This is so boring. It’s so predictable. Elon Musk said on Wednesday, “Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.”
No one needs to be a psychic to see this coming. In fact, I am shocked it took this long for someone to come forward and accuse Musk of sexual harassment.
Get this. The woman involved in the case did not even come forward. Her friend went public with the information without consulting the attendant.
So we’re not even hearing from the SpaceX flight attendant who allegedly received $250,000 from Musk to settle a sexual harassment claim. From Business Insider:
The flight attendant told her friend that the billionaire SpaceX and Tesla founder asked her to come to his room during a flight in late 2016 “for a full body massage,” the declaration says. When she arrived, the attendant found that Musk “was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body.” During the massage, the declaration says, Musk “exposed his genitals” and then “touched her and offered to buy her a horse if she would ‘do more,’ referring to the performance of sex acts.”The attendant, who rides horses, declined and continued with the massage without engaging in any sexual conduct. The attendant “is not for sale,” the friend’s declaration said. “She is not going to perform sexual favors for money or gifts.” The incident occurred during a flight to London.—“He whipped out his penis, it was erect,” the friend said, describing the allegations. “And he started propositioning her, like he touched her thigh and told her he would buy her a horse. And he basically tried to bribe her to perform some sort of sexual favor.”
Business Insider reported that SpaceX has in-house massage therapists for the executives. The attendant said her superiors encouraged her “to purchase her own professional massage training.”
The friend said the attendant “started to feel as if she was receiving some sort of retaliation where her shifts were cut back, and she was starting to feel really stressed” and that “she was being pushed out and punished for refusing to prostitute herself.”
The attendant contacted a California employment lawyer in 2018, two years after the alleged incident:
The attendant’s complaint was resolved quickly after a session with a mediator that Musk personally attended. The matter never reached a court of law or an arbitration proceeding. In November 2018, Musk, SpaceX and the flight attendant entered into a severance agreement granting the attendant a $250,000 payment in exchange for a promise not to sue over the claims.The agreement also included restrictive non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses that bar the attendant from ever discussing the severance payment or disclosing any information of any kind about Musk and his businesses, including SpaceX and Tesla.
The friend came forward because the non-disclosure does not apply to her:
“I absolutely felt a responsibility to come forward with it, especially now,” she said. “He is the richest man in the world. Someone with that level of power causing that kind of harm and then throwing some money at the situation, that’s not accountability. There are predators all over the world. But when someone is particularly wealthy and powerful, they literally have systems that are like a machine working for them, to set them up to be able to do whatever they want.”Remaining silent, the friend said, would make her complicit. “When you choose to remain silent, yeah, you do become a part of that system,” she said. “You do become a part of that machine that allows someone like Elon Musk to continue to do the horrible things that he’s done.”
Um, Elon Musk has been one of the richest human beings on earth for a long time. Why now? How can she use his money as an excuse to come out now?
Musk asked Business Insider “for more time to respond“:
After Insider contacted Musk for comment, he emailed to ask for more time to respond and said there is “a lot more to this story.””If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light,” he wrote, calling the story a “politically motivated hit piece.”
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