After Elon Musk threatened to take full custody of their one-year-old son together, Ashley St. Clair has responded to his comments.
In a tweet shared on Monday (Jan. 12), Musk said he would be filing for full custody of Romulus, whom he shares with St. Clair. “I will be filing for full custody today, given her statements implying she might transition a one-year-old boy,” wrote Musk, who also has an estranged trans daughter. In an appearance on CNN, she hit back against his threats.
As explained by Kaitlan Collins, Musk’s tweet was a response to St. Clair apologizing for comments she previously made about the transgender community. “I feel immense guilt for my role,” St. Clair wrote. “And even more guilt that things I have said in the past may have caused my son’s sister more pain.”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it further, but I think anyone with more than a third-grade reading comprehension level knows what I was saying there,” she said when asked for her thoughts on Musk’s deranged response to her tweet. She said that she can’t even speak about whether she wants her child to have a relationship with his father right now.
She added that she would rather the focus stay on the users of X, formerly Twitter, using its AI tool Grok to produce child sexual abuse imagery, including photos of her when she was 14.
“I’d like to keep the focus on this issue at hand, because I think there’s a lot of people, especially with very tabloid-y tweets, that are trying to distract from this issue,” she continued. “[X is] facing immense backlash from multiple countries, and they are trying to move something to the second page of Google because they want it to go away. And I don’t think we should make it go away. I think this needs to stay center focus until there is regulations and protections and safety for people being abused.”
As she said earlier in the interview, she was “horrified” and felt “violated” by the way people had produced sexualised images of her and others. In her appearance on CNN, she spoke further about his comments about the controversy, including his claim that there’s no evidence of child abuse imagery being produced by Grok.
“What he said is deceptive at best,” she said. “While maybe there weren’t actual nude images, it was pretty close to it. … The abuse was so widespread and so horrific, and it’s still allowed to happen. They just released restrictions that are based on where it’s illegal.”
Musk claimed that Grok “does not spontaneously generate images,” and that the Grok will “refuse to produce anything illegal.” She said that Musk’s apparent need to place further safeguards on X’s artificial technology is an “admission” that it has been used to create “non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women and children.”