SpaceX founder and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has now found himself the target of a defamation lawsuit launched by a certain critic of his, Courthouse News Service reports.
The plaintiff, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan named Randeep Hothi, sued Musk in the Alameda County Superior Court on Tuesday, 4 August, though the complaint was apparently not made public until Friday, 7 August.
According to the media outlet, Hothi is the creator of a Twitter account where he "fact-checked Musk and Telsa’s published claims regarding the electric vehicle manufacturer’s automation, technology and production processes".
In April 2019, Hothi, while driving, encountered a Tesla-owned vehicle fitted with a roof-mounted camera and, having surmised that it was recording "audio, video and/or other data", proceeded to follow and observe it, photographing the vehicle and posting the photos on Twitter.
"At no point did Hothi either drive recklessly or endanger the safety of the occupants of the Tesla vehicle," the complaint states.
Mere days after that encounter, however, Tesla filed a civil restraining order against Hothi, "falsely" accusing him of "trespassing, stalking, harassing and endangering Tesla employees, including an allegation that Hothi dangerously swerved his car towards the Tesla vehicle during the aforementioned incident.
While the harassment case was dropped by Tesla after the judge ordered the company to “produce video evidence documenting Hothi’s reckless driving", Musk later "doubled down" on his accusations against the student while "exchanging emails last year with Aaron Greenspan, the owner of the litigation publishing website PlainSite.org," the media outlet notes.
"Musk wrote ‘as for the people you mention below, they have actively harassed, and in the case of Hothi, almost killed Tesla employees. What was a sideswipe when Hothi hit one of our people could easily have been a death with 6 inches of difference," says the complaint.
As Sperlein told the media outlet, Musk’s accusations against Hothi have apparently resulted in "a lot of hate mail", with the attorney saying that "some people contacted his thesis adviser at the University of Michigan saying he was attempting to murder people", while others engaged in “troubling, racist chatter".
The plaintiff seeks general, special and punitive damages, the media outlet adds.