Home Secretary Jess Phillips said the “misinformation” spread by Elon Musk about gang grooming in the UK and the government's response “threatened” her life.
Phillips has come under sustained attack from the tech billionaire, who has called her an “evil witch” and a “genocide rapist” while demanding her imprisonment.
Britain has been rocked in recent days by a row over the handling of historic grooming cases involving the sexual exploitation of girls by gangs of mainly British-Pakistani men after Musk called for a new national inquiry into the scandal.
Musk's outbursts against Phillips, who holds a security post in the UK government, began after it emerged she had rejected Oldham Council's request for the Home Office to carry out a Whitehall-led investigation into the Greater Manchester grooming scandal.
The Home Office instead urged the local authority to carry out its own review, citing precedents for investigations in other towns affected by gang-rapes, including Telford and Rotherham, while highlighting a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation that ended in 2022.
On Tuesday, Phillips told the BBC that threats to her own life had increased since Musk's volleys against her on his social media platform X, describing the situation as “very tiring” but adding: “I'm no stranger to people who don't do that. you know what they're talking about when they try to silence women like me.'
But she added that her treatment at the hands of Musk was “nothing” compared to the experiences of abuse victims.
Phillips told Sky News that Musk, who owns SpaceX, should “make sure he gets to Mars” and expressed her anger at political opponents, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who pushed for a national investigation into gangs when Musk raised same request.
Musk was contacted for comment.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer issued a staunch defense of Phillips on Monday, paying tribute to her record in defending female victims of violence and abuse.
Phillips' comments came after shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick admitted the Conservatives could have “done more” to crack down on sex abuse gangs when they were in government.
Jenrick defended the previous Tory administration's record but told the BBC: “We could have done more, should we be doing more now? Yes, absolutely – we have to root it out.”
He said the review by Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired the seven-year national inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales, which was reported in 2022, only looked at gang rapes in six cities, but added they could be operating as far back as 50.
Jenrick also defended his party's criticism of the Labor government's decision not to launch a Whitehall-led inquiry into the Oldham scandal.
Attacked over the last Tory government's refusal to launch an investigation into gang-rapes in Oldham, he said the previous request had come from “a small number of councillors”, while the recent request was from the local authority itself.
Jenrick, who ran unsuccessfully for the Tory leadership last week, last week defended his controversial comments that the mass migration of people to the UK from “alien cultures” with “medieval attitudes towards women” had contributed to the scandal.
He said he would not “disguise” or “sanitize” his language so as not to cause offence, and pointed to evidence that fear of being labeled a racist had contributed to authorities not cracking down on the gangs, which included mainly men of Pakistani origin.
Starmer accused Tory politicians of “it amplifies what the far right says” about the sexual exploitation of children after she “did not act for 14 long years”.
Jay said on Tuesday that the issue had been “politicized” and warned that a new investigation could delay the implementation of her review's recommendations.
She criticized people for “getting bogged down in an argument” over the issue in a “very uninformed way”.
Jay previously criticized the former Conservative government for failing to implement 20 key recommendations in its 2022 report, which warned of “endemic” abuse across society.
