A British diver involved in the July rescue of a Thai soccer team has filed a defamation suit against Elon Musk over the billionaire inventor’s description of him as a pedophile.
Vernon Unsworth is demanding $75,000 in damages and a gag order to prevent Musk from making further unfounded accusations, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California. A Tesla spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk’s behavior this year has frequently overshadowed Tesla’s attempts to ramp up production of its Model 3 to meet demand and turn its first quarterly profit. Musk tweeted on Monday, for example, that the company has gone from “production hell” to “logistics hell,” though he said it would be comparably easy to resolve.
During the rescue of the 12 young Thai boys and their soccer coach, Musk volunteered to build and send a mini-submarine to assist. In an interview with CNN after the vehicle was delivered, Unsworth called it a “PR stunt” and said it had “absolutely no chance of working.”
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Musk responded with a series of tweets, including one in which he referred to Unsworth as a “pedo guy,” short-hand for pedophile, according to the suit. After facing shareholder pressure for his comments, Musk apologized, but did not retract his remarks, according to the filing.
Through an attorney, Unsworth sent a letter in early August demanding Musk correct the record. The 47-year-old entrepreneur, however, publicly taunted Unsworth and questioned why he had not yet filed a defamation lawsuit.
Musk, who at the same time also made headlines for claiming to have secured enough funding to take Tesla private, continued to make accusations of pedophilia against Unsworth, the suit claims.
In an email to a BuzzFeed reporter referencing Unsworth, Musk told the journalist to “stop defending child rapists” and suggested Unsworth had traveled to Thailand to marry a child bride “who was about 12 years old at the time,” according to the filing.
While the emails were labeled “off the record,” the outlet chose to publish them because Musk did not engage in the standard journalistic process of obtaining agreement for the terms of the exchange.
