A federal judge in California rejected Elon Musk’s dismissal request for a defamation lawsuit filed by Vern Unsworth, a British cave diver who aided with the high-profile rescue of a dozen boys that were trapped in a waterlogged cave in Thailand last year.
Unsworth is seeking more than $75,000 in damages from Musk. His suit also seeks a court order prohibiting Musk from making further disparaging comments, and will head to jury trial in October.
Musk called Unsworth “pedo guy” in a tweet last year after Unsworth dismissed the tech multibillionaire’s offer to build a submarine to assist with the rescue as as a “PR stunt” that had “absolutely no chance of working.”
Unsworth also said that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts” in a CNN interview.
The Tesla CEO’s lawyers had argued that his now-deleted tweet describing Unsworth, a British expatriate, as a “pedo guy” was a statement of opinion that cannot be defamatory under United States law.
Judge Stephen Wilson disagreed with Musk’s defense, saying Musk’s statements implied assertions of objective fact as opposed to protected opinion, and his apology did not retract his accusations of pedophilia against Unsworth.
The miniature submarine made by Musk’s SpaceX team was unnecessary, as Unsworth and a team of divers had already rescued the boys by the time it arrived. In a series of tweets, Musk downplayed Unsworth’s role in the rescue, stating that “you could literally have swum to Cave 5 with no gear,” and challenging “this dude to show final rescue video.”
Musk labelled Unsworth as a “sus” individual, a colloquialism commonly understood as an abbreviated form of “suspicious,” and announced that “We will make one of the mini-sub/pod goingss all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”
After facing backlash, Musk three days later followed up his accusatory tweets with what the court described as “two tweets that purported to be an apology,” which admitted that his “words were spoken in anger” after Unsworth “said several untruths.” Musk confessed his actions were unjustified, and apologized to both Unsworth and “the companies I represent as leader.”
Despite his apology, Musk refused Unsworth’s request to publicly correct the record on his unfounded claims. He even doubled down on his claims in an email sent several weeks later to a BuzzFeed News reporter, telling the journalist to “stop defending child rapists, you f—-ing asshole.”
“There’s only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach,” Musk’s email read. “It isn’t where you’d go for caves, but it is where you’d go for something else. Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex- trafficking.”
“I f—-ing hope he sues me,” Musk also stated in the same email.
This is the second time in less than a year that Musk’s tweets have brought him legal trouble. In February, his tweet claiming his company would build 500,000 cars this year landed him in hot water. Musk was accused of violating terms of a court settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over yet another tweet from 2018 in which he’d claimed he would take his company private for $420 a share — a substantial premium to Tesla’s stock price at the given time.
