private text messages between him and Reichelt in which he said that east Germans were “either communists or fascists”, railed against “intolerant Muslims” and described himself as “very much in favour of climate change”.

The messages also appeared to show that Döpfner, a former president of Germany’s publisher’s association, lobbied the then editor of Bild to provide positive coverage of the pro-business Free Democratic party in the weeks before a nationwide election in 2021. They seemed to contradict Döpfner’s own publicly stated passion for editorial independence.

In the days that followed, he faced a flurry of other damaging allegations published by rival news outlets as well as a new Spotify podcast called Boys Club that has sought to shine a fresh light on the culture at Bild.

“I apologise for offending, unsettling or hurting many with my words,” Döpfner wrote in a statement published in Bild on Sunday. He said he sometimes used his mobile phone as a “lightning rod” and stressed that the texts, which were sent before 2021, were private messages and not intended for wider circulation.

Yet analysts are now asking whether the torrent of negative headlines will damage Döpfner’s position in the company or his standing with the US private equity firm KKR, which together with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board owns a 48.5 per cent stake in Axel Springer.

“Proprietors entering the news agenda — or at least being seen to do so — is never a winning formula,” said Douglas McCabe, who covers media at the research group Enders Analysis. “The key question is whether it will affect his relationship with KKR, measured by asset reputational damage.”

McCabe said that, for now, the damage “feels containable” but he added: “It won’t have done him any favours.”

KKR, which struck a 2019 deal with Döpfner to take the company private and holds three seats on its supervisory board, has largely shrugged off the scandal around Reichelt. The investor has been pleased with the performance of Axel Springer’s US media assets despite a downturn in advertising, according to three people familiar with its thinking.

Axel Springer’s digital businesses focusing on real estate, including several house-hunting websites, and its collection of online job platforms enjoyed double-digit growth in revenues and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the first quarter of 2023, according to another person familiar with the company’s financials. The person also said that the performance of the group’s German media division had rebounded strongly this year.

However, KKR has been less impressed by the performance of Bild and its conservative broadsheet sister Die Welt, said the trio familiar with the group’s thinking. Axel Springer announced plans to eliminate about 200 out of 4,000 jobs at the two titles in February, aiming to improve earnings at the newspapers by €100mn in the next three years. There is also frustration at KKR that Axel Springer had not moved faster with its ambitions to build a global empire.

The US buyout group and Axel Springer declined to comment.

Shortly before Döpfner’s text messages to Reichelt were published by Die Zeit last week, KKR’s co-head of European private equity, Philipp Freise, voiced firm support for the company.

“It is the result that finally counts,” Freise, who sits on the Axel Springer board, told the German podcast OMR. “[Axel Springer’s] vision is right, a great CEO and team is in charge [and] we are supporting this 100 per cent.”

The 60-year-old Döpfner styles himself as a maverick who likes to provoke with his contrarian views. But he is also unabashedly ambitious. Having started out as a music journalist, he rose to become editor of Die Welt before being made chief of its parent company in 2002.

After launching various failed bids including one to acquire the Financial Times, he paid $343mn in 2015 to take control of Business Insider. In 2021, he stepped up his drive for international influence by buying Politico for about $1bn. 

Last year, it emerged that Döpfner — who also sits on the boards of Netflix and Warner Music Group — urged Elon Musk to buy Twitter shortly before the Tesla chief’s bid for the social media company became public. A profile last year in New York magazine described Döpfner as “part Murdoch, but also part Musk”.

There is deep and longstanding antagonism between Axel Springer, whose domestic outlets are more conservative and rightwing than most of its peers, and the rest of the German media.

But the deluge of stories over the past week has surprised even those used to the sparring, with one Döpfner ally describing parts of the German press as acting like “rabid dogs” who had “smelt blood”.

Such complaints are unlikely to attract much sympathy from those who have previously found themselves in the crosshairs of the aggressive Bild, which is both feared and courted by the German political elite. The liberal broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung recently described “assaulting human dignity” as an integral part of the newspaper’s modus operandi.

One unanswered question is how the past week has been viewed by Friede Springer, the company’s vice-chair and widow of its eponymous founder, who rarely makes public statements and has remained silent since the Die Zeit story.

In 2020, she anointed Döpfner as what she called her “successor”, gave him her voting rights, sold him 4 per cent of her shares and gifted him 15 per cent more, making him a billionaire overnight.

“They are friends — or they have been friends,” said Klaus Beck, a professor of communications at the University of Greifswald. But if the public exposure of Döpfner’s politically charged text messages undermined the trust of the company’s vice-chair in her chief executive, “then he could have a problem”, Beck said.

That notion was dismissed by the ally of Döpfner, who said the 80-year-old Springer would stand by him. “She says [the German media] are just trying to distract us from our work. They’re trying to push us apart,” he said. “It’s not going to work.”

Additional reporting by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and James Fontanella-Khan in New York