How Elon Musk put a decades-old UK sex abuse scandal back on agenda

London: It began on New Year’s Eve. Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, logged onto the platform and began posting for the first time about so-called British-Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK.

Within days, he’d whipped up an international firestorm of rage and fury against the British government, the prime minister and the mainstream media.

Elon Musk’s posts have cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

In a series of vitriolic posts to his 211 million followers, the tech mogul has falsely accused Sir Keir Starmer and other Labour MPs of enabling Britain’s grooming gangs. The term refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sex abuse cases in which thousands of girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities.

Musk saved his most direct criticism for Starmer, who he accused of being “complicit in the rape of Britain” during his tenure as director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.

“I just couldn’t believe that the whole thing had blown up out of nowhere,” says Andrew Norfolk, the journalist for The Times newspaper who broke the story in 2011 and covered the crisis for years.

“It just seems that Elon Musk, whose relationship with the truth seems so loose and who seems to care so little about the accuracy of what he says, clicks his fingers, shoots his mouth off and the whole British establishment responds. I find it surprising that man wields that much power.”

Musk’s posts included multiple inaccuracies and treated a widely covered issue as if it had never been mentioned. Nevertheless, the posts have cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that troubled Britain and has long provoked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

What was the scandal?

A series of high-profile cases where groups of men – the majority of Pakistani descent – were convicted of sexually abusing and raping predominantly young white girls around the UK.

Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US President-elect Donald Trump, has claimed on X that “hundreds of thousands” of “little British girls” were targeted for gang rape and murder. A 2014 report into abuse in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham, led by Professor Alexis Jay, conservatively estimated that 1400 children had been targeted between 1997 and 2013. Some of them were as young as 11.

It tended to follow a similar pattern, with the girls groomed by young men in public places such as town centres and shopping malls; the gradual introduction of alcohol and other drugs; then a sexual relationship with one man, who demanded that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends.

A local government report found victims and parents who asked for help were mostly let down by the police and social services. Some police officers were found to have referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice”.

Hundreds of girls and young women fell victim to similar exploitation rings in Rochdale, Peterborough, Newcastle and Oxford. Up to a thousand girls were also alleged to have been drugged, raped, and beaten in Telford between the 1980s and the 2010s, leading to a national inquiry into child sexual abuse, which was also led by Jay.

Why is Musk suddenly so interested?

Musk, CEO of electric car giant Tesla, decided last July that the new British government was his nemesis after its response to the riots sparked by fatal stabbings in Southport. He said then that “civil war was inevitable” in Britain and called Starmer “TwoTierKeir”, a reference to the view in some quarters that the far-right was policed differently.

The grooming scandal had already been a recent hot topic on social media, triggered by a debate on whether the UK had succeeded in integrating Muslim communities, with the horrendous details revealed in the various rape cases over the years resurfacing and going viral.

Musk, who appeared to know little about the history of the case, then accused the Labour government of opposing an inquiry “because it will show that those in power were complicit in the cover-up” and blamed Starmer for failing to prosecute the perpetrators when he was director of public prosecutions. Starmer, who has accused Musk and others of spreading lies and misinformation, began the prosecutions of the Rochdale grooming gangs in 2013 and also changed the way the Crown Prosecution Service approaches child sexual abuse cases. More than 35 convictions were recorded while he was in the role.

Musk’s interest has also stemmed from his obsession with far-right agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court.

This has led to a falling out with Nigel Farage, a right-wing populist MP, who has tried to distance himself and his movement from Robinson.

Was there a cover-up?

Evidence of gangs operating in different towns and cities emerged slowly – often from court cases and then inquiries – and the pattern is often similar. Local police forces and social services have been repeatedly criticised for failing victims by not prioritising such crimes, either by refusing to believe the children, or blaming them.

Vulnerable children were considered to have brought their plight upon themselves, after being plied with gifts and attention by the perpetrators. As a result, many cases were either not investigated or not progressed to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Ann Cryer, the former Labour MP who first raised concerns, said she was shouted down as a racist in meetings and that local councils “were petrified of being called racist and so reverted to the default of political correctness”.

In Rochdale, two whistleblowers – former detective Maggie Oliver and former social worker Sara Rowbotham – repeatedly warned that agencies had turned a blind eye to what was happening despite them raising the alarm. Agencies have also been criticised for failing to act because they were concerned about appearing racist.

Should a government-led national inquiry be held?

Since the first cases of on-street grooming gangs began to be tried 15 years ago, multiple independent local inquiries have been conducted into how they were able to operate under the nose of the authorities. But their powers are significantly weaker than those of investigations that are set up by the UK government.

The Conservative Party now supports a further inquiry – despite having not even fully implemented the Jay inquiry’s recommendations while they were in government.

Some victims of the gangs in Oldham have said Labour should have spoken to survivors before deciding not to conduct a government-led inquiry.

Jay told the BBC on Tuesday that “people should get on with” implementing her recommendations.

Norfolk questioned how a new national inquiry would help victims of the scandal. But, he says, “everybody is still too scared” to discuss the racial elements of crimes, which he says has allowed the far right to continue exploiting grooming victims.

He believes that independent research into a range of issues is essential to understanding the phenomenon.

“It is very difficult to talk about this stuff without being accused of being Islamophobic. That’s not going to change,” he says.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.