Elon Musk says Ghislaine Maxwell photobombed him when confronted with photo from 2014 Vanity Fair party
Elon Musk was once again forced to distance himself from the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell storm, explaining that a 2014 photo of him with the Epstein's one-time girlfriend at a Vanity Fair party was due to her photobombing him. Musk took to Twitter to respond to a comment about a photo of himself and Maxwell smiling for a photo.
"Don't know Ghislaine at all," he declared in the late Thursday tweet. "She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party several years ago. Real question is why VF invited her in the first place."
Maxwell, Epstein's former girlfriend who procured young girls for him, was arrested on sex trafficking and perjury charges.
Musk has always denied knowing Epstein or Maxwell outright. The SpaceX founder and CEO even released a statement last year against rumors that he had introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg in 2015. "I don't recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don't know the guy well enough to do so, Epstein is obviously a creep and Zuckerberg is not a friend of mine," he said in a statement. "Several years ago, I was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon with Talulah [Riley], as she was curious about meeting this strange person for a novel she was writing. We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art. He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined."
"Elon never introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg and does not know either person well enough to do so," a spokesperson for Musk added in an emailed statement. "They simply happened to be guests at a neuroscience dinner organized by Reid Hoffman."
There is renewed hope for Epstein's victims in the wake of Maxwell's dramatic arrest on sex-trafficking charges. They are hoping the prosecutors will be able to unravel a network of rich and powerful associates complicit in the abuse.
FBI spokesman Marty Feely revealed that Ghislaine was taken into custody around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday and charged with sex trafficking minors for late financier Jeffrey Epstein. She helped the pedophile financier groom girls as young as 14 for sex between 1994 and 1997, prosecutors have alleged. Meanwhile, Prince Andrew has denied he engaged in sexual activity with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who was allegedly groomed by Epstein and Maxwell. According to Giuffre, she was forced to have sex three times with the Duke of York when she was still a minor.
This comes after shortly after it emerged that Maxwell went to "extreme lengths" in an attempt to stay under the radar while she was in hiding over the past year ever since Epstein's arrest. Maxwell, widely believed to be an Epstein accomplice, was arrested at a home worth around $1million in New Hampshire on child sex trafficking ring-related charges. Prosecutors, in court documents on Thursday, July 2, also stated that Maxwell bought the million-dollar house she was arrested in with cash in December and paid for it through an LLC to avoid detection. Before buying the property, she moved her location at least twice in New England. The 58-year-old was last seen in public at an In-N-Out Burger in Los Angeles in August 2019, nearly ten days before Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan prison. Maxwell, during this period, also changed her phone number and email address.