Elon Musk, the Most Powerful Troll on Earth, Targets the U.K.

Michelle Goldberg

Over a decade ago, a horrific sex trafficking scandal rocked Britain. Starting in the late 1990s, thousands of mostly white girls in the postindustrial north of England, many from struggling families, were groomed by networks of mostly Pakistani men, who often professed to be their boyfriends before trapping them in a hell of repeated rape and prostitution. Several girls were murdered.

The mass abuse went on for years as those who tried to sound the alarm — including Sara Rowbotham, a health worker in the town of Rochdale; a Manchester detective constable, Maggie Oliver; and a member of Parliament from West Yorkshire, Ann Cryer — were largely ignored.

Some of the official indifference was of the kind often faced by victims of abuse; in a 2017 documentary, Cryer described police officers saying that it seemed that the girls, many of whom were 12 or 13, were consenting. But given the ethnicities of the perpetrators and the victims, authorities were also terrified of inflaming racial tensions, leaving girls to be sacrificed to their own political cowardice.

The first journalist to expose the grooming gangs appears to be feminist Julie Bindel, writing in The Times of London in 2007. A few years later, investigative reporter Andrew Norfolk published an award-winning series about the scandal in the same paper. Since then, there have been several high-profile trials and scores of convictions, as well as official investigations at both the local and national level.

That doesn’t mean the problem is resolved; Alexis Jay, the academic who headed up a national inquiry into the abuse, has said that few of the recommendations in her comprehensive 2022 report have been carried out. But the crisis has been out in the open for some time, even if Elon Musk only recently decided to make it a cause célèbre.

If you’ve been on the social platform X in recent days, you might have the impression that there has been some major new development in this awful story. Musk, the platform’s owner, has been posting about it incessantly, smearing Jess Phillips, the Labour minister overseeing issues of violence against women and girls, as a “rape genocide apologist” and calling for her imprisonment. He’s also called for the jailing of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and urged Britain’s king to dissolve Parliament and call new elections, something the monarch cannot do.

As the world’s richest man and a quasi-official member of Donald Trump’s team, Musk has enormous influence, and his admirers in both the United States and Britain have taken up the cause. Kemi Badenoch, head of the Tories, is demanding a new national investigation, which her party easily could have undertaken when it was in power until last year. Starmer, in turn, was forced to address Musk’s claims Monday.

In this uproar, we’re seeing a particularly feral right-wing version of an old-fashioned Twitter mob, but with far higher stakes. Musk is using a genuine atrocity to pursue his campaigns against both Starmer, with whom he has a long-running feud over the regulation of social media, and against mass immigration. The visceral horror of the underlying story — especially to people who are only just discovering it — gives his demagogic attacks a sheen of righteousness. But much of what he’s saying about the current government’s culpability is either distorted or flatly untrue, part of his increasingly vigorous crusade against the world’s remaining liberal leaders.

The proximate cause of Musk’s ire is Phillips’ rejection of a request by the town of Oldham to open a national inquiry into the history of grooming and child sexual exploitation there. Phillips said the investigation should be commissioned locally, as those in the towns of Rotherham and Telford were. I have no idea whether this was the right decision, but it’s not a shocking one; as The Independent reported, the previous Tory government turned down Oldham’s request for the same reason. But to Musk and his followers, it’s proof that Phillips, a woman with a long feminist history, is engaged in a monstrous cover-up meant to protect Starmer, the country’s director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.

Starmer’s history on this issue is far from shameful. As The Financial Times reports, it was Starmer “who began the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gang” during his final year in the prosecutor’s office, “shortly after the scandal in the Greater Manchester town became the first to come to light.” Additionally, The Financial Times said, his office overhauled the way it “investigates sexual abuse to ensure more perpetrators are brought to justice,” making it easier to revisit old cases.

That doesn’t mean that Starmer’s record was impeccable. In 2009, prosecutors in his office dropped a case against a group of abusers in Rochdale despite having DNA evidence, insisting that the victim wouldn’t come across as credible. But two years later, with Starmer’s support, a new chief prosecutor for the North West England region, Nazir Afzal, reopened the case and secured the conviction of nine men. As Afzal said in 2022, “Keir was 100% behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past.” You’d never know from Musk’s calumnies that Starmer owned his mistakes and took steps to make them right.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Musk has been throwing his enthusiastic support behind a man who jeopardized convictions in another trafficking case brought by Afzal. In 2018, far-right anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson violated restrictions that a judge had put in place during the trials of a grooming gang from Huddersfield by confronting some of the defendants on Facebook Live. One of the jurors later mentioned Robinson during deliberations, nearly causing the case to collapse. Because of Robinson, wrote Afzal, “we had to fight to persuade the court to allow trial to continue. Those criminals came close to being freed and victims close to getting no justice.”

Robinson is in prison for contempt of court stemming from an unrelated libel case, and Musk has repeatedly demanded his release. When Nigel Farage, the head of the right-wing Reform UK party, tried to distance himself from the thuggish Robinson, Musk called for Farage’s replacement. In asserting himself as the most powerful troll on Earth, Musk is doing nothing to protect women or girls. Rather, he seems to be trying to show that the world is his plaything.

As I write this, his pinned post on X is a quiz asking whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” (“Yes” is winning.) Like so much of what he says, it’s a dumb but menacing joke. What a travesty that the world must take him seriously.