The following includes both facts about Ashley’s rise to fame and my opinion/analysis on what she’s been saying. IDK her, IDK what’s true, I just have ADHD, a lot of free time, and no one to talk to about this because the people I know in real life aren’t this in the weeds.

If your screentime isn’t >8 hours like mine, you’re probably just starting to hear about someone named Ashley St. Clair and her spilling the tea from her time as Elon Musk’s “girlfriend”. Let me bring you up to speed:

Ashley St. Clair is 27-year old a former MAGA influencer who had a baby with Elon Musk in 2024 (she already had a baby from a previous relationship). She was one of the many pretty young women used by the MAGA media machine, amassing over 1 million followers on Twitter (now known by X and famously owned by Elon Musk). Also a Turning Point USA ambassador for several years (you know, Charlie Kirk’s company?), she would spout the same toxic and harmful rhetoric that you’re familiar with: anti-trans, anti-choice, anti-”liberal” B.S. She’s particularly “famous” to the right wing for her anti-trans views, having written a children’s book in 2021 titled Elephants are Not Birds whose point was to explain to children that “boys are not girls.” YIKES.

Fast-forward a few years, Ashley is now sharing her experiences, and trying to make amends for her wrongdoings, on social media. She’s posting the majority of her GRWM (get ready with me) style videos on Tiktok, but sharing screenshots of her texts with Elon on her IG stories. And it’s not the fact that she’s Ashley St. Clair that’s causing her to pick up virality and literal press - it’s what’s she’s sharing.

Based on my research, it looks like the first time she really shared secrets about the inner workings of the US government on March 31st - sharing her experience with a Floridian Republican Congressman who repeatedly hit on her while being married and having a girlfriend (who BTW filed a restraining order against him). Okay, that’s shocking for those of you normies who aren’t listening to political podcasts for hours on end every day, but to me, that’s just another Tuesday.

She started to hit her stride on April 8th, telling her experience battling Alex Jones - you know the right-wing conspiracy theorist who claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was fake and lost to the parents of the child victims in court? - who was telling lies about Ashley trying to “trans” her 1-year old baby. HUH? She literally have a video of her on the phone with Alex Jones where he said he’d issue an apology that never came. This is a theme with her, the girl has receipts.

Since then, she’s spoken about her lawsuit against xAI because Grok was generating AI pictures of her undressed, the countersuit xAI launched against her to squash her lawsuit, the ins and outs of MAGA women who frequent Mar-a-lago, her first MAGA boyfriend, and her journey deconstructing her MAGA ideology and how she ended up there in the first place. But what’s really making headlines is her describing her relationship with Elon Musk, and implicating that he tampered with the 2024 Presidential Election.

The tl;dr is when Elon bought Twitter, he started obsessing over MAGA influencer accounts, slid into her DMs when she was a 23-year old single mom who had recently been cancelled and fired by Turning Point USA. She was working at The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian satirical news website that also happens to be working on setting up an interview with Elon. They meet, he invites her to his plane, flies her to Rhode Island, they do the thing, and she heads back to New York. He eventually asks her if she wants to have a baby with him, he promises to take care of her and the child for life, and in her words, she was a “stained” single mom who never had a stable paycheck before, so she agreed to have his child.

Let’s also remember that tech bros were historically pretending to be left-leaning until recent history. So back when Elon bought Twitter in Oct 2022, he had a lot of learning to do about the conservative world he was hitching his wagon to. Ashley says she helped him get up to speed on the MAGA world a lot, telling him how it all works, who’s important, etc. He trusted her so much he would share loads of highly confidential information to her, including voter data that he was working on ahead of the 2024 election. She even gave him the “dark MAGA” hat that he was wearing at all the Trump campaign rallies. Like, what even is life rn?

This is the video you’re all waiting for: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTB8ELqGA. Fast forward to around 3:17 if you want to skip passed her make up tips and journey through deconstructing the lies she grew up to believe. To summarize, in October 2024, Elon tells Ashley “he is ready to release his anomaly in the matrix,” with his “10,000 lasers in space” (which is what he calls his Starlink satellites). She keeps responding and he says, “this is not a piece on the chessboard they’ll see coming,” and she tells him to stop talking so she doesn’t get deposed. On election night, she was at Mar-a-largo, along with Elon, who texted her that he “knew hours ago” that Trump won the election after he left the event early.

I don’t believe she is. However, I can understand the hesitation. We’re trained to dismiss women like her - young, conventionally pretty, single mom twice over, who made a name for herself shitposting and memeing about real-life issues that affect real-life people. Clearly, she’s manipulated people to get what she wants in the past, how can we say she’s not doing that now.

If you really think about it for more than 2 seconds, you have to ask yourself why would she do this? What is she gaining from this? A couple thousand Tiktok followers? Is that worth the exposure to the entire lawyer army of the world’s richest man (who is already suing her btw)? She’s been open about the warnings and comms she’s been getting from lawyers threatening her to stop talking, but she also doesn’t appear to have an NDA, though she’s intimately familiar with the use of NDAs in these elite circles.

Also, once I found out she was homeschooled in high school, recruited by Young Republicans in college, only to drop out to be a MAGA influencer, all of this started to make more sense to me. Even in her own words, she was a deeply hurt and misguided person and that’s what drove her to gain internet and IRL attention at the time. But since she took a break from the internet over the last year, she’s just trying to tell her truth, and “there would be better ways for [her] to get attention than making herself a target to literally the most powerful people in the world, from the White House to Elon Musk.” She appears to be fiercely smart, someone who is actually doing the work to change herself and right her wrongs (I heard her say on a podcast that she has removed her name from the anti-trans children’s book and repeatedly apologizes), and a deeply loyal mom trying to protect her kids (scroll to the third screenshot of her IG stories here).

She has claimed to have given all the texts, documents, testimony, aka RECEIPTS to trusted individuals for her own safety and to try to make something happen with that information. She’s also back in school (remember she dropped out of college) so she can go to law school and help people in that way. And remember, she’s not just spilling tea on Elon, but the whole MAGA and conservative establishment (including their coordinated talk tracks and weird interpersonal issues).

Do I trust her? Not yet. I believe what she’s saying is true, but we don’t know anything really about these people we see on the internet (including Elon, Trump, etc). If she is trustworthy remains to be seen - I think this will come in time. I will say I like to think I’m a good judge of character, and while I don’t believe many people can or will change, it seems like she’s one of the rare few who do.

We’ll see how this plays out. While I wish anyone (BUELLER???) in Congress would take this seriously, the fact that Kamala Harris and her team didn’t call for an investigation or recount into the 2024 election really took the wind out of my sails. I will keep listening to my daily political news podcasts, scrolling on Tiktok, and keeping you informed of any major changes in the landscape. If you made it this far, sorry for the kinda depressing reminder that we live in America, so here’s a cute dog:

Please forward to a friend who would enjoy the tea about the world’s richest man, one of his many baby mamas, and a transformation story for the ages. If this was forwarded to you, don’t forget to subscribe! prettybusy is a blog for multi-passionate millennials who enjoy nuance and cultural commentary. I send out a cultural digest, Culture over Coffee, on the weekends, and intersperse essays about topics spanning news, entertainment, race, tech, wellness, and whatever else affects us millennial women.