Daily Mail dominated by Elon’s baby mama

Rumors of a romantic entanglement between the Texas-based conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair and Elon Musk have been buzzing around MAGA circles for some time. Yet St. Clair, a former Turning Point USA ambassador and Babylon Bee staffer, decided to go public with a Valentine’s Day statement on, where else, X, the website her child’s father owns.

St. Clair wrote that she had not previously disclosed her infant’s parentage “to protect our child’s privacy and safety, but in recent days it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.” One atypical aspect of St. Clair’s plea to be left alone: the inclusion of an email address for crisis PR guru Brian Glicklich. “The first advisor that Ashley sought on this was Elon and Elon’s people but they chose not to make themselves available,” Glicklich told Cockburn. “She needed professional communications assistance and that’s where I came in.”

Cue banging of heads on keyboards at the Daily Mail, the British mid-market tabloid, whose reporter Josh Boswell had been pursuing the St. Clair-Musk story, Cockburn can confirm. To make matters worse, St. Clair then popped up in rival tabloid the New York Post a day later to offer more of her side of the story. 

“Ashley has wanted to raise her children privately and she cooperated with Elon and Elon’s people about how she managed that privacy,” Glicklich said. “It had been increasingly clear that a tabloid publication was preparing a story on this. They sent a reporter to physically stalk Ashley, her neighbors and her family members, asking intrusive questions — putting her in genuine fear.”

St. Clair’s rep stressed that his client went public only as a last resort. “Ashley went to Elon and Elon’s people to say that privacy was no longer going to be an option, wanting to do media cooperatively with them,” Glicklich said. “She reached out to them many many times, as did I — they have refused all communications.” He added that the Valentine’s Day timing of her post was “a coincidence based on the tempo of how she was being chased around — it was our opinion that they were hours away from publishing.”

The triple-bylined Post exclusive comes with a photo shoot in the Financial District apartment St. Clair says Musk provided for her — including photos of the conservative influencer barefoot on the windowsill and sitting at a table before a wrongly set-up chessboard. (For what it’s worth, Glicklich says the online chatter about the barefoot photograph is “a ridiculous thing to be worrying about.”) The Mail then had to rewrite the Post story that they had so diligently been working on. DailyMail.com did not respond to a request for comment.

St. Clair’s decision to tell all to the Post represents an amusing volte-face: just weeks ago, she was branding their hotshot political reporter Jon Levine an “idiot & hack” over his phone interview with Trump regarding the H-1B visa issue — ie, the Twixtmas rift between Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the tech right on the one hand and Steve Bannon and “MAGA” on the other. A few weeks later, Levine was interviewing her. The Post newshound declined to comment for this story.

The X CEO has yet to respond publicly to St. Clair’s revelations — with the exception of writing “Whoa” under one of the many posts fellow right-wing influencer and Kanye West representative Milo Yiannopoulos has made about St. Clair after her statement.

“Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded,” St. Clair wrote under Musk’s reply, in a since deleted tweet. “When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?”

“If Ashley’s going to have to tell this story, she wants it told accurately,” Glicklich told Cockburn, regarding her decision to speak to the Post.

Two of Musk’s thirteen (to date) children have found themselves in the public eye of late. There’s Musk’s trans daughter Vivian, who regularly criticizes her estranged father on rival social media app Threads. There’s X, Musk’s child with his most recent ex-wife Grimes, who is being shown around events at the White House and Mar-a-Lago. Are X’s appearances are an adorable testament to the importance of public fatherhood? Or a cheap and exploitative political stunt? The answer shouldn’t depend on your politics. Yet it probably does.