Ashley St. Clair woke up Thursday to find her X account gutted.
Her verified checkmark—gone. Her Premium privileges—revoked. Her creator monetization—frozen.
“they took my checkmark and canceled my twitter premium lmao,” she posted, sharing a screenshot of the damage. “was it something i said.”
It probably was. She had gone public about Grok—the AI chatbot built into Musk’s platform—generating sexualized images of her without consent. Some were based on photos from when she was 14. She told the bot to stop. It didn’t. She threatened legal action.
Then her account got stripped.
When another user asked Grok why St. Clair had been penalized, the bot cited “potential terms violations, including her public accusations against Grok for generating inappropriate images.”
She had reported abuse. The platform called that the problem.
St. Clair, a conservative commentator, is also the mother of one of Musk’s children. She announced last February that Musk was the father of her son, born in September 2024. She later filed for sole custody. In March, she accused him of retaliating financially after the suit.
Now she’s accusing his company of the same playbook—punishing her for pushing back.
“hey guys im starting to think the $44 billion wasn’t for free speech,” she wrote Thursday.
The Grok controversy began in late December, when Musk rolled out a feature allowing users to edit any image on the platform using AI prompts. No permissions required. Within days, users discovered they could prompt the bot to undress women and children, generating sexualized images without consent.
St. Clair says she was targeted repeatedly. She told Fortune she felt “disgusted and violated.” In one image, her toddler’s backpack was visible in the background—the same bag her son carries to school every day.
She tagged Grok directly and told it she didn’t consent. The bot acknowledged her request, then kept generating more. “And what ensued,” she told Fortune, “was countless more.”
Musk hasn’t spoken to her about it. She told NBC News she has “zero desire” to reach out to him directly. “I don’t think that would be right for me to handle this with resources not available to the countless other women and children this has been happening to,” she said.
Musk’s public engagement with the controversy has been limited to laugh-cry emojis on some posts and a statement that users who create “illegal content” with Grok will face consequences. X’s media team offered Reuters a two-word auto-reply when asked for comment: “Legacy Media Lies.”
In interviews with Fortune, St. Clair called X “the most dangerous company in the world right now.” She framed the issue as larger than herself—a system that punishes women for existing publicly online.
“When you are exiling women from the public dialog because they can’t operate in it without being abused,” she said, “you are disproportionately excluding women from AI.”
Regulators have begun responding. The UK’s Ofcom made urgent contact with xAI. The European Commission called the content “illegal” and “disgusting.” Congress passed the Take It Down Act last May, requiring platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate images within 48 hours.
St. Clair has made requests. She’s still waiting. She says she’s considering legal action.
xAI has not responded to requests for comment.
She spoke out about what Grok did to her.
Then she lost her checkmark, her Premium status, and her income.
