Elon Musk will go to trial over 'pedo guy' comment

Tesla CEO Elon Musk will go to trial over his insults directed toward cave rescue diver Vernon Unsworth.

U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles rebuffed Musk's request to dismiss Unsworth's defamation lawsuit, Bloomberg reported Monday. The trial will take place in December.

The back-and-forth began in July 2018, with Unsworth publicly criticizing Musk's plan to rescue a junior soccer team, trapped in a cave complex in Thailand, with a mini-submarine. Musk answered Unsworth by calling him "pedo guy," seemingly accusing him of being a pedophile without providing any evidence. Musk later apologized, but then doubled down on his initial claim in an email to BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Mac, in which he argued that Unsworth originally went to Thailand to find a child bride. (Unsworth claims he met his wife in London, and that she was 32 years old at the time.)

The story got even crazier after it was revealed that Musk had hired a shady private investigator to dig through Unsworth's past, even though he later claimed that "pedo guy" was a "common insult" in South Africa (where Musk grew up) and not an accusation of pedophilia.

Musk tried to get the lawsuit dismissed on several occasions, with the court denying it every time.

Musk is now facing a legal battle in which he'll have to prove he acted without malice. Even if he's successful, Unsworth's lawyer Lin Wood told Bloomberg, he could still be liable for defamation.

“We understand that, while Musk has apologized, Unsworth would like to milk his 15 minutes of fame," said Musk's attorney Alex Spiro in a statement.

Earlier this month, court documents revealed that Musk said calling Unsworth a "pedo guy" was one of the "dumbest things" he'd ever done.