In a court deposition released on Monday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he once worried that British cave diver Vernon Unsworth might be “another Jeffrey Epstein.” The deposition came out as Musk and his lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the defamation case Unsworth brought against Musk for previous comments calling him a “pedo guy.”
The dispute started last summer, when Unsworth criticized Musk in a television interview for involving himself in efforts to save a Thai soccer team that was trapped in a flooded and complex cave system.
Reacting to that, Musk called Unsworth “sus” (suspicious) and a “pedo guy” on Twitter, and later characterized the spelunker as a “child rapist” in an e-mail to a Buzzfeed reporter.
In Monday’s filings of the Aug. 22 testimony, Musk reveals that his representatives launched an investigation into Unsworth, and Musk was concerned with what the investigator found.
Specifically, Musk testified that he sent e-mails to Buzzfeed due to a concern over what he heard about Unsworth. He said, in the deposition:
“And I was like, well, what if this is a real situation? What if what we have here is another Jeffrey Epstein. We should, you know — I have this — I am told this information. I don’t know if it is true. But what if we have another Jeffrey Epstein on our hands? And what if he uses whatever celebrity he gains from this cave rescue to shield his bad deeds? This would be terrible.” – READ MORE