Tesla founder Elon Musk is asking a judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit by a British diver involved in the rescue of a Thai soccer team, arguing that the public didn’t take literally the billionaire inventor’s claims that the man was a pedophile.
Initially filed in September, the suit came after Musk said on Twitter that Vernon Unsworth was a “pedo guy,” following Unsworth’s criticism of Musk’s attempts to build and send a mini-submarine to assist with the rescue as a “PR stunt” with “absolutely no chance of working.” The team of 12 boys and their 25-year-old coach were trapped for two weeks when an unexpected downpour flooded parts of the northern Thailand cave they were exploring after soccer practice in late June.
In a Wednesday filing, attorneys for Musk argue that Unsworth initiated the feud and that the comments from the 47-year-old entrepreneur, made on an online social media platform, are protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.
“The reasonable reader would not have believed that Musk — without having ever met Unsworth, in the midst of a schoolyard spat on social media, and from 8,000 miles afar — was conveying that he was in possession of private knowledge that Unsworth was sexually attracted to children or engaged in sex acts with children,” the filing says.
After the initial tweets, Musk also emailed a BuzzFeed reporter and doubled down on the claims, telling the journalist to “stop defending child rapists.” The email exchange, which Musk deemed off the record, “differed in kind from, for example, a Boston Globe spotlight expose, a university press conference or a criminal complaint,” the attorneys argued.
Unsworth is seeking $75,000 in damages and a gag order on Musk to prevent any additional unfounded accusations. Tesla’s stock fell 6.8 percent in New York trading on Thursday to $303.89.
Unsworth’s lawsuit has been one of several challenges for both Tesla and Musk during a rocky 2018. This fall, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based carmaker and its founder each agreed to pay $20 million and overhaul the company’s board after Musk posted on Twitter that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share, a claim the Securities and Exchange Commission said was not backed up by fact.
Musk relinquished the role of chairman, though he is still CEO, a role from which the SEC initially had also sought to oust him.
