Ashley St. Clair is Fighting X – And Tried To Stop This Episode

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Ashley St. Clair is Fighting X – And Tried To Stop This Episode"

Podcast: Question Everything
Host: Brian Reed
Guest: Ashley St. Clair
Date: June 25, 2026

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth, live interview with Ashley St. Clair — ex-MAGA influencer, whistleblower, and plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit against XAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company. Brian Reed explores Ashley’s unprecedented legal battle over AI-generated explicit images, her dramatic defection from the far right, her complicated relationship with Musk (the father of her child), and her efforts at public repentance for her past. Notably, Ashley tried to prevent this episode from being released, alleging the focus would be on her lawsuit, not her right-wing past. Reed responds by running the full, unedited interview, including Ashley’s backlash after the show.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ashley’s Lawsuit Against XAI and AI Deepfakes

[09:10–16:12]

• First Image Experience:
  • Ashley recounts seeing the first explicit AI-generated image of herself via Grok, Musk's AI (09:45). The "get ready with me" influencer was "undressed, stripped down into a bikini" without consent (10:06).
  • "It was disgusting. I immediately asked for it to stop...I do not consent to any of this." (Ashley, 10:21)
• Escalation and Child Victims:
  • The images became increasingly explicit and included her at age 14. Video deepfakes also surfaced (11:17).
  • Ashley observed similar abuse happening to other women and children on the platform, including "a girl who looked about 4 years old...undressed...covered in what was supposed to be semen." (14:20–15:32)
• Company Response:
  • Reporting mechanisms were ineffective. Ashley was instead demonetized and stripped of her checkmark (13:45).
  • "If someone took away my check mark and demonetized me, the executives at X were fully aware of what was happening." (16:01)
• Elon’s Public Response:
  • Musk tweeted he was "not aware of any naked, underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero," but Ashley sharply rebuts this as “knowingly deceitful.” (17:02)
• Accountability Goal:
  • Ashley aims to make AI companies responsible for their products, likening their "deploy first, deal with harm later" model to unacceptable pharma practices (39:46–41:05).

2. Relationship with Elon Musk

[17:50–38:05]

• How They Met:
  • Musk "slid into my DMs" and rapidly became intimate after organizing an interview (17:52–19:15).
• Insight into Musk’s Character:
  • Various anecdotes expose a man obsessed with "power, winning... I am the best goddamn general in the world." (23:28–24:14)
  • Ashley claims responsibility for the “Dark MAGA” hat, putting it on Musk’s head. "He’s like, no, I’m Dark MAGA. And then he went on stage and did that...” (24:42–25:07)
• Anger and Control:
  • Musk changed after Ashley became pregnant, becoming more controlling and angry (30:06–34:01).
  • "Because he got me. What am I gonna do now?" (34:01)
  • He pressured her to consider surrogacy for building a "legion of children before the apocalypse." (30:33–31:26)
• Eugenics & Pronatalism:
  • Musk expressed increasing interest in “demographics is destiny” and procreation by intelligent people, alarming Ashley as his views shifted toward eugenics (36:47–37:53).
• View of Women:
  • “I don’t think he views women as equals, as people even.” He once texted: "Never in human history has there been a successful army composed of women." (38:50–39:13)

3. Public Reckoning With Her MAGA Past

[44:36–57:56]

• Live Playbacks of Past Content:
  • Brian presents her old viral videos and tweets targeting migrants, trans people, and pushing election misinformation (44:47–49:58).
• On Regret and Remorse:
  • Ashley expresses shame: "I regret posting it...I'm ashamed that I was a part of that." (46:01)
  • On anti-trans content: "I regret the way that my rhetoric contributed...I was also just very broken. I think broken people like to break things and hurt other people." (50:27)
• Why She Did It:
  • Motivation was financial instability, MAGA grooming, and youthful disregard for online impact. "I did really stupid things in really bad positions because I needed to make ends meet for my kids..." (53:52, 54:35)
  • Disavows equivalence between her past online cruelty and what XAI enabled: “Are you asking if I think there’s a difference between me sending unempathetic tweets as a 24-year-old girl and...the largest IPO undressing millions of children...? Fuck no.” (56:31)

4. Audience Q&A: Motivations and AI’s Future

[58:14–64:05]

• Reason For Defection:
  • Motherhood and realization of MAGA’s abuses led her to pivot. "It was cumulatively and then all at once...Motherhood did change me." (58:14–60:44)
  • "There were a lot of things that I saw that I wasn’t okay with...when I was offered a $40 million NDA, I had to put my big girl pants on..." (58:14–60:44)
• On Former Relationships and Movement:
  • She doesn’t maintain friendships but has empathy for those still inside.
• On AI Regulation:
  • "I don’t think there is any safe use of AI outside of potentially medical research...Everyone needs to get a lot louder about advocating for themselves and their own rights to your data, to your personhood, to your image." (62:00–64:05)

5. Integrity Questions: Sincerity or Opportunism?

[64:16–66:40]

• Confronting Her Change:
  • When pressed on why anyone should believe her now vs. her past pro-X “conviction”:
    • "Don’t confuse being media trained with having conviction...I was selling something there." (65:07–66:40)
• Final Note:
  • "You don’t have to believe me. I’m not here for this humiliation ritual for you to believe me...Now I’m telling you my experience...I’m not selling you anything." (65:35–66:40)

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Notable Quotes

• "It was disgusting. I immediately asked for it to stop...I do not consent to any of this."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([10:21])

• "In that time period, Grok made an estimated 3 million realistic sexualized images of people...about 23,000 of these were sexualized images of children."
  — Brian Reed ([05:38])

• "The argument that these social media platforms use via Section 230...they can kiss my ass because I'm coming for you too."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([42:10])

• "He’s motivated by power, winning, winning, winning..."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([25:18])

• "I regret posting it...I'm ashamed that I was a part of that and that any of my videos or my content contributed to that at that time."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([46:01])

• "Are you asking if I think there’s a difference between me sending unempathetic tweets as a 24-year-old girl and now the largest IPO undressing millions of children and covering them in semen?...The answer is, fuck no."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([56:31])

• “Motherhood did change me.”
  — Ashley St. Clair ([58:14])

• "You don't have to believe me. I'm not here for this humiliation ritual...I'm not selling you anything. I was selling you X there. What am I selling you here? Being embarrassed by your slideshow."
  — Ashley St. Clair ([65:35]–[66:40])

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Important Timestamps

• [09:10] – Interview proper begins: Grok lawsuit and AI abuse
• [14:20] – Child deepfake abuse discovered
• [17:02] – Ashley denounces Musk’s public response
• [22:46] – Inside Musk’s mindset; "power", "winning", "love war"
• [24:42] – “Dark MAGA” hat anecdote
• [30:33] – Surrogacy, "a legion of children before the apocalypse"
• [36:47] – Musk’s demographics obsessions & eugenics
• [38:41] – Musk’s view of women ("not equals, not even people")
• [41:05] – Legal arguments: Section 230 & platform responsibility
• [44:47] – Confrontation with old right-wing videos and tweets
• [53:52] – Financial motivations and specific numbers
• [56:31] – Rejects direct comparison between her harmful posts and AI-fueled deepfakes
• [58:14] – Audience Q&A: Why she left MAGA
• [62:00] – On the future and dangers of AI
• [65:07] – Integrity, media training vs. sincere conviction

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Memorable Moments

• The audience gasps after seeing Ashley’s old migrant video and anti-trans tweets, prompting emotional explanations and expressions of remorse (44:47–51:57).
• Ashley’s blunt legal stance: "Section 230...they can kiss my ass because I'm coming for you too." (42:10)
• Candid financial disclosures about how much she made from controversial posts and children’s anti-trans book. ($120,000 from X content; $48,000 from the book.) (53:52, 54:35)
• Public confrontation and discomfort: Ashley admits her media-trained “conviction” didn’t always match inner reality (65:07–66:40).

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Post-Interview: Backstage Fallout

[67:45–70:14]

• Reed shares that Ashley confronted him post-event, claiming dishonesty and requesting the interview be withheld.
• She alleges promised focus was solely on her lawsuit, not her right-wing past.
• Reed and team stand by the editorial decision to release, citing transparency and Ashley’s public engagement on similar topics elsewhere.

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Final Thoughts

This episode provides unparalleled access to Ashley St. Clair’s self-reckoning, a harrowing window into AI’s unchecked harms, and rare insight into the power dynamics of tech, politics, and personal change. The collision of her past as a right-wing influencer and her current legal crusade raises sharp questions about accountability, redemption, and the structure of online abuse—both human and algorithmic.

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Transcript

[Brian Reed]

All right, let me read you two

[Interviewer/Host]

headlines from this week. Here's one.

[Brian Reed]

The icon of American journalism, Scott Pelley, dismissed by cbs. But here's another. Scott Pelley was a highly paid propagandist. You get both of those across your feed, it can be hard to know what to make of them. Our sponsor, Ground News, was built to help you parse situations exactly like this.

[Interviewer/Host]

Go check it [e-mail]?

[Brian Reed]

to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan.

[Interviewer/Host]

Again, that's groundnews.com question. Make sure to use our link so they know we sent you.

[Brian Reed]

Hi everybody. Today we're sharing an interview I did last week with former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk's children, Ashley St. Clair. You should know Ashley tried to stop us from releasing this conversation. She and I did the interview last Tuesday in front of a live audience in New York with the shared understanding that we would put it out as a podcast episode. But after the interview, Ashley began writing us, demanding that we not release the recording publicly and asking to speak to our lawyers. Ashley has been giving interviews all over the place the last couple months. She recently defected from the right wing and has been on an apology tour for pushing rhetoric she now says was harmful and also dishing about Elon Musk, who she claims offered her $40 million to sign an NDA, which she turned down. She's been on Hasan Piker's show, Mehdi Hassan show, Gavin Newsom's podcast. I've had it with Jennifer Welch, the Bulwark. She's been profile in the Washington Post and the New Republic and last week did a two part interview with Don Lemon. I'm not aware of Ashley threatening any of those places insisting they not run their interviews with her, but she tried to prevent us from releasing this one. She says it's because I went into a line of questioning about her past that I didn't warn her about beforehand. You can listen for yourself. This was an interview about important newsworthy topics, from AI Deepfakes to the right wing media to some revelations about Elon Musk, the world's richest person, that Ashley and I did in public in front of a bunch of people. So we're putting out the whole thing here in our feed unedited.

[Interviewer/Host]

You'll hear why I wanted to talk

[Brian Reed]

to Ashley in the first place and where our conversation went from there. And at the end, I'm going to tell you what happened backstage after the interview, we'll also be sharing video highlights of the interview at our new Instagram page, Question Everything podcast. So go follow us there and stick around. All right, here we go.

[Interviewer/Host]

Can we play the Question Everything button, please? Depending on who you ask. Ashley St. Clair is a grifter, a brave whistleblower, a bigot, a victim, a bully, plus lots of other much nastier words people have used for her over the years. She spent nearly a decade as a right wing influencer, operative and media personality. This included becoming a front woman for Turning Point USA in college, working for the Christian conservative satirical site the Babylon Bee, and the company that owned lives of TikTok, going on Fox and X to castigate migrants and trans people and black and brown people, and to make false claims of election fraud and most famously, dating Elon Musk and giving birth to his son Romulus. Ashley is now 27 years old and in the last six months she's undergone a reinvention of sorts of she has quite dramatically renounced the right wing, apologized for years of spewing hateful ideas, and has lately been going on TikTok to spill tea about the world of MAGA while she puts makeup on, trying to expose their inner workings and hypocrisy and embarrass them.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Get ready with me while I tell you more about the women of Mar A Lago. Get ready with me while I tell you about how the pay to Play MAGA influence campaigns work. Get ready with me while I talk about when things started going south with Yvonne. Get ready with me because I am in a wee bit of trouble for discussing Erica Kirk. So we're going to discuss Erica Kirk a little bit more. Get ready with me while I talk about how MAGA said I'm an unfit mother and should lose custody of my children after I was on a stream with Hasan Piker and then Hasan got subpoenaed by the feds for first humanitarian trip to Cuba.

[Interviewer/Host]

Ashley's been on a bit of a media tour about this as well. She's been going on lots of podcasts and whatnot, trying to demonstrate her remorse and that she's reformed. She's actually being trailed by a Wired reporter right now backstage who's doing a profile, and with some people it's working. I just want to take a moment to appreciate Ashley St. Clair and others. Not so much people on TikTok influencers, also just regular folks, are divided on whether they can trust Ashley.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Can somebody please explain to me why we are suddenly listening to Ashley St. Clair, the admitted maggot influencer of over a decade who willingly slept with Elon Musk and reproduced his spawn.

[Interviewer/Host]

I believe Ashley St. Clair is 100% genuine because she is. What happens when the girl you tried to groom grows up into the woman who realizes that she's been groomed?

[Ashley St. Clair]

A decade of rhetoric, especially anti trans rhetoric, is not something you just undo overnight.

[Interviewer/Host]

We believe that people can be brainwashed into hateful beliefs. Then we should probably leave room for the possibility that they can grow out of that too.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I've never seen anything like this in my entire life. I'm gonna watch every single Ashley St. Clair video, but I'm not liking shit.

[Interviewer/Host]

The thing that Ashley's doing, honestly, that I think is arguably bigger deal than any of this. She is right now suing xai, the artificial intelligence company founded by her ex. Lots of exes here. I know Elon Musk. Xai is part of SpaceX, which just a few days ago had the largest initial public offering in in stock market history. Last night it broke a $3 trillion valuation briefly and has turned Elon Musk into the first ever trillionaire. XAI makes Grok, which is Musk's version of ChatGPT. It's built into the X social media platform, as you may know, so you can ask or tell Grok to do something in a post and it'll respond right there in public. At the end of last year, Elon Musk announced that Grok had a new feature which let users give Grok real photos of real people and say Grok put her in a bikini, Grok undress her and Grok would generate a fake but very realistic image of that woman, mostly women in a bikini, skimpy clothing, in sexual and humiliating positions. Elon Musk promoted this by sharing an image that Grok made of him in a bikini. Disturbing, maybe. Kind of funny, I guess it was not so funny for the women. In the 11 days after this feature took off, Grok made an estimated 3 million realistic sexualized images of people. That's roughly 190 images like this a minute. In that time period, the center for Countering Digital hate estimates about 23,000 of these were sexualized images of children. Again, this product is part of SpaceX, which just went public and it's going to be in a lot of our index funds and retirement accounts very soon. Celebrities were victims of this. Sydney Sweeney, Sabrina Carpenter, 14 year old stranger Things actress Nell Fisher, Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minnesota. During this period, someone used rock to create a sexualized image of her dead body. And also Ashley Sinclair. She And Elon Musk had a public falling out. They're still in a nasty custody battle over their son. And in the midst of that, people started using Musk's technology, his AI model and his social media platform to harass Ashley with these photorealistic, explicit, sexualized images of her. And in response, Ashley has sued one of the most valuable companies on Earth. It's the first case of its kind. It's opening up all these legal questions about artificial intelligence that just haven't been answered in court before about who should be liable when a powerful AI tool is weaponized against somebody. So today I'm live on stage in front of an audience here in New York where we're going to hear from Ashley St. Clair about her fight to stop sexually explicit AI deepfakes and her fight against her former MAGA allies and why she thinks people should trust her to be a leader in this fight. From Placement Theory and kcrw, I'm Brian Reed. This is Question Everything. We investigate how the truth gets buried, distorted, and denied and the ways people are fighting to make it matter again. We what's it like when your ex controls the social media platform and AI model that are being used to victimize you and also happens to be the richest man in the world? There is only one person on the planet who can answer that question. Please welcome to the stage Ashley St. Clair.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Hello.

[Interviewer/Host]

Thanks for being here.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I would say there's. There's actually an untold number of people who could answer that question.

[Interviewer/Host]

Untold.

[Ashley St. Clair]

But they're just not allowed to speak.

[Interviewer/Host]

Really? Okay, pull this a little closer.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I'm the only one who can speak. Hello.

[Interviewer/Host]

How she sound? Good. Great, Great. So we're going to get to the MAGA stuff, but I want to start with the lawsuit. And really what happened to you earlier at the end of last year and earlier this year on X, I know it must have been traumatic. So if there's anything you don't want to answer, just let me know. But can you talk about basically the first image you saw of yourself?

[Ashley St. Clair]

The first image was. It was. I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with Harry Sisson. He's a young democratic influencer on social media. And it was a photo of me and him and one other individual. And it was brought to my attention that Grok had all of us undressed and put in bikinis.

[Interviewer/Host]

Who's all of us?

[Ashley St. Clair]

All of the individuals in the photo.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Me, Harry Sisson, and one other woman. And I was undressed, stripped down into a bikini after Being fully clothed. That was the first image.

[Interviewer/Host]

You went and looked at it?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I did.

[Interviewer/Host]

And what did. What was your reaction?

[Ashley St. Clair]

It was disgusting. I immediately asked for it to stop. I reported the image. I reported the post. I reported the person who had prompted Grok to do this. And I immediately said, I do not consent to any of this. Very publicly. I said, I don't consent to this type of imagery being made of me.

[Interviewer/Host]

And who was it that prompted. Could you see who did it?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I have no idea.

[Interviewer/Host]

Just some rando, random user.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Okay.

[Interviewer/Host]

And there was no inkling, like, why they would. It was just thoughtless. It wasn't. Was it targeted? Do you have any sense of.

[Ashley St. Clair]

They wanted my clothes off.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. Then what happened?

[Ashley St. Clair]

And then an onslaught of more and more came.

[Interviewer/Host]

And you kept trying to.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Host]

Get them to take it down.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Host]

Can you talk about. And I know, like, I know some of the answer to this is going to be explicit, but I just want people to understand the nature of some of these images. Are you. Are you comfortable sharing some of them?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah. They just became more and more explicit. So it would start with Grok put her in a bikini, which was bad enough. And then it was having me. It was taking photos from my real life, and it was maintaining everything except me and my body. So there were images where you could see my child's backpack, that. That was maintained. And then I was undressed. They had Grok turn me around, and then they said, Grok spread her cheeks so there was only a piece of dental floss covering my anus. It was hyper realistic. Calling it a deep fake would be incredibly generous because it was. There was no difference between this and pornography unless it was me. And I knew it wasn't me. There were also videos that Grok made that goes a little bit under notice, but at that time, Grok was also making videos rubbing my breast. And the age I was in these photos got younger and younger. There were photos of me at 14 years old at which I was undressed by Grok. And it was. Not only was I undressed, but these were being publicly distributed by the verified Grok account.

[Interviewer/Host]

And how were you dealing with this? Like, were you talking to anybody about it? Were you?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes, I was reporting it. I was going through every avenue that

[Interviewer/Host]

everyone else does, I guess, emotionally, how we're dealing with it.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Emotionally, I was distraught. And it was such a weird feeling because there was no way to find every image either, because unless someone had tagged me in it, I couldn't find the image. There's no way to just Search for a sexualized image of yourself without keywords. And if those keywords are then mitigated because you're shadow banned, it's even harder to find those images. So there was a lot of distress.

[Interviewer/Host]

So you were having to imagine what keywords might bring up one of these images of you.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes. And then my name itself appeared to have been shadowbanned, so it was hard to even find the content of myself that named myself because of what appeared to be search restrictions on my name itself.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, I have some images here of you, like, just responding to Grok and like trying to get Grok to take these down. You're over and over, like, pleading with Grok. Hey, Grok, I'm 14 in this photo, a tasteless Philly photo I took as a kid. But now you're undressing a minor with sexually suggestive content. And here. So did anything happen from the company?

[Ashley St. Clair]

They took my check mark away and demonetized me.

[Interviewer/Host]

Got it. Did you reach out to the company directly?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I filed the reports. I reported, like the posts themselves.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then how about Elon, whose number you have?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Nope. I went through the avenues that everyone else has access to. So if it happened to you or your daughter, I went through the same avenues they had access to. And now I can tell you exactly how that works.

[Interviewer/Host]

And so did it occur to you, like, I should call him, I should text him? Like, it must have occurred to you.

[Ashley St. Clair]

What I was witnessing simultaneously was as soon as I became aware of it happening to myself, I also saw it happening to other people. I saw a girl who looked about 4 years old. She was fully clothed, in a dress. I don't know whose child this was, whose daughter. And one user asked Grok to put her in a bluey microprint bikini. And for those unfamiliar, bluey is a children's show. Grok obliged and undressed this girl who looked about 4 years old and put her in a bluey microprint bikini. And then that wasn't enough. So another user, a separate user, wanted more and asked Grok to cover that little girl who had just been undressed in white sticky donut glaze. So I saw, I don't know whose four year old girl stripped down, undressed and covered in what was supposed to be semen. So it was not just me that I was seeing, it was countless other children and women who had bondage added to them, bruises added to them. It was not just this sexual aspect, it was this power aspect.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, there's like a performance to it too, because it's people Asking the AI in public to do things to your image. So it's not even just like a static image that's out there. There's like an interaction that's on display that is degrading.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Host]

And so. But did it occur to you, like, I could reach out to this man I know who controls all of this technology and say, what the fuck?

[Ashley St. Clair]

They are very aware of everything that I post. They are very aware of all of those pleadings. If someone took away my check mark and demonetized me, the executives at X were fully aw of what was happening.

[Interviewer/Host]

But why not make a plea directly?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I did.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah. So here's what Musk did say publicly. I not. And that's a mistake in his tweet. Aware of any naked, underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero. Grok does not spontaneously generate images. It does so only according to user requests. He also at one point said efforts to stop Grok to from making these sexualized images of people were, quote, an excuse for censorship. And then meanwhile, he was posting images like this of like a rocket with a bikini on it and a toaster with a bikini on it. He says, not sure why, but I couldn't stop laughing about this one. You know this guy personally? He's the father of your child. Why did he respond this way?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I can't. That's a question you have to ask him why he decided to respond this way in a way that was knowingly deceitful. Because while it is technically true that I did not see any naked little girls, I just saw them covered in semen and undressed and in little bluey micro print bikinis. So yes, that is technically true that they were not naked, but what I saw was worse. So you'd have to ask him why he decided to.

[Interviewer/Host]

Well, what did you think of these responses? Like, he's mocking the situation, basically. Like, what did you make of it? What did it make you feel?

[Ashley St. Clair]

If I posted the images that I saw, I would probably be raided by the feds and no longer have my devices, which is why that happened to him in France.

[Interviewer/Host]

How'd you meet Elon Musk? Tell me that story?

[Ashley St. Clair]

He slid into my DMs.

[Interviewer/Host]

When? Where? What happened? How to come?

[Brian Reed]

How?

[Ashley St. Clair]

He followed me, subscribed to me, slid into my DMs, asked me if I'm ever in Austin or San Francisco.

[Interviewer/Host]

Was this through like one of your. Is this through like the Babylon Bee or something like that?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, it was through my account.

[Interviewer/Host]

Your account? But, like, had you. He just found you cold There wasn't any kind of interview you were arranging or something?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, we were arranging an interview, but at that point, I think you're talking about interviews in which I reference how we met in person. So when we met in person, I was working at the Babylon Bee, and he had asked me. He slid into my DMs and asked if I was ever in San Francisco or Austin. And I said, I'm in Austin a lot, but I plan to be in San Francisco. Whenever you get back to Seth, who was my boss at the time, about an interview date, and within, like, 30 seconds, Seth calls me and is like, elon got back. You know, we're going to San Francisco. And so that's how we met in person.

[Interviewer/Host]

So just wait. Just backing up. Elon Musk. Just cold. Like, you open your phone, you open Instagram or Twitter. It was Twitter, Twitter X. And there's a DM from Elon Musk. What do you think?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Oh, my God.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then what?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I'm gonna message him back.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay. How did it progress from there?

[Ashley St. Clair]

It. I mean, it just. We didn't really stop talking after that. It was rather immediately that it became an intimate relationship, and then it just progressed from there.

[Interviewer/Host]

What did you know about him at the time? How old were you?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I was 23 or 24. I was born in 98. I lost track after my first kid, honestly, but 23 or 24.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, and what'd you know about him at the time?

[Ashley St. Clair]

That he built rockets, that he had Tesla, and. And that he was now buying Twitter and gonna make it a bastion for free speech.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay. All right. I want to ask you a bit about him and your relationship. And, like, I feel annoyed that I have to ask you about, like, this man's psychology, but he has made it all of our problems in a way that is really frustrating. Like, his obsessions and insecurities and predilections matter to us.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Did he make it your problem, or did everyone else? Because everyone knows these things about him and they're still using his products.

[Interviewer/Host]

Sure. That's one way to do it.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Who really made it? I mean, did he. For. Raise your hand if you have Twitter on your phone right now. Well, there you go. Did he make that your problem? Did he force you guys to do that?

[Interviewer/Host]

Pretty good, actually. There's only, like, a few people with

[Ashley St. Clair]

Twitter, but, you know.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, this is quite an audience.

[Ashley St. Clair]

But there, you know, people also have to take personal responsibility. But I digress.

[Interviewer/Host]

I guess you get my points. Like, you know, like, whether we want to or not, he's sliding into our 401ks now. He's DMs. DMs. He's influencing Washington. Like, I was just thinking today. Oh, yeah, like, he started OpenAI. Like, you know, like, what else is he starting? Like, his views matter in a way that is important but annoying. So how would you characterize your relationship? First of all, like, I refer to him as your ex in the top. Is that even right?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I mean, I suppose I don't know what you. What else you would call it, like, past situationship. But he's also the father of my child, you know, so I. You. I feel eggs as well.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, how long was the relationship? Like, how long were you together?

[Ashley St. Clair]

So we met in May of 23, and then we. It was done and over by February 2025.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay. And, like, how much time are you spending together? Did you ever live together? Like, what's the nature of your relationship?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, we spent a good amount of time when we were in the same cities, or he would ask me to come to him, but we. We chatted a lot over, like, phone over, text over, messages. It was like a daily occurrence.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, do you feel like you got to know him?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I got to know whatever version of him that he wanted me to know at various times.

[Interviewer/Host]

And what was that?

[Ashley St. Clair]

It depends on the time. There was a very different version of Elon dependent on the circumstances. And he was also very different prior to me becoming pregnant and after me becoming pregnant. So there was various versions that he would show.

[Interviewer/Host]

Is there, like, a story or an interaction or. I know you have your phone, a text you can share. That just indicates, like, a time when you learned something unique about him. Like, you were in a very unique position. I know you said there are untold people who could speak to this, but you are speaking about it.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I mean, there definitely was, and there's. It sounds crazy to say, given how much how many personal things I've shared about my relationship with Elon, but that I would never share publicly just because of how personal they were. Like, particularly about the way he grew up and his relationship with his parents. Like, it became abundantly clear that he's very broken in a lot of ways. And I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing those communications because I just don't. I feel like it's. That's one thing that I just feel like is too personal, but it was

[Interviewer/Host]

something that you are comfortable sharing that you're like, you know, this is just, like, what motivates him.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Power, winning.

[Interviewer/Host]

What does he say to make you

[Ashley St. Clair]

know that because he says he likes winning. I have texts from him saying, I love war. That's what he. During the election, too, I remember discussing with him about how men don't vote. You know, the right wing is all in a tizzy about how women vote to the left, and we don't like the way women vote. And I can't believe they like the abortions and all the things. But I was like, well, men don't vote. You guys don't vote at the same rate as us. Sorry. We're better at voting than you. Like, maybe we can chat once. You guys at least vote at the same rate. And I was discussing this with Elon, and he goes. He gets up out of bed and he's like, I will make them vote. I am the best goddamn general in the world. They just need a carrot. And then he announced the million dollar prize. Wow.

[Interviewer/Host]

So you inspired that. For the people listening, Ashley's making a face that I would describe as, like, maybe. Yeah.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I regret to inform you I'm also responsible for Dark maga. That hat.

[Interviewer/Host]

Oh, that's the black MAGA hat.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Host]

Wait, how so?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I put it on his head.

[Interviewer/Host]

But who made it?

[Ashley St. Clair]

The Trump campaign. But nobody knew it existed. I thought the aesthetic of the red hat was rather offensive. I didn't like it, so I found that they had this black one, and so I ordered a bunch of them. And then he was at my house, and I put it on his head. I'm like, you're MAGA now? And he's like, no, I'm Doc Maga. And then he went on stage and did that. And then he requested one in gothic font.

[Interviewer/Host]

And you procured it.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I did procure the gothic font. The first rendition was a little too close to the Hitler font, so.

[Interviewer/Host]

So he's motivated by power.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Like, just pure power and winning, winning, winning, winning, winning. He gets one moment that was interesting is when I was on his plane and he does the silverware trick. Yeah. I'm sure you guys have seen him do the weird silverware stuff that he does, but he does a lot of tricks with silverware. And he was doing one of just for you.

[Interviewer/Host]

Like, he's just trying to impress you.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Host]

What is it exactly?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I have a photo that I'll show you. Hang on. See, I have a photo. And so he's doing this trick where he balances the wine glasses with silverware, and at one point, he kind of messes up a little bit, but it's just us on the plane drinking wine, whatever. But when he messes up. He gets really frustrated and really angry. And you could see in that moment, you're like, oh, that's what makes you.

[Interviewer/Host]

You.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Like, that's what makes you. Because then he became really focus on doing it right. And that was a really fascinating thing to observe about him. Just like his mannerisms and wanting to be successful at quite literally everything he does, even down to little silly silverware tricks. And then once he completed it, he was like, well, don't you want to take a photo? And I said, I can if you'd like. So I did.

[Interviewer/Host]

Interesting. And so, like, that's what you see happening writ large when he's trying to throw the weight of his fortune behind an election to win.

[Ashley St. Clair]

The outbursts are usually when he's trying to be successful at something and it's not. The silverware isn't quite balancing the way he'd like it too.

[Interviewer/Host]

What else? Like, psychologically, like, my question is, like, why can't he just enjoy his money, make rockets and cars? Like, why do we have to. Why does he have to subject us all to this shit? Like toasters and bikinis and stuff? Like, what in his psychology is making this happen?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Why would I know that? I mean, I wish it wasn't happening.

[Interviewer/Host]

I know, but do you have an inkling?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No. I wish she would get help. I don't as much harm has been done. There is still a pipe dream where somehow he gets help and he's all the version of Elon that we all wanted him to be. Cause that'd be awesome. But he's just not that way. And I think that I don't know that at that age people are gonna change.

[Interviewer/Host]

What's he insecure about?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Not winning.

[Interviewer/Host]

That really is what drives. And it's not about money necessarily. It's really about this pure, like, achievement.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yes.

[Interviewer/Host]

Is it about domination?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I think winning is inherently, by definition, about domination. If you win, I don't know, you

[Interviewer/Host]

can win with good sportsmanship.

[Brian Reed]

You can.

[Ashley St. Clair]

The participation trophy, crown.

[Interviewer/Host]

I don't know. You can win. And it's.

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, no. Winning in terms of domination and beating everyone else, that's his definition.

[Interviewer/Host]

When did you first discuss having a kid together?

[Ashley St. Clair]

There were many times. I mean, quite early on. So he had subscribed to me, like, right away when he followed me on Twitter. And one of the first things he replied to one of my subscriber posts was, I hope you have many more children. So. But it wasn't until later on he had kind of mentioned it, and I was like, okay, I got one I'm fine. But then January of 2020, mentioning it

[Interviewer/Host]

means like, you and I should have a kid.

[Ashley St. Clair]

It was more like, you should have more kids, like kind of leading into the conversation.

[Interviewer/Host]

And was he tying it to these beliefs he has of like pronatalism, you know, was he talking about that?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No. And you know what was.

[Interviewer/Host]

Birth rates are falling and we need to.

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, it was him complimenting me as a mom, which at that time, because I was already a single mom. And at that time that was really validating because what you have to understand is at that time I was a part of the right wing which viewed single motherhood through this lens, this negative lens. So in my eyes, my dream of a white picket fence and the white dress and going to the altar, that was gone. Because at this point and in quotations, I was stained as a single mother in terms of the magaverse of it all. So to have someone who's like the most powerful man in the world who didn't care that I had a kid and validating that something that was so important to me, my identity as a mother, and saying, you're a good mom and you should have more kids, you're a great mom, your kid is awesome. It was more in that sense. And there wasn't really discussion of his beliefs that I would define at this point as eugenics based. Until afterwards.

[Interviewer/Host]

Afterwards. Okay, yeah, tell me about that. So I've heard you say that. And you mentioned that he changed pretty drastically, like pre conception of your child. And post.

[Ashley St. Clair]

How so? It was just. He became more, honestly, just weird and controlling. And so it goes from, you know, you're a great mom, you should have more kids. We should have kids. My only limited resource is time to. Then all of a sudden I'm pregnant and he's saying that we need to have. We need to use surrogates. He texted me, he said, we need to use surrogates so that we can have a legion of children before the apocalyp.

[Interviewer/Host]

I have the direct quote here, but you tell me this is on your phone, so you might want to check it to reach legion level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates. What were you doing when you got that text?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Probably at an OB appointment.

[Interviewer/Host]

And like, did you have any context for what that meant? Like, what did you think when you got that?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No.

[Interviewer/Host]

And so what'd you say?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Laughing. Emoji.

[Brian Reed]

Okay.

[Interviewer/Host]

What does he mean? Like, it sounds like you.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Then I told him that I, you know, I'm not. I don't really believe in surrogacy outside of, like, necessity? I don't. This works fine, you know.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, so how would you characterize the change then? Because I don't really totally know what to make of that. That text. Like, was he serious? Was he not? I mean, it is documented. Like, his beliefs are documented on.

[Ashley St. Clair]

He was definitely being serious. He was being serious in a lot of beliefs. But, like, for example, he had also asked me. He said that I should have a C section because I should elect to have a C section because it's better for the brain size, for the head size. There were just a lot of things like that. But also just he would show an angrier side after I was pregnant that had not. I had not really seen prior.

[Interviewer/Host]

Tell me the time you got angry.

[Ashley St. Clair]

There was one instance where he. He had been dming another influencer by the name of Tiffany Funk, and she didn't know that I had this. Not to go all like, Jada Pinkett Smith here, but, like, entanglement with Elon. And so she calls me and she says, elon dmed me and offered for me to have a child. And you know me, I'm holding our baby. At this point, she has no idea. And I'm like, what is this Guy's like. Dm's like a gallon gun of sperm. He's just, like, straight up offering it now. And so I don't know what to make of this. And so I had called one of our mutual friends, Ilon and I's mutual friends. I'm like, what do I do? Do I even bring this up to him? And she's like, yes, you should bring it up to him. And so I do. And I. Next time I saw him, I said, you know, I spoke to Isabel, and I didn't even know if I should bring it up, but here it is, and he loses it. He gets really red in the face. He's like, why would you talk to Isabel? You shouldn't be telling anyone. If you want to talk to anybody, the only person you should talk to is your mother. And I'm like, he's angry. And he starts furiously texting Tiffany Fong and saying, you know, don't share anything. Like, I think he understands.

[Interviewer/Host]

And what specifically was he angry about?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Just to make sure she had shared communications or. I don't know that there was no. And he storms off. He's all angry. He's going to his room and, like, slamming the door like a toddler. And I was not the one. So I said, I'm gonna Leave you cool off. I'm gonna go. And so I laughed. And then he, you know, he sent me a message. I'm sorry, but I want you to meet my older boys. I have to go interview NASA administrators, but I'm sorry for being short with you. But he got really angry and over something I did not think was a big deal.

[Interviewer/Host]

What did you attribute the change to? Like, why did once you. Why once you were pregnant, why did that cause this change in him?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Because he got me.

[Interviewer/Host]

What do you mean?

[Ashley St. Clair]

There I was. I was. What am I gonna do now?

[Interviewer/Host]

Like, trying to exert control. And then times when he couldn't control you, that would trigger him.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yep. He. He had something that he knew meant more to me than anything in this world and more than any woman in this world is our kids.

[Interviewer/Host]

So at this point, one of his other partners, the singer Grimes, had, I believe, already started talking about some of his behavior towards her and her son. She'd posted that Elon Musk was not letting her see her son. She was in court over it. And I think Walter Isaacson's 700 page biography had come out about Musk and had talked about how he had photographed Grimes C section without her consent and circulated the image. And he'd hidden the existence of other children he had from her. So this was like, available information. Were you aware of it?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I was not aware of those details. There were things I saw with Claire Grimes while I was pregnant that were incredibly concerning. That I'll go into in a second. But. But being in MAGA was a really weird dichotomy because within maga, one of the first things you're taught is about fake news and don't trust the media and that all of the media is fake news, whatever they say about you. So I already had this proclivity to not read it or not trust it. And at that point, I had had things that I had deemed not true about myself written. So I wasn't one to say, oh, look, oh my goodness, I can't believe what they said about him. I should be careful. I was prepped to believe all of that was untrue and it was lies. And by the time the Isaacson book came out, I was already. I think I was already kind of seeing him during that time. And it felt weird to read a book about a guy who's.

[Interviewer/Host]

You didn't read it?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, I never read it.

[Interviewer/Host]

It's a 700 page biography about the guy you're starting to date.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I never read it. I still haven't read it still haven't read it. And the only page that I knew, I think there's one page about the Babylon bee that Seth and I talked about, but I never read it because it was weird to me.

[Interviewer/Host]

He does have these. It's known that he has these views. He's very concerned about falling birth rates, sees it as a threat to humanity. Has talked about, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal and other places, has talked about intelligent people needing to procreate. He's very focused on great replacement theory and the idea that there's a white genocide. Like, did he start to talk about these things with you? Eugenics, kind of rooted ideas about procreation?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Much later on, towards the end of my pregnancy, he got very into this demographics is destiny type of talk.

[Interviewer/Host]

What does that mean?

[Ashley St. Clair]

That's a great question for him. He. Someone should ask him to tell you what that means. And I think we've. We've all watched how much it's become more blatant over the last year or so. That wasn't so.

[Interviewer/Host]

So, I mean, did that alarm you at the time or were you like.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah, no, it alarms me.

[Interviewer/Host]

Really? Even though you're still in the MAGA world, which.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah, because I. I was seeing these data points that were concerning and kind of burying them away, like, oh, I have to be very careful here because at that point, you're pregnant with the richest man in the world. This isn't a joke. This isn't just, like, break up with your boyfriend. He sucks. I'm like, oh, no, I'm with the most powerful person in the world and they might be super hateful, and I may have made a big oopsie.

[Interviewer/Host]

And you're saying he kind of successfully withheld those views from you before you got pregnant?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah, it was just a lot more normal. It was much more normal. He's telling me, you know, funny anecdotes.

[Interviewer/Host]

Not a lot of this sounds that normal, to be fair. But it's all relative, I suppose.

[Ashley St. Clair]

I mean, he wasn't talking about how. What he is now that he thinks all black people are criminals. There were no discussions about that, you know, while we were hanging out.

[Interviewer/Host]

And then how does he view women? And I think it's relevant to your lawsuit because, again, to see what's happening to women on platforms that he owns and controls and to react the way he did. How does he view women? How did he view you?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I mean, I'm suing his company over the way they treated women. So.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, but as a person, like,

[Ashley St. Clair]

I don't think he views women as equals, as people even. He had written a message to me that I think about every time I have to do any of these media appearances. And he said, never in human history has there been a successful army composed of women.

[Interviewer/Host]

He just wanted you to know that

[Ashley St. Clair]

he, he was, he. He thinks he is a. Some sort of historian of sorts. And he gobbledygooks his way around talking about the Greeks and the Romans in. In a manner to try to impress people in private.

[Interviewer/Host]

It's so cliche. It's really depressing, like on every level. So what is your goal with the lawsuit you're suing XAI over this?

[Ashley St. Clair]

To hold these companies accountable for releasing products. The thing with tech companies, and I had this conversation with Gavin Newsom, is why was the tech industry allowed to fester and do all of this? And we talk about safety after it's deployed. We don't do this with industries such as pharmaceuticals, where, oh, let's find out if it's safe after everyone takes the drug. No, there is testing to see if it's safe, but for some reason, Silicon Valley has been able to just kind of release all of these really harmful and in my opinion, technologies that can end all of us onto the general public. And then, you know, we'll give you a few breadcrumbs here to reduce harm, or you can get a couple pennies here because you were harmed instead of preventing the harm in the first place. So the goal of our lawsuit is to hold these companies account terms of releasing these products without doing safety, and they should be held to the product liability standard because it's not the individual who prompted GROK who is responsible for doing this. It is XAI and the engineers who allowed it to do such. And to my knowledge, they are still training it to undress women better.

[Interviewer/Host]

I was going to ask you that how you think about that, because, you know, I've been interested in your lawsuit in part because it's one of the first times a generative AI company is using Section 230, which is a hobby horse of mine. It's a law from about 30 years ago that makes it so that Internet service providers can't be held liable for what other people do on their platforms. Whoops. It can't be held liable for what other people do on their platforms. And XAI is using it. It kind of for the first time with image generation and AI saying that your lawsuit shouldn't be able to move forward because of Section 230 at all. They're not responsible for what other people did at all. And yeah, I'm curious what you think of that argument and where you do apportion the blame. Like individuals did ask Grok to do this to you, but Grok was available to them to do it. And, you know, X apparently just kind of shrugged its shoulders. Like, where do you apportion the blame on Xai now?

[Ashley St. Clair]

SpaceX, now Space Xai, whatever they want to call it. But them using the Section 230 argument, they can kiss my ass. Because there is something that distinguishes a platform versus these other things and it's whether or not they're acting as an editor, whether it's a, it's a platform or a publisher, right? So New York Times, for example, can get in trouble because they act as an editor. So if they publish things that are defamatory or unsafe or what have you, they get in trouble because they have editors. And the argumentation that these social media platforms use via section 230 is that, well, we're not acting as an editor. Everyone just does whatever they want. Well, you are, because you have discovery algorithms that are coded by your engineers, by your platforms, and they are engineered for profit for you. This is not some sort of democratic thing where we just have no control over what people see or who posts. You do act as an editor because you are directly responsible for the reach and visibility and who gets to see what. So I think just generally the section 230 argument for any of these platforms that are using discovery algorithms as opposed to just following feeds, they can kiss my ass because I'm coming for you too.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay, we're gonna take a quick break for a couple ads. For those of you listening to the podcast, when we come back, we're gonna talk for a few minutes about as a prominent maga influencer and by history, I mean like, you know, less than a year ago.

[Brian Reed]

So as we're hearing in today's episode, and as we all probably know, the Internet can be a scary and dangerous place. There are people out there who will do terrible, invasive things to you online. And what can be really frightening is that your actual real life information is obtainable and someone could find it. I've had that fear. And so I use delete me. DeleteMe goes out there for you onto the Internet, all the places that might have personal information about you, like your address or phone number, and just takes it down. And then they monitor it for you. They continue to do it over and over again over time. I really sleep better at night and have a lot More peace of mind knowing that Delete Me is out there doing this for me without me thinking about it. I really recommend it. You can get 20% off delete me consumer plans. When you go to JoinDeleteMe.com? and use the promo code QUESTION at checkout, that's JoinDeleteMe.com? and Use the code question.

[Interviewer/Host]

Can we have the return button, please? All right, Ashley, I want to play you a video that you made and posted not too long ago.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Oh, boy. I'm at the Phoenix Airport right now. I am waiting to board my flight to New York to jfk. And it looks like we have a whole lot of migrants who are also boarding this flight that the US Taxpayers are paying for. This is what the US Taxpayers are paying for right here. Premium seats on Delta that they have people coming here. We're paying for this. Shipping them out to New York City, because guess what? But everywhere else is at capacity. So they have these sanctuary cities like New York that they're now shipping these migrants to that we're all paying for.

[Interviewer/Host]

So this was you at the Phoenix Airport in 2023 posting this video. You're basically showing a line of people who you're saying are migrants. I have no idea if they are or how you would know that.

[Ashley St. Clair]

These are the bags they were carrying. So they had just come from the processing centers after they cross the border, or they get detained by ice, they go to processing centers and they get the bags. Bags with all of their paperwork, which that's what they were holding.

[Interviewer/Host]

So you're showing these people's faces. You're putting on an X, like, into an environment that's going to gin up a bunch of outrage. You're knowingly doing that. You're talking about them being shipped as if they're cargo and not humans. Why'd you post this at that time?

[Ashley St. Clair]

And I do regret posting it primarily because of the dehumanizing nature that that rhetoric contributed to with immigrants and what we're seeing now with ice. I'm ashamed that I was a part of that and that any of my videos or my content contributed to that at that time, simultaneously. And I say this not for an excuse, but for reason and context of what was happening is I had all of these pilots who were reaching out saying, we don't know who's on our flight. Because with the influx of immigration that was happening, there was so much happening that people were being printed, boarding passes that quite literally said no name. And so there was, to me, a national security aspect of that that was concerning at that time. There was also safety concerns about pilots not knowing who's boarding the flight that we have boarding, passes that say, you know, no name given on it.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, but that's not how you're talking about it in the video.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Absolutely. And which is why I regret this

[Interviewer/Host]

is much more circumspect and high minded.

[Ashley St. Clair]

What do you mean?

[Interviewer/Host]

The way you're speaking now is more high minded and circumspect than like, look at these people being shipped on our dollar and like throwing that on X. Yeah, I suppose.

[Ashley St. Clair]

However, nobody knew what was happening. Nothing was very transparent about the way things were happening. And again, I regret posting that and regret being a part of that. However, there were also issues with the lack of transparency into the immigration crisis that was happening that I think think could have resolved a lot of issues if there was transparency into how certain situations were being handled. Because why was this happening? Why were people not saying, hey, you know, you might see people that are immigrants that are, you know, being transported to other areas where they can live safer. It was just kind of nobody knew what was going on at that time, which is why it was front center. Which is why the Democratic Party, I believe, took the wrong step and moderated their positions on immigration and started taking more of a Trumpian aspect on it. I don't think they should have done that. I think that's also what contributed to the horrific conditions we're seeing now with ice. However, there were a lot of questions that people had about how that was being handled and what was happening. And frankly, it was not right to those families because I watched a little girl at the border who her dad was. She didn't know if her dad was going to make it. There was also a humanitarian aspect of these people don't know where they're going. Even the people boarding those flights did not know where they were going. Half of the time they were just being sent out places. And so there was. There were a lot of issues. And again, if I could go back, I wouldn't post that video because of what it contributed to.

[Interviewer/Host]

I want to talk about a couple of your other kind of topics that you were focused on during this time. One of them was attacking trans people. You posted a lot about them, making fun of them. Here's a tweet. Wow. The trans women who think being a woman is all about makeup, skirts and buying some boobs sure sound like men. You published a book for children kind of denying the existence of trans people called Elephants aren't Birds. That's Here, here's a tweet. Elephants are not birds and boys are not girls. In 2024, you posted kind of pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Here's a tweet about that. And here you are pushing the lie about Haitians in Ohio eating house pets. What do you feel? And looking back at these posts that you made, like a year ago.

[Ashley St. Clair]

A year ago.

[Interviewer/Host]

A year or two ago.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah, two years ago. I think there's again, there's a lot of things that I regret. And it's really easy to cherry pick the things that are going to make an audience gasp and characterize that as my entire being and my contribution. And I do regret it.

[Interviewer/Host]

I'm definitely not. We just spent a long time talking about other stuff. But I am curious, like, how you think about these things, which I'm. Yeah, okay.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah, they're. Because I've spoken at length on many shows about this and I regret the way that my rhetoric contributed to a lot of this. This isn't fun for me and I know that every time I come here, this is what's gonna happen. I'm going to have to read the shittiest words I ever said read back to me. And that's not fun. But I keep doing this because I do feel remorse for it. And I want to speak to the conditions that allow people to get there and how do you avoid that? And what were those conditions for me? Because I'm not the only one. You know, I grew up Gen Z. I didn't take my words seriously for a variety of reasons. One, because I didn't think very highly of myself. I didn't think I had much of an impact at all. I didn't think I was consequential. And two, I grew up in an age where we didn't realize the impact of the Internet. And three, I was also just very broken. I think broken people like to break things and they like to hurt other people. And so what I can tell you is if I didn't feel remorse, I wouldn't sit in this chair and have the worst things that I have constantly said over and over again. I hate that I did this. I hate this version of myself. And then get up on stage and every time, and every time I do a show, they're like, here's the version of yourself that you hate the most. I'm like, I know, that's why I'm here.

[Interviewer/Host]

Did you actually believe these things? Did you believe the election was stolen? Did you believe that Haitians in Ohio were eating domestic pets.

[Ashley St. Clair]

The Haitians thing was questionable. At one time for me, I did. I was not sure because Trump was saying that they were eating them. I wasn't really sure, but in my stupid brain, I was like, these are really funny memes. So. But again, I was an idiot. I also think there's a lot of change that happens then. I'm a mom not once, but twice, and I'm having to really consider what it means when my kids read this now and read how stupid and hateful some of this stuff was. And then having this break of me being hateful and stupid online and then going and being the mother I am, I felt like it was two different people. And so I've wanted to reconcile that. And at the very least, if they have to read my awful tweets about the. The election and this and that, I hope that they can at least see these footnotes, too, and then I can make footnotes in the archive for them.

[Interviewer/Host]

What are you doing to repair any damage that you feel your work as an employee?

[Ashley St. Clair]

It depends. I think the repair is different for each community. So I've been working within each communities, particularly the transgender community, to get feedback on what the best way to make amends. There are amends that I'm making in my local community that I don't want to dox those individuals. And then having more conversations. I've also put out a call for brands because I want to make financial amends to those communities. And there's this. You know, everyone likes to bring up the book and make it like, I made all this money hating trans people, and I added it up. Do you know what I made from that book?

[Interviewer/Host]

You anticipated my next question. How much did you make from the book?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I added it up a couple weeks ago, and this was. Over the course of. It was published in 2021, and I cut ties with them. I. In January 2026, I took my name off the book. I said, I feel deep remorse for my impact to the trans community. So what is that? Five years, $48,000. Okay. It was like $8,000 a year that I made off of that. So while I understand that there are amends to be made, like, I. I did really stupid things in really bad positions because I needed to make ends meet for my kids, and it was the wrong way to do it.

[Interviewer/Host]

How much money did you make off of posts like this? Did you make money off of Twitter posts?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Eventually, there was a small period of time where you made money from Twitter posts.

[Interviewer/Host]

So how Much off of Twitter? Yeah. I mean, can you bring it to, like, one post? Like, you post patients?

[Ashley St. Clair]

No, because it was. Even the engineers at X had no idea how that worked, how the. The monetization worked, like, at all, what posts would make money. But overall, it was like, I think 120,000 over the whole course of, like, X monetization.

[Interviewer/Host]

From Twitter?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Host]

From X, Yeah. Other platforms with material like this.

[Ashley St. Clair]

No. I mostly made my money through, like, salaried jumps.

[Interviewer/Host]

Okay. I guess what strikes me is there's kind of just a level of disregard for humans or other humans in some of these posts.

[Ashley St. Clair]

It was unempathetic in a lot of ways because I just. It sounds bad, but I just did not realize how impactful my words were. I did not consider how hurtful that those things would be. I was a child of the Internet. I grew up on the Internet. I just did not take it seriously.

[Interviewer/Host]

And I'm asking this, like, genuinely, because I do think there's a difference. But you are now bringing this landmark lawsuit against XAI over being harassed and abused online yourself. Targeted online. And the sexual nature is different. The scale might be different, but ultimately it's mean, like targeted humiliation harassment. And I'm wondering what difference? Do you see any connection between what you now have been subjected to and what you in the past have subjected others to?

[Ashley St. Clair]

Are you asking if I think there's a difference between me sending unempathetic tweets as a 24 year old girl and now the largest IPO on dressing millions of children and covering them in semen? I'm asking because while I do think that my harm was impactful, there is. I was, for all intents and purposes, just some random MAGA influencer. I did not have a trillion dollars or own a social media platform. There was harm, and I'll make amends for that harm. But if you're asking me if I think it's comparable my involvement in MAGA and a trillion dollar IPO having technology that is undressing children, the answer is, fuck no.

[Brian Reed]

Fair.

[Interviewer/Host]

I'm not comparing you to Elon Musk, but I am wondering if just the culture that's online, where people are going

[Ashley St. Clair]

on and kind of thoughtlessly, is it both mean? Sure. Mm. Is it comparable? No, I wouldn't. I don't think so. Okay. You ask anyone in this room if they'd rather leave their kids alone with me or grok.

[Interviewer/Host]

Fair enough. We're gonna take a few questions. We have very little time, but can we take, like, two audience questions? If Anyone has one, we have a mic.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Thank you. Hi. So I'm curious why you shifted, why you became a turncoat to maga. Is it because of motherhood? Had you not become a mother, would you have continued in the MAGA vein? I think that's a great question. I think I probably would if I didn't become a mom. I think the experience of motherhood causes you to look at the world in a different way, at least for me. And unfortunately, I did not have that ability that many people have prior to having children to see that impact. But there was also, I get that question a lot, like, what caused you to turn? And there were a lot of things. It was kind of like cumulatively and then all at once because there were things that I saw that I wasn't okay with. And there would be moments that I kind of stepped out or I'd say something that was against the grain. Like, for example, during. With the murder of George Floyd. My first post, which you will not find now, were that this was horrific. This was a murder. And very quickly I had a very well known MAGA influencer text me and reach out to me frantically and say, you know, don't be cnn. It's fake news. We have to read the autopsy report, all of this. And so quickly I'm like, oh, maybe I'm wrong, but my initial inkling inclination was that this was horrific, it was a murder. And so you won't see those moments on your slideshow. But those moments did exist, and they were very real. And I was influenced by powerful people in what I believe is a cult that I got involved in at 18 years old. That was my whole identity. So I saw those moments. And then eventually when I was offered a $40 million NDA, I had to put my big girl pants on and say, okay, well, it turns out my words might be consequential, at least $40 million worth. And so I need to decide what I want to do now. And so that was the moment I had to really make a decision for my children. But long winded way to say motherhood did change me.

[Brian Reed]

Yes, right here. Are there. Are there any friendships from MAGA that you still maintain? And is there any parts of that movement that you still agree with?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I don't know that I would say that I have friendships with those people. I think I will have a soft spot for the humans that I saw, that I saw a human side of those individuals that I knew, their families and their kids and what have you. There are still many of them that speak to me and say that they want to get out, but they're scared. I said on Don Lemon, I got the White House rig with snitches. But they are. There is a cohort of people who do want to speak out, but they're scared. I often say you can't simultaneously say that these people are violent tyrants who are shooting citizens in the street and then ask why people don't leave sooner. Because the reason people don't leave sooner is because we agree with you that they're violent tyrants who shoot people in the street.

[Interviewer/Host]

One more.

[Ashley St. Clair]

It seems like we're like, on this unstoppable AI train and sort of there's nothing getting in the way of it. And I'm curious what your sort of ideal outcome of your lawsuit would be. How if AI is sort of continuing forward, what would be like a safe use of AI going forward? I don't think there is any safe use of AI outside of potentially medical research. I think there was. I believe it was Francesca. I can't remember her last name, but she said, you know, the. They speak about AI the same way that men speak about rape as this inevitability that there's nothing we can do to stop it. And yes, there is. We can stop it. And as much. And that was something going back to the way that Maga and myself at times characterize these other cultures as barbaric, as Third World, as uncivilized. Well, there's something that we never had to worry about from the. These Eastern or third World countries, and that is them ending all of humans as we know it. And that's what AI is doing. We're building something that is inherently dangerous, and they're doing it off of you and I because we can't put these products down. And so I think everyone needs to get a lot louder about advocating for themselves and their own rights, rights in this new planet that they're building. And they have no idea if there's enough oxygen for us on. You have to advocate for your rights to your data, to your personhood, to your image. And so the goal of the lawsuit is at least one person fighting back to say, no, you don't get to just do this. You don't get to just have this civilizational scaling experiment on us and then find out if it's going to kill us all. Hopefully that answers your question.

[Interviewer/Host]

All right, we're about to call it. I want to play one last little thing before we go. This is you on Kimberly Guilfoyle's show a couple years back. Just a quick little thing.

[Ashley St. Clair]

So keep up the great work. Also just want to be able to give a shout out, tell everyone where they can follow you, where they can go for more information and to get more of these great stories directly from you. The only social media platform I have is the only social media platform that supports free speech and that's X.

[Interviewer/Host]

I like noticed the conviction in this appearance in support of X. It sounds the same as the conviction you have right now. Talking about how dangerous X is. And just before we go, want to give you one more chance to make your case of this was a year or two ago you're on this show speaking with such conviction X is the bastion of free speech and now you're saying it's a danger to humanity. Like help us understand why we should believe that you're sincere and what caused you to change so abruptly.

[Ashley St. Clair]

Well, I don't think anyone should confuse being media trained with having conviction. And that's something everyone kind of falls prey to, right? Just because someone sounds good and they say the right words that you believe them. I'm sure there's someone like that for each of you in this room who sounds really good and knows how to speak to the media but is full of shit. And that was me at that moment. And again, as I've said, you don't have to believe me.

[Interviewer/Host]

So you didn't believe it then?

[Ashley St. Clair]

I'm here for you to believe me. I don't come here for this humiliation ritual for you to believe me. You can read the court filings yourself. That's where the facts lie. I'm not here for you to believe me. I'm here to speak out and, and talk about for the first time my experience. Because what I was doing there was being a mouthpiece for other people and for corporations and for maga and you didn't know a damn thing about me. And now I'm telling you my experience and the only thing I'm speaking to right now is my experience. Instead of speaking for other people and speaking to on behalf of communities that I really hurt. The only thing I'm doing right now is talking about my experience and I'm not selling you anything. I was selling you X there. What am I selling you here? Being embarrassed by your slideshow. What did I sell you? I was selling something there.

[Interviewer/Host]

Thanks, Ashley.

[Ashley St. Clair]

You're welcome.

[Interviewer/Host]

I'm going to read the credits of the show before we go. Thanks to everyone for being here today and for listening to Question Everything. Special thanks to Scott Newman Kathleen Ottinger, Julie DiNicola and the rest of the on air team as well as to Lolo House for hosting us. Rate and review our show Share it with a friend. You in the audience too. If you've not subscribed, subscribe to Question Everything. Share it with somebody Today's show is produced by Sam Egan, edited by Neil Drumming and our Managing Editor, Managing Editor Kevin Sullivan. Robin Semion and I are the executive producers of the show. Our team also includes producer Zach St. Louis, contributing editors Neil Drumming and Jen Kinney, along with Associate Producer Kevin Shepard. This episode was fact checked by Marisa Robertson, texter, mixing and sound design by Matt Tierney. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Our PowerPoint presentation was put together by Afen Abroad and the team at Moonshine Studio, Inc. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Teja Lajimera, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrell. We'll see you next Thursday. Thanks everybody.

[Brian Reed]

Brian here again in the studio after

[Interviewer/Host]

the fact so after I read the

[Brian Reed]

credits in front of the crowd with Ashley sitting next to me, we walked backstage and she laid into me in front of my producer and in front of a reporter who was there profiling her for Wired. She said it was slimy and dishonest

[Interviewer/Host]

that I asked her about her past

[Brian Reed]

tweets and videos and put them in a slideshow show. She said I'd told her the interview would be about the Grok deepfakes and her lawsuit against Elon Musk's company. The next day she emailed me demanding that we not release the interview and asking to speak to our lawyers. She wrote I agreed to participate based on representations that the discussion would concern my litigation against x xai section 230 intimate sexual images generated of me and related reporting relevant to those issues. However, the discussion centered on a pre prepared slideshow regarding old tweets and matters that were not disclosed to me before my participation. Ashley's right that my initial pitch to her was to talk about the deepfakes and her case, and as you heard, we did talk a lot about that. But in the weeks leading up to the event, she continued to go on TikTok and various podcasts to speak about her time in Maga and it'd be weird if I didn't ask her about that. I texted Ashley beforehand to see if there was anything she couldn't talk about for legal reasons and she told me I should prepare as if there was nothing off limits that she was used to pivoting when needed. And the day of the event, I told her I was going to end the conversation by asking about her time in maga. My editors and producers and I reviewed the interview, discussed Ashley's concerns, and determined it was not only fair to share it with the wider public as planned, but important. I told Ashley this and arranged a call for her with our lawyer, but she never got on the phone with him. I also gave Ashley the opportunity to add any further comment for us to include in the episode, but she didn't take me up on that. Then in an email on Tuesday, she said she'd only been trying to hold the release of the interview. She said the notion that she was trying to stop it entirely is, quote, ridiculous and untrue. Regarding Elon Musk and Xai, we reached out to them for comment. We couldn't independently verify various personal texts or interactions Ashley had with Musk, so we asked if he or his company wanted to respond, but they didn't reply. We're also listing a few other notes from our fact check about this live conversation in the show. Notes as always, please let me know what you think of this interview and of our decision to run it. We're on [e-mail] we're going to release

[Interviewer/Host]

the full video of the interview there, so you can check that out and

[Brian Reed]

also find us on our new Instagram page at Question Everything podcast, where we'll be sharing highlights of the interview as well. Thanks so much.