Elon Musk is a ‘THIN-SKINNED BULLY,’ says cave diver

‘Thin skinned bully’ Elon Musk ‘made up’ allegations about British cave rescuer he called a ‘pedo guy’ THEN hired ex-con private investigator – who pretended he was working for a kids charity – to dig up dirt on him

Musk is being sued by diver Vernon Unsworth who was one of many people involved in the rescue operation to save the boys after they became trapped in a cave last June.

Unsworth made headlines when he mocked Musk’s idea to send a Tesla submarine in to get the boys as a ‘PR stunt’ which he said would never have worked.

In response, Musk tweeted, calling him a ‘pedo guy’. He then hired a private investigator for $50,000, asking him to dig up dirt on Unsworth, and later emailed a BuzzFeed reporter with unsubstantiated allegations against the man which the investigator was then tasked with proving.

Among them were the false claims that Unsworth married his wife when she was 12, that he was a child rapist and that he had been visiting Thailand for years and engaging in ‘nefarious’ behavior.

Musk has since claimed he is innocent because the private investigator ‘told him’ the allegations and because he never expected BuzzFeed would publish them.

In emails to his team about his behavior, he said he was a ‘f*****g idiot’.

But Unsworth’s most recent filing includes emails between the investigator and Musk’s team in which the investigator – who is a convicted felon – states that he never made such claims and that Musk ‘drew a conclusion’ from what he had told him.

As his ineptitude became apparent, Musk’s associate stopped engaging with him gradually.

Later, in emails with his PR advisers, he admitted he was a ‘f*****g idiot’ for how he handled his interactions with BuzzFeed.

‘Yes, this is extremely bad. I didn’t expect BuzzFeed to publish an off the record email. My intent was to have them investigate and come to their own conclusions, not publish my email directly…. Still, I’m a f*****g idiot,’ he said.

Unsworth is suing him for unspecified damages in excess of $75,000 for allegedly defaming him.

In a statement to Daily Mail.com on Tuesday, Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro said: ‘This case is nothing but a money-grab in which Unsworth has hired an agent and pursued profit, publicity and self-promotion at every turn.

‘The truth of his motivations and actions will come out soon enough.’

He added that Musk believed everything he put in his email to BuzzFeed was true and that it was based on information he claims he got from his investigator.

‘Everything that Mr. Musk put in that email, he believed to be based on information he received from the investigator.

‘He believed it would never be published,’ he said.

Musk is now trying to have the case thrown out.

His defense is that he did not know the allegations he made against Unsworth were untrue, claiming to have gotten them from his PI, and also that in his native South Africa, calling someone a ‘pedo guy’ only means they are a ‘creepy old man’.

In a blistering response to Musk’s defense, Unsworth claims he did know the claims against him were untrue and that he set about trying to publicize them anyway because he is a ‘thin skinned bully’ who had a bruised ego.

His attorneys describe in hundreds of pages worth of declarations that Musk knew the allegations from Howard were false or unsubstantiated but tried to leak them to the press in the UK and Australia before eventually sending them to a BuzzFeed reporter who published them.

The leak was staged for August 27, 2018.

Their ‘priority’ was, they said in emails, to ‘divert the story away from the principal and let the UK tabloids develop there [sic] story.’

Howard went on to say UK readers were ‘familiar’ with Thailand ‘& ‘its culture to welcome and protect sex tourist.’

‘We call it Yellow Fever where older men leave there [sic] wives for a young Thai friend,’ he wrote.

Howard also revealed that he pretended to be working on behalf of a children’s charity to get the story told instead of for Musk, saying he was the ‘only link on the chain who knows who the beneficiary is.

‘The Thai team and Richard all believe that this is for a children’s charity in the UK.’

He says the private investigator never presented them as true facts but that Musk and his associate, Jared Birchall, thought there was ‘enough there for a story’.

‘After spending over two weeks daily working to save the lives of 12 children and their soccer coach lost deep inside a dangerous Thai cave, Vernon Unsworth will now spend the rest of his life with the asterisk of pedophilia attached to his name as the direct result of a public relations campaign of false, heinous accusations by Elon Musk, a thin-skinned billionaire who is obsessed with his public image and who has a history of vindictively and intentionally ignoring truth to maintain that PR-created image.

‘Like the bully that he is, Musk chose to lash out publicly at the criticism only be falsely attacking Unsworth, a relatively unknown individual, and publicly challenging him to sue for libel,’ ‘ Unsworth’s lawyers fumed in their filing.

Last month, Musk – who previously publicly apologized for the tweet at the insistence of the Tesla board – filed his own court papers explaining why he thinks he is innocent of defamation.

In a motion asking the judge to dismiss the case, he doubled down on his allegations against Unsworth and included others like that he married his wife when she was a teenager and that he’d been ‘w***emongering’ girls in Thailand.

Even though they turned out not to be true, Musk said he had no reason not to believe them because private investigator, James Howard-Higgins, told gave him the information.

Unsworth’s most recent filing is a response to that and refutes that Howard ever called him a child rapist.

He lays out in it how Musk allegedly set ‘in motion’ a malicious attempt to besmirch his reputation by trying to prove, without evidence, that he was a pedophile.

‘The truth is that the media was ridiculing Musk about the tube, calling it a PR stunt, likely because Musk frequently tweeted about it, posting photos and videos.

‘Musk retaliated by trying to destroy him – making up out of whole cloth and publishing to the world false accusations that Unsworth is a pedophile and child rapist who married a 12-year-old.

He pointed out that Musk hired Howard after he called him a ‘pedo guy’ on Twitter and claims that he offered him a $10,000 bonus if he could produce proof of the apparently ‘nefarious behavior’ Howard said Unsworth was connected to in Thailand.

Between July 15, when Musk first issued the tweet, and August 28, he and his associate were working quietly with Howard to try to find proof that would back up the allegation, the court papers claim.

On August 15, he hired Howard after he got in touch with him saying, in an email:  ‘Dear Elon, you may wish to dig deep and look into Mr. Unsworth’s past… no smoke without fire!’

They set about launching their ‘investigation’ but go to great lengths to keep Musk separate from it. In emails, Musk’s associate Jared Birchall carried out their dealings and Musk was referred to as ‘the principle’. He and Birchall never discussed it in writing.

On August 25, Birchall emailed Howard saying: ‘For successful confirmation of nefarious behavior there is an additional $10k bonus’.

Two days later, Howard was instructed to launch a media ‘leak’, according to the papers.

‘We would like you to immediately move forward with leaking this information to the UK press. Obviously must be done very carefully.

‘The line of thinking is…: Thailand is the world capital of pedophilia. This man has frequented Thailand since the 80s. While the guise of cave exploration is creative, there are amazing and extensive caving systems in many places throughout the world…. He eventually woman [sic] 30 years his minor whom he met while she was a teenager. He had been going to Thailand for decades before marrying her.

‘She wasn’t the first girl he met – and definitely not the first teenager he interacted with. Share the facts and as you said, that should be enough for a story,’ Birchall said in an email that is quoted in the filing.

Howard then tried to get the press to print the claims, emailing them to journalists under the email address ‘bangkokjohn’, the lawsuit alleges, but he was unsuccessful.

As speculation gathered that Unsworth was going to file a lawsuit, a BuzzFeed reporter emailed Musk for a comment.

In response, he said: ‘Off the record. I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actualluy going on and stop defending child rapists, you f****** a**hole.

He’s an old single white guy from England who’s been traveling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Ria for a child bride who was 12 years old at the time.

‘There’s only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach.

‘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****** hope he sues me.’

The BuzzFeed reporter replied to say that he had never agreed to speak off the record.

Musk hit back: ‘If you want to publish off the record comments and destroy your journalistic credibility, that’s up to you.’

BuzzFeed published the email exchange five days later.

When the reporter contacted Musk again, he replied: ‘Get lost you creep’.

The private investigator, having seen the story, then contacted Birchall asking why Musk had made the comments publicly when there was no proof to back them up.

‘At no time have I reported that the target is a child rapist. We need to be clear about what we are looking for.

‘The target had a traveling pattern that shows he spent time before he moved to Northern Thailand in Pattaya,’ Howard wrote.

Birchall then claimed in one email in response that the private investigator had mentioned ‘on the phone’ that she Unsworth’s wife was a teenager.

‘You can agree that the data you provided would have allowed him to draw that conclusion?

Over the next few days, as it became apparent how inept Howard was, Birchall wound down their communication.

Unsworth filed his lawsuit on September 17.

It has since emerged that Howard is a con man who claimed to have worked for MI5 and George Soros.

In one of his emails to Birchall, he said he’d tried to have the story run in British and Australian news outlets by claiming he was working for a children’s charity.

Unsworth said, in summarizing his case, Musk took matters into his own hands by sending emails to an adversarial reporter in response to a bona fide request for comment which stated, as a matter of fact, false accusations that Unsworth was a child rapist with a 12-year-old child bride.

‘With a straight face, Musk unabashedly seeks judgement because he claims legal protection for accusations of pedophilia against British men who spent time in Thailand.’

TIMELINE OF THE THAI RESCUE AND MUSK AND UNSWORTH’S DISPUTE