Ashley St. Clair, a conservative social media provocateur, revealed she was Jewish shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks. Courtesy of Ashley St. Clair via X; Getty Images
By Louis Keene
April 16, 2025
This story was originally published on Feb. 19 and updated on April 16.
A Jewish right-wing influencer who gave birth to Elon Musk‘s son says he told her to keep the boy a secret — and to not have him circumcised.
Ashley St. Clair, who posts content favorable to President Donald Trump to more than 1 million followers on X, shared Feb. 14 on the social platform that the child — later revealed to be named Romulus — is Musk’s. She is suing for his sole custody.
Musk has neither confirmed nor denied his paternity, and did not respond to an inquiry via X (formerly known as Twitter) from the Forward in February. But the Wall Street Journal, which reported the circumcision claim, said a report from Labcorp, which conducted a court-ordered paternity test, stated that Musk’s “Probability of Paternity” was 99.9999%.
St. Clair’s spokesperson also did not respond to a request for comment in February.
Musk has acknowledged fatherhood of 13 children with three other women. St. Clair is the first of the four who is Jewish; according to the Jewish principle of matrilineal descent, that would make any of her children Jewish as well. (Some denominations believe Jewishness can be passed along by either Jewish parent.)
It was unclear whether St. Clair acquiesced to Musk’s request about circumcision; the Wall Street Journal said Musk also instructed St. Clair to give birth by caesarean section, which she defied.
St. Clair posted about her Jewish identity following the Oct. 7 attacks.
“I’m Jewish. I support Israel’s right to defend itself,” St. Clair wrote on X on October 10, 2023. “However, I reject emphatically the bloodthirsty warmongers I have seen the past few days.” She later added, “My mother is Jewish!”
St. Clair is a former contributor to the right-wing satirical publication the Babylon Bee and was fired by the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA after she was photographed at a dinner for white nationalists and antisemites, including Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. She has also written an anti-transgender book called Elephants Are Not Birds.
In an article published Feb. 15 in the New York Post, St. Clair said she first connected with Musk over direct messages on X in May 2023. She said she flew to San Francisco to interview him for the Bee, and that their relationship became sexual. She added that Musk paid her rent, and said that when she got pregnant, he demanded she confine the news to a tiny group.
“I was told to keep it secret,” St. Clair told the Post. “I was being asked to keep it a secret forever.”
The Post said that St. Clair showed a reporter text messages from a conversation between her and Musk’s manager, Jared Birchall, in which she complied with a request to leave Musk’s name off of Romulus’ birth certificate.
Since then, a pair of lawsuits St. Clair filed against Musk — one establishing his paternity and the other suing for full custody — have become public. They depict Musk as an absentee father who has met Romulus three times since his birth in September 2024 and has not been involved in his upbringing.
Musk has a mixed record regarding Jews and Jewish issues.
He has had several friendly meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recently visited Auschwitz, and says “two thirds” of his friends are Jewish. But he also regularly consorts online with white supremacists who traffic in antisemitism, made what seemed like a Nazi salute at a rally following President Donald Trump’s inauguration and, at a recent conference of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, said Germans need to get over “past guilt.”
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