Twitter CEO Elon Musk has opened up about his involvement in a conspiracy theory about the home invasion of former speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, in which Mr. Pelosi was brutally attacked.
But he did so indirectly, in a Twitter response to a woman best known for accusing former President Bill Clinton of rape.
Musk has long been targeted by journalists – most notably MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan – for his promotion of a plot spread by right-wing commentators to attack Mr. Pelosi by a man who broke into his home.
The conspiracy claimed that the attack was not motivated by Ms. Pelosi’s status as one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, but rather the result of an imagined love quarrel between her husband and a man who was arrested following the incident.
This theory was debunked by statements by the suspect himself to the police shortly after the incident, but Musk left them unamended.
“There is a tiny possibility that this story could be more than meets the eye,” he tweeted last fall, referring to a story in a small California news outlet that was accused of spreading misinformation.
Now, after posting body camera footage of the attack, Musk has apologized, albeit hesitantly. In a reply to Juanita Broaddrick, the Clinton accuser who later became a darling of the far right, he wrote: “Nevertheless, I apologize.”
Mr. Musk’s apology came in response to a tweet by Ms. Broaddrick that read: “The idiots on the left want @elonmusk to apologize to Pelosis,” given that “[i]It’s still a dubious and strange situation between two men in underwear.”
Even with the release of the body camera footage now circulating widely on many media platforms, Ms. Broaddrick and others continue to spread lies about the attack.
Video of the incident clearly shows the attacker, identified as David DePape, is fully clothed and wearing what appears to be a raincoat – he never appears in his underwear, as Ms. Broaddrick claimed, before he can be seen brutally beating the elderly people. Mr Pelosi.
Twitter representatives did not immediately respond to a request from Independent as to whether Mr. Musk addressed Pelosi personally — or whether his “apology” went beyond an answer to an unrelated person.
