I interviewed Ashley St. Clair, the former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, last week in front of a live New York City audience. After we walked off stage, I had one of the strangest interactions with an interview subject ever. She called me “slimy” and “dishonest” for presenting her with videos and posts from her MAGA past. The next day, I got an email demanding that we not release the interview publicly, and asking to speak to our lawyers.
We are running the interview anyway. You can watch the full thing, unedited, and decide for yourself. Am I slimy?
I had initially reached out to Ashley because she is in a legal battle with Musk’s company, xAI, over sexually explicit deepfakes that its chatbot Grok made of her. The bot generated millions of these kinds of images of her and other women, and I wanted to hear how she planned to take on one of the most powerful companies in the world, run by the richest man in the world, who also happens to be her ex. I wanted to know how she planned to address one of xAI’s first volleys — invoking Section 230, the law that has protected internet service providers like xAI for 30 years from facing liability for horrible content on their sites. Ashley’s case is one of the first where a company is trying to use Section 230 to protect itself from being held liable for making a generative AI product that harmed people.
We talked about that, but I also asked about her MAGA past, because… journalism. I asked her about some of her past videos and tweets about migrants, trans people, lies about Haitian immigrants eating domestic pets, and the 2020 election. It was those questions that seemed to bother her most.
She said she wasn’t expecting the interview to go there, and demanded we shelve it. This surprised me, because Ashley’s been on something of an apology tour, going on lefty podcasts to say she’s remorseful for the hateful rhetoric she spouted during her years on the right-wing. In the lead-up to the interview, she told me to prepare as if there was nothing she couldn’t talk about. “I am good at pivoting,” she texted me.
We told her we planned to run the interview. Then she emailed, claiming she never wanted to kill it. She said she only wanted us to delay publication until she talked to our lawyers. We had connected her with them, but she never ended up doing the call.
People online have been debating whether they can trust Ashley’s transformation from MAGA to “woke,” and I think this interview will help you decide.
But also — what do you think of my decision to ask Ashley about her past rhetoric? And our choice to run the interview despite her protests?
Watch for yourself, and let me know what you think.
If you’re not already a subscriber, this is a good time to become one. Hit the subscribe button to get more of these conversations delivered to your inbox. Our fact-checker reviewed this live, unedited conversation. We were not able to independently verify St. Clair’s remark that Musk’s devices were seized during French authorities’ search of X’s offices. Likewise with St. Clair’s recollection that she saw a Grok-generated image of a 4-year-old girl in a Bluey microprint bikini, and her claim that immigrants were getting on planes with boarding passes that didn’t have any name on them. We reached out to Musk and xAI for comment about St. Clair’s allegations, but they did not reply.
