Elon Musk wants cave rescuer's defamation suit dismissed
In a fitting end to a year of questionable tweets, Elon Musk is asking the courts to drop a defamation suit filed against him after insulting a British cave diver on Twitter this summer.
A motion to dismiss the case was filed Wednesday to the U.S. District Court in California's Central District where Vernon Unsworth, a UK citizen, filed a complaint in September alleging Musk used defamatory language when Musk tweeted Unsworth was a "pedo guy," then later sent an email to a BuzzFeed reporter accusing the diver of being involved in child sex trafficking. The tweets have since been deleted and Musk publicly apologized -- on, you guessed it, Twitter.
Unsworth was part of a mission to rescue a Thai soccer team trapped in flooded caves in June and into July. Musk offered his companies' engineering and systems expertise to build a rescue submarine, which Unsworth criticized.
Now Musk would like to put this all behind him, or as the motion says "end the war of words," but in a statement to CNBC, Unsworth's lawyer plans to pursue the case. Musk's main defense is that his words were "non-actionable opinions" protected by the First Amendment even if they were offensive "imaginative attacks."
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In the motion, Musk calls Unsworth's comments "indefensible and baseless" and that they prompted Musk to defend himself and his companies, SpaceX, Tesla, and the Boring Company.
Musk then "took to Twitter -- a social networking website infamous for invective and hyperbole -- to respond." Later in the motion, Musk characterizes the social media site as the "rough-and-tumble Twitter platform."
Since this was Twitter and not "a Boston Globe Spotlight exposé, a university press conference, or criminal complaint" the case against Musk and his "gratuitous barb" should be dismissed, his legal team argues.
Unsworth is seeking $75,000 in damages and a court order to stop Musk from making more allegations. Sounds familiar.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
