“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” said Vivian Jenna Wilson, 20
Elon Musk‘s 20-year-old daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, a transgender woman, is speaking out after he said she was “killed by the woke mind virus.”
Musk, 53, made his comment during a sitdown with psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson that was streamed on his platform X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, July 22.
The Tesla CEO alleged that he was “tricked” into allowing Wilson to undergo transgender-related medical treatment for her when she was 16, adding, “I lost my son, essentially. They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason they call it ‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead.”
Wilson, who legally filed to change her name and gender in 2022 at age 18, denied Musk’s claim in a Thursday, July 25, interview with NBC News, referring to it as a “lie.”
“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” she said. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”
Wilson, who told the outlet that she first came out as gay in eighth grade, said that Musk “knew the full side effects” of her medical treatment, which she says involved puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy.
Noting that the two have not spoken in about four years, she looked back at her childhood as one where “he was there, I want to say, maybe 10% of the time.”
“That’s generous. He had half custody, and he fully was not there. It was just a fact of life at the time, so I don’t think I realized just how abnormal of an experience it was,” she said.
Wilson is one of six children Musk shares with his ex-wife Justine Wilson. The SpaceX founder also shares three children with singer Grimes and three other kids with Shivon Zilis.
On Threads, Wilson responded to a tweet in which Musk described her as “gay and slightly autistic” and claimed that she would pick out clothes from him to wear about age 4 and say it was “fabulous.”
Wilson said Musk’s recollection was “entirely fake.”
“This entire thing is completely made up and there’s a reason for this. He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there, and in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness,” she wrote as part of a lengthy response.
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“Obviously he can’t say that, so I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype f*g-ing along to use at his discretion. I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general,” she added.
Musk did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s emailed request for comment.
