Conservative-influencer-turned-MAGA-defector Ashley St. Clair is pulling back the curtain on her unusual relationship with Elon Musk, telling audiences that things between the billionaire and the right-wing personality turned “weird” almost as soon as she became pregnant with his child.
In a string of recent interviews and TikTok videos, St. Clair — once a fixture in Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA orbit and the author of an anti-trans children’s book that catapulted her into right-wing stardom — has begun dismantling the public narrative around her time inside the MAGA machine. The most explosive revelations involve Musk himself, with whom she shares a son born in early 2025.
Speaking with Mehdi Hasan in an interview published on May 18, 2026, St. Clair described a relationship that started inside the upper echelons of Trump-world power and curdled almost immediately after she revealed she was pregnant. Her dynamic with Musk, she said, shifted in ways that left her isolated — and ultimately targeted by some of the same allies she once helped elevate.
From Turning Point Star to MAGA Defector
St. Clair spent years building a brand inside the conservative ecosystem, working for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and amplifying culture-war rhetoric across platforms. Her anti-trans children’s book gave her national reach, and she was quickly welcomed into the inner sanctum of right-wing media and activism.
That proximity to power, she has acknowledged, only intensified once she began dating Musk. But the relationship’s collapse — combined with what she describes as an escalating campaign of intimidation — has pushed her to renounce many of the positions that defined her career, including her views on trans rights, LGBTQ issues, healthcare, and immigration.
The breaking point, she has said, came after Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk’s company xAI, began flooding the internet with nonconsensual deepfake content undressing her — along with countless other women and children. St. Clair has since filed a lawsuit against xAI over the sexually explicit deepfakes, and she has become one of the loudest voices warning against unchecked AI development.
Inside the Coordinated Group Chats
Beyond her personal saga with Musk, St. Clair is now exposing what she describes as a tightly coordinated messaging operation that explains why right-wing influencers so often post identical pro-Trump and pro-Musk talking points within minutes of each other.
According to St. Clair, MAGA influencers operate inside group chats that frequently include Trump administration officials and even President Trump’s adult children. “There’s multiple chats they operate in,” she told Hasan, describing a behind-the-scenes architecture that turns the online right into a synchronized broadcast network.
She also alleged that during her time inside the movement, she was “offered a hefty sum of money to promote Ric Grenell for secretary of state.” Grenell, a former ambassador and Trump ally, could not immediately be reached for comment on the allegation.
Since shifting her public posture, St. Clair says, she has been pressured relentlessly to stay quiet. She claims she has turned down enough hush money to rival “the GDP of a small nation,” a figure she says reflects how desperate certain factions are to keep her from speaking publicly about what she witnessed.
Threats, Targeting, and a Custody Battle in Public
St. Clair says she and her family have received threats since her break with MAGA, and she has been targeted by members of the Trump administration, fellow right-wing influencers, and Musk himself. The campaign, she argues, is designed to discredit her before she can finish telling her story.
She first opened up about her political awakening in a 48-minute conversation on Taylor Lorenz’s Power User podcast episode released Jan. 14, 2026, walking through how she got her start in conservative influencing, what she calls the differences between MAGA 1.0 and MAGA 2.0, and the right-wing internet pipeline that elevated her in the first place.
In that conversation, St. Clair traced her shift to a combination of personal experiences with Musk, the trauma of being deepfaked by his company’s AI, and a slow realization that the movement she had championed bore little resemblance to the principles she thought it stood for.
A Question of Sincerity
Skeptics — including many of her former allies — have questioned whether St. Clair’s conversion is genuine or whether she is simply rebranding for a new, more liberal audience. St. Clair has acknowledged the criticism, conceding that ex-MAGA personalities have a credibility problem to overcome.
But she insists her motivation is not financial. With money on the table to keep quiet and threats arriving regularly, she argues, the simplest path would have been to take the deal. Instead, she has chosen TikTok and long-form interviews — and a continuing fight with one of the most powerful men in President Trump’s orbit.