Home Office Secretary Jess Phillips said the “misinformation” spread by Elon Musk about UK groom groups and the government’s response “threatened” her life.
Phillips has come under sustained attack from the tech billionaire, who has labeled her a “wicked witch” and a “genocide-rape apologist” while calling for her to be jailed.
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 the role of British government protector, began after it emerged she had rejected Oldham council’s request for the Home Office to carry out a Whitehall-led inquiry into the groom scandal in the city of Manchester.
Instead, the Home Office called on local authorities to undertake their own review, citing precedents for investigations in other towns affected by gang-rapes, including Telford and Rotherham, and highlighting a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation that concluded in 2022.
On Tuesday, Phillips told the BBC that threats to her own life had increased since Musk’s salvos against her on his social media platform X, describing the situation as “very tiring”, but added: “I’m no stranger to people who don’t know what I’m talking about they speak trying to silence women like me.”
However, she added that her treatment at the hands of Musk was “nothing” compared to the experience of abuse victims.
Phillips told Sky News that Musk, who owns SpaceX, should “get on with getting to Mars” and expressed her anger at political opponents, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who pushed for a national gang inquiry after she Musk made the same request.
Musk has been approached for comment.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer issued a strong defense of Phillips on Monday, paying tribute to her career in defending women victims of violence and abuse.
Phillips’ comments came after shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick admitted the Conservatives could have “done more” to crack down on sex-abuse gangs when they were in government.
Jenrick defended the record of the previous Tory administration, but told the BBC: “Could we have done more, should we be doing more now? Yes, absolutely – we have to eradicate it.”
He said the review by Professor Alexis Jay, who chaired a seven-year national inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales which was published in 2022, only looked at gang-rapes in six cities, but added they may have operated in as many 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.
Challenged by the last Tory government’s refusal to launch an inquiry into gang-rapes in Oldham, he said the previous request had come from “a small number of councillors”, while the recent request was made by the local authority itself.
Jenrick, who ran unsuccessfully for the Tory leadership last year, defended his controversial comments last week that the mass migration of people into the UK from “foreign cultures” with “medieval attitudes towards women” had contributed to the scandal.
He said he would not “disguise” or “sanitize” his language to avoid causing offence, pointing to evidence that fear of being labeled racist had contributed to authorities failing to crack down on the gangs, which mainly included men of Pakistani origin.
Starmer accused Conservative politicians of “amplifying what the far right is saying” about the sexual exploitation of children, after he did not act for “full 14 years”.
Jay said on Tuesday that there had been a “politicisation” of the issue and warned that a new inquiry could delay the implementation of her review’s recommendations.
She criticized people for “entering into the debate” on the issue “in a very uninformed way”.
Jay previously criticized the former Conservative government for failing to implement the top 20 recommendations in its 2022 report, which warned of “endemic” abuse in society.
