The Complex Tragedy of Grimes

I don't typically record like prefaces at the front of episodes, but as you can tell by the title, this is an episode about a one Grimes, someone who weaves a particularly and exhaustingly complicated web.

Even among the people we talk about on this show, when we talk about celebrities, we're usually also talking about bigger forces at play, which stories about these famous people come to represent and which affect us all.

Grimes is someone who, in going from beloved Tumblr era indie artist to abused accomplice of the world's richest man and shadow president, tells us stories about the internet era that shaped millennials, about pipelines to political radicalization, about domestic abuse.

It's a rich and complicated text that I hope you find as interesting and perhaps challenging as I did while recording it.

So, without further ado, just kidding, I do have one more thing to say.

This spring, a bit fruity, is hitting the road.

I am so excited to be doing seven live podcast shows this coming May and June in Toronto, Chicago, Philly, New York City, Seattle, LA, and Portland.

It'll be just like the podcast, but, you know, live with Q ⁇ As, audience feedback, you know, we can all hang out.

And there will be some special guests who you might recognize from this podcast.

I am truly so excited.

Tickets for those shows are now officially on sale and the link for those will be in the episode description.

I can't wait to see you.

I'm so excited.

Okay, Grimes, I'm ready for you.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity, the podcast where I am literally always talking about how the primary uniting force in this country is anime.

It's the only media through line that I can reliably observe regardless of political alignment.

That was a Grimes tweet from last week.

Thank you, thank you.

Recently, the Flyer for World Pride 2025, which is being held in Washington, D.C.

this June, was released.

And among the top-billed performers is a one, DJ Claire Elise Boucher, known to most of us normals as Grimes.

People, especially gays, who, you know, are the only people paying attention to the flyer release for World Pride 2025, were not happy.

Here's some comments on Instagram.

There's no reason for her to be here.

She's consistently complacent.

We have a gay pop renaissance.

There's plenty of people who could replace her.

Another says, I fear she may have destroyed her career by procreating with that thing.

Another says, Next up is J.K.

Rowling doing a speech?

We have more gay pop acts than ever, and you chose someone who ignored a man's fascist ideologies for a doomed relationship and a child.

Grimes is someone whose public image and art I have been personally purposely avoiding for years, as both have gone down the tubes in a pretty dramatic and dark way.

And as a little closeted gay boy who lived on Tumblr in 2012, I once loved Grimes.

Those photo shoots of her with the, you know, DIY pink bangs are etched into the back of my brain like a tattoo I can't get rid of.

And so I'm really not enjoying any of this.

But as someone who still, 13 years later, feeds off of pop culture and political news like a fish needs water, it's gotten increasingly difficult to avoid the train wreck my former mother has gotten herself wrapped up in.

Every time she tweets, it's like adding a new car to the back of the pile.

Grimes has, obviously, well, not obviously.

Obviously, if you listen to this podcast a lot, not obviously if you're out in the world touching grass.

Three children with Elon Musk.

And though they've long since split up and have also had a grisly custody battle, it still seems like they play an important role in one another's lives.

And despite early signs that Grimes might have been putting up a fight against Elon Musk's political swerve to the far right, time has shown that she's willing to ignore and often co-sign her ex-partner's beliefs.

I think talking about Grimes will in some ways follow the script of a conversation about a pop cultural fall from grace, you know, those types of conversations that everybody loves.

But with the Elon of it all and of course the techno mechanicus of it all, we add in some harder questions about what it means to be a victim or a victimizer and who bears responsibility for what Grimes has become.

Was that good?

That was really good.

Really good.

Scripted that shit out.

To do that,

I would like to welcome back to the podcast two of my best friends and two people who you're intimately familiar with at this point if you listen to this podcast often cat tenbarge and taylor lawrence yay thanks for having us

you sound really thrilled to be talking about grimes cat

i am extremely excited to be talking about grimes i'm always ready to talk about her Kat and Taylor are both seasoned journalists who have each recently gone independent.

And so if you would like to support them, I want to plug both of their newsletters right up front.

Those newsletters in which they are doing some of the best work in reporting around politics and culture on the internet will be linked in the episode description.

I thought that we could just start the spiral on something kind of unrelated, but if you guys open the doc that I sent you with my notes for this episode, you'll see that I put the World Pride Music Festival flyer into it.

I just wanted you guys to call out some of the names here and get your reaction.

This is like deeply unrelated to Grimes.

I just thought it was crazy.

This is insane.

Well, Troy Sivan makes sense.

Troy Sivon makes sense.

Jennifer Lopez at the top.

I just saw Trisha Paytas and my job was like.

I just like imagining like Jennifer Lopez, Troy Sivan, Paris Hilton, Rue Paul, and Trisha Paytas like in the green room backstage.

What do they talk about?

I'm like, what is Trisha going to do on stage?

I just want to locate like the one specific gay guy for whom all of this is perfect.

Who booked it?

The guy who booked it.

It's me.

I just think that it's funny that there's nothing about the poster that's LGBTQ looking.

Like it looks like a trashy rave poster.

I have news for you.

You say it looks like a trashy rave poster.

Have you been to a world prize?

Have fun, everyone.

Before we really get into today's episode, Kat and I want to do something that we have done on this podcast once before, and yet so many people didn't listen.

Kat,

would you like to do the vocal fry disclaimer?

Yes.

So as a disclaimer, we don't care if you don't like vocal fry.

We don't care.

We get these comments every time we do an episode together, which are people will say like, wish I could listen to this, but this vocal fry is unlistenable.

We've talked about it multiple times now, and we always usually get really helpful comments.

Like, there was one on a former video where someone basically pointed out that, like, famous men will have vocal fry and no one will care.

But if, like, women or like femme-coated people have vocal fry, then all of a sudden everyone's like, I just can't listen to this.

So, yeah.

We don't care.

We don't care.

So, before you leave that comment about how you love the content, but you can't listen to the vocal fry, delete that comment and go outside.

I have perfect speech.

Is that all you have to contribute to that?

Let me do the talking.

No, I don't.

I think that's misogynistic.

I think the vocal fry, I get that too, but not as much.

Gotten comments when we've done episodes that have been like, it's the battle of the vocal fry.

And in my head, I'm like twiddling my thumbs and I'm like, who will win?

Before we get into the chronology of Grimes' life and who she was, who she is, who perhaps she's always been, how are you guys feeling going into this?

Because Grimes has been, I would say in the news, but really just kind of like on our social media timelines a lot lately, particularly as it pertains to Elon Musk.

I feel like I think about Grimes a lot and it's very surreal to me because I listened to her music a lot even before she was with Elon.

And so as the relationship has progressed, it's just gotten more and more dystopian.

And she's talked about more now than she ever has been in the past and in like such a reasonably but overwhelmingly negative way.

There's so much posted and said about Grimes, but a lot of it does not really get to the heart of what I think is the most important

this case and this relationship.

And so I'm excited to talk about it because,

I mean, I just, I find her fascinating and so emblematic of this bizarre pop culture political era that we are in right now.

She's very of the times.

She's sort of like a representation of so much, I think, that has gone wrong, unfortunately, in culture and just the manifestations of how the internet has warped people.

I saw this tweet the other day from someone named George Severis who wrote, small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss celebs.

And that's what we're doing today.

But celebrities are these sort of like, they're a way to talk about culture and they're sort of manifestations of culture.

And especially in America, where celebrity is so intertwined with culture, like we have such a celebrity obsessed culture and the way we process culture is so much through celebrities, I think it's important to talk about.

100%.

And Grimes is a rich text, if ever there was one.

So Grimes was born in Vancouver, BC to wealthy parents.

Her dad was a banker who then switched to biotech, which anyone out there who really knows what biotech is, feel free to leave a comment.

I can't wait to read them.

But she and her younger brother were raised Roman Catholic.

Her parents divorced when she was 11.

Obviously, I'm like really speeding through the timeline of her early life.

She ended up going to McGill University where she was a freshman in 2006.

And I put in the outline a few photos that were unearthed from her time at McGill.

If you guys want to look, I love these photos.

She looks like Claro or like a little, I don't know, she looks like a little Amish boy.

I think it's very sweet.

And I feel like this is very much so her brand.

She looks like a creature who lives in the woods.

Yes.

You can see it's always been there.

Grimes says that she was expelled from McGill in 2010 for missing, at that point, a year of classes.

But while she was still at McGill, she began releasing music on MySpace.

She formally released her first two albums, both in 2010, which were generally well received in some indie circles, and really had her breakthrough with fame with her 2012 album called Visions, which is most likely when, if you know who Grimes is, probably the first time you heard about her.

Visions had the two songs Genesis and Oblivion on them, which were both critically claimed, put on all the year-end lists.

Her sort of mythology around the album Visions was that she wrote the songs over a nine-day period where she says she did not eat or sleep and took a bunch of amphetamines.

And that's just like, I've read enough Grimes interviews to have like accepted that story uncritically over time.

But as I was drafting this outline for this episode, I googled like how long you can survive without sleep or food.

And like, I don't think she went nine days.

You can go nine days without food.

You can't go nine days without sleep.

I just bring that up to say, I think Grimes has always done some, you know, self-mythology.

I think so.

I think she's always been a troll.

And I think she's always enjoyed the idea of like telling people things that aren't true about herself to like hide who she really is.

And I feel like even back in the early days, you can see kind of some of the things that would have made her a good fit for someone like Elon, because I think he too enjoys like making things up and being like, I don't sleep at all.

Like, I just work for days straight.

And it's like, with Grimes, I will say, I think she's more talented.

Like, Elon Musk could not make visions.

Grimes could pretend to run Tesla, but Elon Musk could not make vision.

So I do think that like she has produced more artistic work than he ever will or would ever be capable of.

And I actually think that Grimes is like quite talented.

A lot of times people just paint her with like a brush of like she's always been like this kind of loser figure.

But I do think that back in this era, like she was making really good and interesting music.

And I think that like you saw hints of what would later become who she

became.

But at this point, I think she was like, had a very promising career in front of her.

I love that we're like zero and a half minutes in and like we already have the Elon lashings.

Thanks.

It would be an overstatement to say that this album Visions at all broke her into like the pantheon of mainstream pop.

But if you were gay or had no friends and lived on Tumblr during the early 2010s, you knew Grimes.

I was gay and had no friends and lived on Tumblr in 2012.

So I knew Grimes.

This is, I feel like, where she enters all three of our lives.

And so I don't know.

I wanted to ask each of you, like, where you first encountered Grimes and what you remember about her from this era of her burgeoning career fame.

Well, I was not gay on Tumblr

in that.

I would caveat what you just said, which is I think that that is very true for probably most people.

I, like Grimes, was in, in, although I don't know if she was living in, but I was living in Williamsburg at that time in the early 2010s.

I moved to Williamsburg in 2009,

the year that I blew up on Tumblr myself.

I don't know if people know my origin story, but I got popular on Tumblr.

Congrats, Queen.

My millennial era.

But living in Williamsburg in 2012, I have to say it was kind of like those TikToks where you see it romanticized, where it was like the hub of millennial culture and music culture and internet culture at that time too.

Like the internet was so burgeoning and Tumblr, because this is pre-Instagram, you don't put your photos of yourself on Instagram yet.

Like Twitter was ascendant.

Like there was this like energy to the internet that was so driven by Tumblr.

And obviously like to all the like LGBTQ kids in their bedrooms and like creative people, I think around the country or the world were like following it.

But I think Brooklyn was like this hub of it.

And I think the first time I saw Grimes in person I was I go to these parties at this place called 285 Kent I feel like an ancient person I love this like cross-generational conversation

God it was this like music venue whatever and you know there was just a lot of like

stuff happening and I knew who Grimes was because

She also was popular on Tumblr and was sort of in this music scene and I had friends that worked in music in that era.

And so that is, I just remember the first time I saw her was at some party at 285 Kent and everyone like, holy shit.

I think this must have been the year that Visions came out, like 2012 or 2013.

And just being like, wow, she's so, you know, she was like the queen of that like hipster scene, one of many queens, but like from, she was so emblematic of that era of millennial culture, which I think is interesting because like so many people affiliated with that culture kind of died with that culture almost.

Or like, like once like Gen Z sort of started, like they kind of of just they had their time in the sun yeah she's really been able to evolve out of it yeah it's it's so fascinating I think about the people who are really famous on Tumblr who like Acacia Brinley like I don't I don't know if that's gonna trigger some memories from anyone listening but like a lot of those people kind of you didn't hear about them after Tumblr came and went well because there wasn't much you could do with Tumblr fame aside from leverage it into some career like because you couldn't monetize yourself on the internet in the same way, Tumblr was this channel to music, right?

Like you had people using that Tumblr clout to like get their music out there.

And Tumblr kind of like birthed so much of like millennial music culture or YouTube.

Like you blew up on Tumblr, Jenna Marbles was huge on Tumblr, Tyler Oakley was huge.

And then you would sort of like leverage it into YouTube fame or what I did, which is leverage it into a traditional media job, the worst

outcome of

probably the worst thing I I could have done with that fame.

But like, I feel like Tumblr was this like creative soup and it birthed so many creative people.

And I feel like so much of Grimes' culture is wrapped up in that early 2010s.

Taylor, you said that you did the worst thing you could have done with Tumblr fame, but I would argue that it's not as bad as what Grimes has ultimately done.

True.

Low-hanging fruit.

I definitely listened to Grimes growing up in Ohio and being like, wow, this music is so interesting.

It's like nothing I've ever heard before.

And I actually really bonded with one of my ex-girlfriends who I dated growing up in Ohio over Grimes.

So I feel like that contributes to the gay teenager bedroom narrative.

I also found Grimes really interesting and resonant for me within that Tumblr culture, like specifically like social justice warrior culture because Grimes would talk about like being a woman producer and like not being taken seriously because she was a woman and like not being viewed as like someone who was pioneering or popularizing like a very new style of music.

And also Oblivion, I'm pretty sure, has like something to do like the meaning of the song with like being assaulted or like being preyed on.

And so

I always think about that when I think about like the trajectory that her life took is that when she started out, I think maybe a lot of what she was saying and doing that like seemed progressive was like more pseudo-intellectualism than actual progressivism.

But for a while, it felt like she was a part of the like more leftist, liberal side of the internet.

And famously, like jumping ahead a little bit, but famously, her bio when she first started dating Elon was initially like pro-communism.

Oh, it was, yes, it was anti-imperialist.

Which, yeah, we are, we are jumping ahead a little bit.

But after their relationship progressed, she took anti-imperialist out of her bio, which, like, I don't know, at least she was self-aware enough to do that.

I feel like throughout her whole career, and especially in retrospect, you can see how she took big words and just like used them and didn't really understand what they meant, but liked the aesthetic of like using these like big words.

And like, well, that brings me actually into the next part of my outline, which I just labeled.

pseudo-intellectualism.

Grimes has, for basically, I feel like as long as she's been famous, how do I, it's hard to even describe the pseudo-intellectual aspect without talking about, again, her kind of like self-mythology and her self-branding, which is all about like, I'm a little nymph from the woods and I'm an alien from space and I'm not a real human being.

And it's like, you are a rich girl from Vancouver, BC, but sure, you can also be like an AI alien from space, I guess.

But Grimes has from the beginning, she's always kind of talking about, like you said, Kathy's like larger than life concepts that are really difficult and unappealing, I think, for the normal person to try to spend too much time thinking about.

She's always talking about like capital C civilization.

You know what I mean?

And honestly, in ways that I don't understand and in ways that I more often than not just find very grating,

it's, I don't know, it's like the worst person you can be drunk next to at a party.

And they just start talking your ear off about how like cryptocurrency can save the art world from, I don't know, it's just words on words and words and words i think what's so interesting too of just like that era of the internet that she came from was a very tech optimist era of the internet like you had really the first half of the 2010s there was almost no criticism of like social media like this was like social media is going to like liberate the world it's going to the internet's going to change everything and there was just this like rank tech optimism and that i think a lot of creative people of that era myself included, like bought into or like believed in.

And Grimes was so also intertwined with blogging culture because she was really made by music bloggers of the time.

And blogging was also seen as this like amazing thing.

There's this great book called Never Be Alone Again.

And it's about the blog house era of the internet.

It talks about this of just like how this like view of technology as a positive, liberatory, amazing, creative space that's going to like bring amazing things to the world, like is so imbued in music culture of that time.

And I think it's just interesting because when you hear her talk about her ideology, I think she was one of the first people that I heard talking about like the singularity.

I had a blog about the singularity, like a Tumblr, like a joke Tumblr with my friend.

And I feel like she made a comment about it that we've like re-blogged or whatever, but she would talk about

the singularity.

The singularity.

It was called like all the singular ladies or something.

Wait, what's, but what's the singularity?

The singularity.

Oh, my God.

Wait, Kat, do you know what that is?

I've heard people talk about it, but I could not like explain it to you.

Guys,

it is the sort of hypothetical moment in the future when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Oh.

That is like when the new world order begins.

And like.

Okay.

When I had this vlog in like 2014, we were like, oh, that's going to be the greatest moment.

That's going to be.

Oh, it was talked about as a good thing yeah I mean by a lot of people again like this just goes back to like pre-2015 like tech brain you had like so much boosterism from the tech press because it was the tech press was dominated by gadget bloggers that were like inherently fanboys you had so much amazing creativity I mean this is what I think Lena's book never be alone again gets into so much of like the blogging culture and like how that was affecting media and creativity and so people were like yes I can't wait for like AI and it's going to do all these amazing things and like we didn't have any concept of what that would be, right?

It was just like, there was just this like excitement about technology and excitement about the future.

And Grimes was one of the first people that I remember like a celebrity that I would be like, oh, she's talking about that stuff.

When you look at Grimes's music,

it intensified around when she started dating Elon.

But she's been talking about how amazing it would be for AI to take over the world for a long time.

She thinks it'll bring communism.

Didn't she think it would bring communism?

Yes.

And like, I totally agree with everything you said, Taylor.

And I think it's such good context.

And I feel like the way that Grimes makes music is wrapped up in like techno-optimism because she talks about how like she didn't have any actual skill at music.

She created all of her songs through like garage band and like technology of the time.

It was very like, I'm going to make a movie on my iPhone like style, like making music.

And in her lyricism and in like her personal brand, she'll say things like, I'm getting experimental surgery on my eyes.

Like she'll make things up and she'll troll.

And I think that she purposefully does this because it's convenient for her if she says something that isn't actually smart.

She just creates this aura of like, you'll never know, am I trolling or am I serious?

Or do I really understand these things?

Or is it all part of the bit?

And I think that kind of helps her construct a like reasonable doubt around whether she's truly a pseudo-intellectual or not.

Because sometimes she'll do really blatant trolling where she's like, I'm putting AI in my brain today, like I'm going under the knife.

And then other times she'll say things where she's like acting as if she's serious, but there's no real substance to what she's saying.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to shout out Factor for making this episode possible.

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Now, let's get back to the show.

Do you guys know about the 2009 river boat incident?

Yep.

No.

Wow.

Okay.

So in 2009, Grimes, then Claire, and her college friend from McGill named William wanted to set sail on a boat.

that they made themselves.

Here is a little snippet from a pitchfork article that was written about this.

Oh my God.

What the boat looks like is insane.

Oh, you're looking at the photo?

I just looked at the photo.

Sorry.

The couple traveled 25 hours from Montreal to Minnesota, where they spent a month constructing a 20-foot house raft on a friend's property with the intention of sailing it down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

They named the boat the Velvet Glove Cast in Iron and renamed themselves Verushka and Zelda XOX.

Boucher and Gratz painted murals with fantastical creatures on the side of the vessel, which they filled with live chickens, a sewing machine, and 20 pounds of potatoes.

But soon after setting sail, the engine failed and Boucher and Gratz spent three weeks traveling downstream.

This is the most like manic pixie dream shit I've ever heard.

They spent three weeks traveling downstream attempting to fix the boat and dealing with the police.

There's something about this that I appreciate in the sense that I'm like, okay,

that's fine.

You know, like this is a weird creative thing and you want to sail down the thing with chickens.

Like that's fine.

That's creative.

We all do creative, you know, things to like feed our souls.

The problem is like when you start

like when you give someone like this an enormous amount of power and money and sort of start to take what they have to say as intellectually rigorous or something.

Do you know what I I mean?

Right.

I guess if she had stayed on the riverboat, it would have been fine.

I think it's really funny.

Like, you can see already the seeds that are being planted for what she's going to name her future children.

It reminds me, it's just so firmly rooted in Tumblr culture to me because it's like there is like a little bit of a pseudo-intellectualism to it, but it's really just like kind of like goofy and silly.

And I think the fact that she would go on to name her kids like such outrageous names shows sort of the transition from like a more playful, immature, all-in-good fun kind of use of this naming style to like all of a sudden it went zero to 100, like, oh no, this is like the heir of the fake U.S.

president.

Also, so much of Tumblr was just pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

My own blog probably included.

Speak on that.

First of all, I think people have a hard time if you've never been on it and probably didn't spend your formative years on it to remember that like blogging and writing was the dominant form of expression on the internet at that time because you couldn't upload photos and videos easily.

So, so people were just writing and like right, like most people are not brilliant writers or thinkers, right?

Like, and, and this was also the era of like, yeah, it was like pseudo-intellectual of like, um, you know, it was very like book culture and like early kind of like buzzfeed, like I'm a reader, like fetishizing reading and being intellectual and like kind of being smart because again the best bloggers of that era like the big time bloggers were were smart right you had to have something to say to succeed well you had to be smart you had to be interesting you had to be intellectual and so I just think like so much of Tumblr was that and it was a lot of young people no matter how brilliant you are at like 20 you're not gonna have the most like fully formed opinions because your brain is not developed and because you have literally almost no life experience.

And so when you give someone like that a platform, I mean, I don't know, I've deleted most traces of what I've written from those eras, but like it was just sort of like encouraged, right, to like pseudo-intellectualize and like and over-analyze your life or culture or whatever.

And I feel like that probably fed right into someone like her, where it's like, that's she's clearly that type of person already.

I pulled a few tweets from like the last few weeks.

Grimes on Twitter: It is so monumentally embarrassing that I am finally getting into Christianity because it's the only way I can quit vaping.

I am more of a general deist slash feel-like goddess physics slash math slash sees itself through our eyes kind of vibe in terms of what I actually think.

In parentheses, the universe is also probably dead and empty, except yeah, IDK, prob not, and GL.

This is the most millennial stuff.

IDK, prob not, and G-L.

LOL, LMAO.

This is also one from a few weeks ago.

Actually, this is what what I opened the episode with.

The primary uniting force in this country is anime, and it's the only media through line that I can reliably observe, regardless of political alignment.

It is also, I think, underrated as a later stage illustration revolution.

I'd argue the Akira art is the Cold War Mona Lisa.

This is like, you know, that tweet that's like, this must hit so hard if you're dumb.

That's how I feel reading these.

I'm like, what the hell?

Sure.

What the hell?

Sure.

What the hell?

Sure.

I don't want to hate on her because I like these people.

Like, maybe it's just, I am predisposed to, like,

I think because like personally, like, and this is why I'm a journalist, like, I love like thinking of weird, like, alternatives or like, I love listening to people, like, rant about their own weird theories about something.

Like,

if she was just doing this on Twitter and making her music, it would be totally fine.

Like, who cares?

Twitter is for posting dumb stuff.

Twitter is for venting venting your weird thoughts.

Like, I think what we've seen and like why it's relevant is how this sort of like, when she came into an enormous amount of money and power and influence and like suddenly like this person's sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense thoughts are now shaping potentially Musk's policies or beliefs or whatever.

Like she's given this this political platform.

I just feel like I have to defend her because these are the kind of people I love being next to at parties.

Yes, girl, like tell me crazy theories.

I want to hear everything.

Most of what I'm complaining about, like mostly I just find pseudo-intellectualism annoying.

It's not a crime, certainly, but I also think it's hard to talk about her pseudo-intellectualism without highlighting.

And this is kind of where I had what I had going on next.

in my outline is like that being the thing that also kind of brought her and Elon Musk together.

The king of pseudo-intellectual is like the, he's like the final boss of pseudo-intellectualism.

I remember because I was at a particular high point of listening to Grimes all the time, re-listening to like the classics from the earlier era and also listening to some of her newer stuff when she popped out at the Met Gala with Elon Musk.

And I remember that moment like so vividly and just being like, this isn't good.

Like I, even though Elon Musk, and I think people forget that at the point when he and Grimes grimes popped out together he was it was like people were like power couple like people loved him they loved him and i think i was even at the time as a grimes fan kind of like i don't know about this but it was really interesting to me the way that they allegedly like met

is that Grimes had made a pun involving like Rococo's basilisk and then the art style or Roco's basilisk or something, basilisk, and then the art style Rococo.

So she made like a pun, Rococo's basilisk, and used it in a music video, which is very like, I think it lends itself to what we've been talking about in terms of like, there's something there that's like interesting and creative.

And I think if it was disconnected from Elon Musk, I'd be like, how interesting.

What a nice young lady.

Instead.

But instead, Elon Musk like also thought of this separately, supposedly, and googled it to see if anyone else had come up with this pun.

And when he saw that Grimes had, he like DM'd her on Twitter.

And at the time, it was like, meet Q, like the rest is history.

And unfortunately, the rest is literally history.

As are our rights.

Exactly.

Oh, that's dark.

The fact that Elon Musk continues to meet all of his women on Twitter, or they work for him.

Dark.

Imagine what he would act like if he was just at like a bar.

He would be so awkward.

I don't think he can.

I think that's why he has to slide into Twitter DMs because he cannot function IRL.

And I think he, I think he saw Grimes and spotted her, and kind of immediately picked up on like ways he could maybe manipulate her by feeding into like the weirdness and being really congratulatory of it, even if it was like he did not ultimately respect her.

And I think she was probably enthralled with him because here's this, like you said, his reputation at that point was still very high.

People thought of him as this like Tony Stark type figure, this like brilliant tech tech guy right like he's this like amazing person building the future uh he was an environmentalist people were selling that back then right this is somebody that that values technology somebody invested in this like new creative future and yeah i'm sure she saw so much in him and i think like you said i think he probably saw a woman that's willing to flatter him and you know feed his pseudo-intellectual BS and his ego and ultimately sought to control her, which is what he seems to want to do to every woman he interacts with.

I think in the beginning of their relationship, undoubtedly she did not think of him as like this bigoted fascist individual.

And we know this because like early on in their relationship, as he was very publicly radicalized, whether or not that's what he always believed, she seemed to think that that was not who he really was because of the famous like,

hate is not in your heart.

pick up the phone and give me a doll.

And that was about the.

Kat, I love how you remember the typo in that tweet.

You steered into my frame.

This is how online we are.

In, I believe it was 2020, Elon Musk tweeted, pronouns suck.

And this was kind of.

the first glimpse most of the world got into like, oh, wait, is this guy like, does this guy really have like a fixation on trans people?

And that was when she responded, Elon, hate is not in your heart.

Give me a doll.

Give me a call.

I love me remembering, please give me a doll.

And I, I do, like, I think we kind of just said this, but I just am like, there's this perception that Grimes got with Elon Musk, like, because he's the horrible person he very publicly is today.

And there's also a perception that like she knew exactly what she was getting into and she wanted a relationship with this man.

And I think that that is like always bad rhetoric with abuse victims because it's like, at the end of the day, even if someone made really bad choices in terms of like pursuing a relationship, I just think it's like bad to say that someone wanted like an abusive relationship.

And I also think that like in the case of Grimes, going back to 2018, I definitely don't think that she had any idea of what was going to happen because I don't think most people did.

I don't think that even Elon realized how he would be radicalized at that point.

And I, I, this is something that bothers me so much about Grimes' discourse specifically on the internet.

I just think that love is complicated, and different people give each other different things.

You know, because people will be like, well, how can you be in a relationship with somebody that you like politically disagree with?

Or how can you be in a relationship with somebody that's like a bigot?

As you mentioned, Kat, a lot of times these people don't start as bigots.

If you knew they were a bigot, you wouldn't have gotten in that relationship, presumably.

But sometimes you are with somebody and then you realize their beliefs have evolved, or, you know, there are even people that I care about deeply that were there for me during like really critical parts of my life that I will always like care about and value that ultimately I realize they have like crazy and terrible opinions on things.

And I think if you have a kid with someone too.

like the sentiments change and everything and i mean this is why and i i hate too that so many women because so many women and more progressive women too are stuck with more bigoted men like i feel like we hear about that a lot at least rather than the other way around And the woman is chastised.

And the woman, it's always like, How could you be with this monster?

How could you do this?

And it's like, you just, you don't know what, what they're getting from that relationship.

You don't know.

And yes, it would be great to have a moral high ground and all this stuff, but it's just like life is so much more complicated and messy than that.

And human beings are more complicated.

And even though you're right, like he probably was never like a leftist, like in any sense of the word, he's always been a union buster.

Billionaires are inherently, I would say, pretty evil.

But like, I do think that he's, he was a different person in 2018 than he is now.

I think it's a hallmark of abusers to showcase, very intentionally, show one side of yourself at the beginning of a relationship.

This is something that almost every abuser does because most abusers are very cognizant of what they are doing.

And by the time Elon had met Grimes, he had already been with other women.

And we have heard about various abusive dynamics within those relationships, including his first wife, Justine.

She wrote about this, I think, from Marie Claire in like 2013 or like 2014.

And so we know that Elon had this pattern that...

from what other women have described as kind of like love bombing, where at the beginning of the relationship, he is really doting, presents himself as like, I'm going to save you.

Like, I have so many resources, I have so much money, and I care so much about you.

Like, I'm going to be the best thing that's ever happened to you.

And we know he did this to Amber Heard, coming in and being like, I'm going to save you from your abusive relationship with Johnny Depp.

We know he did this to Justine, where it was like, she wasn't that interested in him in college, but he like persistently was like, I'm going to really make something out of my life, and I want you to be with me.

There seemed to be parts of this in his relationship with Tallulah Riley because it happened super quickly after he left Justine.

And so, I think that most likely, based on Elon's patterns with all of these women, I think he probably presented a very different side of himself to Grimes.

And then not too long after their relationship, you know, took on a definition that she would never be able to fully escape from, which is that she had children with him.

Once you have children with someone, you're kind of stuck with them as long as they're alive.

And as soon as he kind of had her like in this position of being stuck with him, that's when you really publicly see the unraveling of Grimes publicly being like, I don't recognize this person.

This is not who I got together with.

I don't believe this is who you are.

And that is so sad to me because it is just such a common and in fact, the most common trajectory of an abusive relationship.

Also, it's like if you're with somebody like that who's like a narcissist or the love lobby stuff, like you always want to get back to that point.

You always believe, I think, you know, that that is the person that they truly are.

And this is just some like aberrant behavior, but like, hey, just get back.

Like, why can't this man return to the man that I knew?

Right.

And as you said, it was always a mirage.

Or maybe she was overlooking a lot of things, right?

Or like, well, how could she have more children?

And it's like, again, maybe he is love bombing.

You believe, you believe that that initial version of the person that you met is always going to be that person.

It's also like there are two contradictory societal narratives at once, which is that as a woman in particular in a heterosexual relationship, you are encouraged to try to fix relationships, especially if you have children with a header, like a man in a relationship, if you're a woman.

You are actually like by the court ordered to try to repair that relationship versus cut that person off.

And so, through the court system, like abusive relationships that involve children are essentially mandated.

We mandate that victims like remain in close proximity with their abuser.

We mandate that they like share child care responsibilities with them.

And oftentimes, we mandate through our legal system that they spend like extended periods of time immersed in their abusers life, in their homes, in their ideologies.

And so I think that like once Grimes passed that point, she was kind of trapped.

And that's not even like taking into account the fact that contrary to popular belief, Grimes and Elon were never married.

He doesn't owe her anything.

First time she was pregnant with ex, that was a really big deal.

Like, as a fan still at the time who was like, I hate this relationship, I want them to break up.

When she announced she was pregnant with his baby, I was like, fuck.

Like, this is now forever.

What does this mean?

What does this mean for my relationship to Vision specifically?

I was just like, I remember kind of watching helplessly from the sidelines because I was like, you know, at the time when Grimes and Elon's relationship was starting to develop, there was also simultaneously like the emergence of Elon Musk's radicalization in the public eye.

I was like, this is so bad.

Like, she needs to break up with this horrible man.

And instead, they had a kid together.

That was a whole public ordeal, particularly around like they give the child this keyboard smash name.

Then, for the second and the third child, for whatever reason, and this is like a big red flag, they tried to hide them.

They tried to like hide those pregnancies from the public.

A reporter discovered that that they had had either the second or third child.

They did an interview at Grimes' house and they heard the baby crying.

And they're like, did you and Elon have another baby?

And we now know that Elon does this with different women.

He like, he like encourages them as the relationship is clearly not equitable, as there are clearly signs of like abuse or coercion or whatever in the relationship.

He's also like, let's have another baby.

So he's done that to multiple women now.

And he definitely did that to Grimes.

Yeah.

And we've been talking about them having an abusive dynamic.

And I want to talk a little bit about the specifics of some of the things that she alleges.

So, like you mentioned, they have these three kids: X.

The next one is Ex the Dark Side Rail.

The next one is Technomechanicus.

I've riffed enough about the name thing.

I feel like online and on this podcast, I don't need to talk more about the names.

I don't like the names.

I don't like the situation they create for the children who have no agency in what they're called.

I don't like the names.

But shortly after their third child, Technomechanicus is born, they split and enter into this custody battle.

And Kat, you were reading some of the legal documents as you love to do.

Would you like to shed any light on what they reveal to you?

Yes.

So around this time, after Grimes had had X, which is nothing to say of his full name, after Grimes had that kid, people in her fandom in particular were starting to get really worried because this is around the time that you started to see tweets and stuff that suggested bad things were happening behind the scenes with Elon and Grimes.

And the custody battle like kicked into effect because Grimes was trying to get a legal sort of parental arrangement like acknowledging that Elon is the father of these three children so that she can have legal rights to them and what we know from like the court documents themselves and like the official narrative is supplemented by the fact that Grimes will often tweet and often she'll delete them.

But like Grimes frequently tweets and gives these little like bits and pieces of insight into like what her portrayal of these events are.

But after she starts trying to go through the courts to establish like parenthood, then they start disputing over whether the children live in California or Texas.

And the custody battle is in Texas.

So Grimes wanted to move it to California and said that the youngest two children were with her full-time in California and that the only child who was in Texas was X.

And X is the one who Elon constantly is parading around in public, has him on his shoulders, has him in the White House.

Like from the time that he was a little boy, X has been like the very public child who Elon takes around with him.

And it is super bizarre.

And like Grimes has hinged kind of her argument around this, that it is like not what she wants as his mother.

And it is like not consistent with the other children, the way that he parades X around specifically.

And it's like he has children who are X's age with other women who he's not doing this with.

It's like he picked this one kid, and in the custody battle, Grimes is like, I haven't seen X for five months.

I can't see my son.

I don't want him to have this level of public visibility, but Elon won't comply with my wishes.

And the custody battle is really, really ugly.

A lot of it is sealed from public view.

Most of it is, but she reveals on Twitter,

she says that like her modeling photos were used against her in the courtroom.

Like she basically said that Elon used like probably tried to portray her as like sexually promiscuous, which is just like so gross, but such a common thing used against mothers in custody battles.

What she like described happening is so consistent with what women from all backgrounds and like all histories and experiences go through in custody battles.

She said she was going bankrupt because of like these custody battles.

She said that like Elon obviously has the most resources out of everyone in the in the world.

He is the richest person on the planet.

And she was like, I have such a difficult time fighting this against him.

And she also said at that point that it was like someone who she no longer recognized as compared to the man who she had met.

And she basically said that like she was fighting to stop her kids from getting taken away from her.

Another really interesting thing during sort of this whole custody battle era, which did wrap up finally with some sort of settlement, but as this was all going on, Grimes's mother actually tweeted at Elon and was like, Grimes is trying to take the kids to see her dying grandmother and you will not like relinquish them to her or give her their like passport documentation so that they can do this.

Like, please don't do something.

This is breaking my daughter's heart and my mother's heart.

And with all of this stuff being so publicly out there, I just have always found it so like surreal and ultimately unsurprising, but very disappointing that people don't like talk about how blatant all of this like mistreatment of his kids and Grimes and her family is and how like egregious it is that she has so little resources compared to him and that he's like putting her and the children through all of this.

Yeah, yeah.

And just because I can already read the comments litigating how much sympathy or scrutiny towards Grimes is too much, I want to be clear and say that there is a reason, a very valid reason, that so many queer people reacted so negatively towards Grimes' inclusion in the World Bride lineup.

Grimes has, you know, co-signed and espoused some really shitty political views that we're going to get into in a bit.

And at the same time, she's in this truly nightmarish situation inside this relationship with the father of her children.

I don't think those things, by the way, are entirely separate either, which we're going to get into in a second.

But I do think people can and probably should have conflicting feelings about them.

And I'm not asking anyone to reconcile those feelings necessarily, but I think it's worth noting that they can all exist at the same time.

Yeah.

And it just goes back to also, I just have to say again, too, what I said before, which is that like, you don't know what a relationship is like until you're in it.

Women, especially, are taught to compartmentalize and to, as everything that Kat said earlier, it's like you're pressured, especially once you have a child, to be together and to fix it.

And if that guy keeps giving you, which it sounds like he does, it's like he's such a manipulator.

He's giving these women, especially Grimes, like these little tastes of him as they once knew him when they met.

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Now let's get back to the episode.

While we're complicating this all, let's talk about Grimes' own political radicalization and maybe speculate on what about this arena of far-right personalities was interesting to her.

Because while to be clear, obviously, I vehemently disagree with how she chooses to spend her time nowadays, I kind of always think, and it's a running theme on this show, that perhaps the most productive thing we can do is ask how and why.

I think what we see is as Elon starts to get radicalized,

you start to see Grimes's politics evolve as well.

And you also see her start to talk quite negatively about the media and to fight with the media.

In 2021, she does this photo shoot where she's kind of trying to troll the media where she's dressed up in this like typical Grimes kind of crazy outfit.

And then she's reading the Communist Manifesto.

And this is when she was getting a lot of media criticism for being with Elon and enabling him because 2021 is when he really kicked off like the really awful transphobic stuff and just sort of started to make his more extreme beliefs more publicly known.

And so you see her kind of feeding against that.

People were like, oh my God, like is she sending a message or what is this?

But I think I started to see signs of like resentment of the media and like resentment of her public image.

And you see her also starting to fight more with people in the replies.

Like people will say something to her and she's like, well, that's not, you know, you don't understand what's going on.

You know, like she's clearly frustrated.

And and I've written so much about this and I've experienced it myself like when you see false information about yourself publicly or when you feel like part of your story is not being told or you're being chastised in the media it is such a radicalizing force I do think like with her she probably felt I don't want to say persecuted but I do think that she felt this like resentment and that resentment if you start to go down that road you are fed into the right-wing pipeline.

Like the right is so good at taking that resentment and being like, you're right you're right and by the way the media is evil and by the way all these people canceling you are evil well see what i mean woke people will turn on you this is a da da and so you see her starting to affiliate with more of these like counter culture you know like these right-wing extremists that's what they are yeah i don't want to excuse it it's bad it's lazy she shouldn't do this right like you should recognize like okay these people are also grifting off me they also will throw me under the bus the minute i'm not politically expedient but when you're feeling lonely which i imagine she was, you're feeling completely isolated.

And then also endearing yourself to this, these far-right radicals also kind of endears yourself to Elon, who's increasingly in those circles.

I just see how that she started to go down that path.

I think that like throughout Grimes's career and what we've talked about, you see like the perfect conditions for radicalization form.

Because like we talked about at the very beginning, when Grimes emerged as a musician, I think she was undeniably extremely talented, but was often sort of not given her due and had kind of this tense back and forth with the media, like broadly speaking, because I think she also dealt with a lot of misogyny and sexism from the media and from parts of the media that are not like the same parts of the media that are calling her out now.

But I think a lot of people in that position just sort of naturally start to associate.

anything that falls under the umbrella of the media with like negative bad treatment they've gotten.

And to some degree, like you said, Taylor, I think that for a lot of women in the public eye, that is fair because a lot of times, as a woman in the public eye, even the best media outlets still treat you through a misogynistic lens.

So, I think coming into her relationship with Elon, Grimes was already sort of in this like standoff with the media.

The way her relationship gets covered, I think, really like upset her.

And then, as the relationship in her personal life starts to really visibly become abusive.

I think like you see a lot of effects and consequences of that that only further open her up to radicalization.

For example, during the custody battle, she tweeted that her daily schedule would be like sleeping, eating, crying, and going to court.

And I just think that someone who is in that kind of survival mode where it feels like the world is against you.

And in the case of fighting the richest man on the planet for your children, the world kind of is stacked against you.

Like I can see why she became so vulnerable that like it was just perfect breeding ground for radicalization and i'll also say that like that's not an excuse because a lot of people who are in really heinous horrible situations do not become radicalized right right i think this more has to do with like the path she went down and the path elon went down are both because of like who they are and she's not like a violent abusive individual in the same way that he is but she like has co-signed on this rhetoric.

And some of the really bad stuff that she's done over the years has included like following white supremacist neo-Nazis on Twitter.

She also starts to like physically hang out with these people.

I was going to say, it's, it's not just Twitter for people.

Because following, I don't want to be the follow police because like I really I've you follow everyone.

It drives me insane because I write about right-wing influencers.

Of course I follow them.

I monitor everything they do.

And I, every day, I have some new person in my DMs.

Why do you follow this person?

like well

i write about them what's way more concerning to me and i do think that you can deduce a certain amount of you know information about someone from the the people that they follow because that is the information you can tell kind of their information diet but she also starts to hang out with these people socially right that's what i was going to mention i mean she's like she's has there's write-ups about her friendship with uh curtis yarvin who is this avowed race scientist white supremacist yeah he's he's a eugenicist On January 19th, the night before the inauguration, she was DJing a sort of like MAGA hangout party.

She's on Twitter, you know, all the time defending Elon.

Someone just a couple weeks ago said, girl, please, you were in love with a Nazi.

And she just responded to that person, quote, hysteria will get you nowhere and told them to read Confucius and study history.

We did study history.

That's the problem.

Right.

I wish wish that she would just admit it.

I wish that she would just acknowledge it, but I think she's into denial.

And I think she feels resentment.

Because again, when you're in love with someone and you're in love with someone and you have kids with someone and then you see yourself being hated, like, I don't know, it's hard.

You, we all want to defend ourselves online and we all think of ourselves as like doing the right thing and the moral thing.

And I just feel like she's gone down this path so far that it's, you know, a tweet is not going to get her out of it.

Also, I just want to say like the MAGA stuff, like, especially the inauguration, I mean, I was at a lot of these inauguration events and stuff because I was writing about it.

Again, their goal is to radicalize people and to bring people into a movement.

And so you see this a lot where somebody sort of starts to associate or they're in this vulnerable spot and you see the right just like vultures like seize on them.

Again, because they're opportunists that don't actually give a shit, but this person is vulnerable.

And then you see the anger, like the anger from the left, rightfully so.

And that kind of pushes them.

And that doesn't mean that it's the left.

I hate when people say, oh, well, that's the left fault.

Like, oh, you know, you should, that's why we should be nicer to people.

No.

Whoop, there goes Mary.

No, but I think we have to be realistic and recognize these conditions that people are radicalized under.

It reminds me really significantly, like over the past few years, like since 2018, since like the height of the Me Too movement, I have noticed multiple women who were like high-profile accusers in the Me Too movement who have been radicalized and radicalized hard.

Tara Reed is like a really good example because she is like literally like in Russia.

And I think Rose McGowan also has like said some pretty concerning stuff.

At first, when I saw these women getting radicalized, it confused me because I was like, how could you be drawn to such a like toxic and like patriarchal demographic?

But I think what I eventually realized is that like what these women experienced when they came forward is they saw that, they said, they saw that same patriarchal misogyny from the left.

And that is why they got pushed to the right.

Because unfortunately, the reality is there is like no justice in any sense for women who go through these types of situations.

Like, a lot of victims understand that it is not like a left or right thing.

It's like.

just because the left mistreats you doesn't mean the right's going to treat you any better.

But a lot of victims do fall prey to this.

Like they are sort of vulnerable to this radicalization.

And I've seen examples of this where it's like, I'm like, well, this guy who you now love is a victim blamer.

And they're like, but not to me.

Like they're like, but this person showed me kindness and no one is showing me any kindness.

And it's like, it's really sad to like see this happen.

And I hate it.

But it's like, it all comes back to the fact that I think bottom line, like these men, Elon Musk and like his cronies are manipulators.

They're manipulators.

And it's like, that's the like most important takeaway from this is that he's now done this to so many women, Grimes and others, that it ceases to be about who these women are as individuals.

And it's more so about just like, oh, it's the same pattern of abuse.

And Elon Musk is abusing all of us now in his position.

So it's like, it just is who he is to his core, and he'll do it to any woman he can.

Again, in my own head, I find myself coming back to this point of what is the right amount of sympathy?

What is the right amount of scrutiny?

How do I hold these things at the same time?

Because on one hand, right, and this is what people bring up a lot, Grimes will somewhat regularly go out of her way, especially on Twitter, to defend Elon.

Like just in January, there was this tweet.

Let me find it.

She was sparring with some random person on Twitter and continuing to claim that like Elon is still this like climate change warrior, despite obviously like joining the worst presidential administration the climate has literally ever known.

So she continues to do this sort of like laundering of Elon's image for reasons that don't quite make sense.

But then at the same time, like a month later, she tweeted, let me find this one.

She tweeted directly at Elon Musk.

Here it is from the 20th of February.

At Elon Musk, please respond about our child's medical crisis.

I am so sorry to do this publicly, but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation.

This requires immediate attention.

If you don't want to talk to me, can you please designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this?

This is urgent, Elon.

I'm not giving any details, but he won't respond to texts, calls, or emails, and has skipped every meeting.

And our child will suffer lifelong impairment if he doesn't respond to ASAP.

So I need him to fucking respond.

And if I have to apply public pressure, then I guess that's where we're at.

Like, it goes without saying that that's pretty fucking horrifying.

I would not ask anyone to feel sympathetic for Grimes because there are a number of reasons why you may not want to be sympathetic toward her.

But I do think that, like, in noting that, we can also recognize that victims don't have to be sympathetic, and that the way that Elon Musk is victimizing these women, Grimes included, is also reflective of the way that he is victimizing the country at large through all the other actions that he takes in his personal and his professional life.

And I think with Grimes and defending Elon specifically, it's like we can look at this behavior sort of objectively for what it is.

And it's like, this is a man who has only ever like persistently hurt Grimes.

And so for her to come out and defend him after all of that is not a rational position for her to take.

It's coming from an irrational place.

And so just because victims act, you know, in some situations irrationally or in a way that is like consequential to others, you know, we don't have to separate those things out from each other.

They can exist at the same time.

She can be coming from a place where she's reacting to an abusive relationship, and her statement on its own can have negative and harmful consequences.

This is actually like a very frequent facet of like domestic violence cases is that there are cascading consequences that affect everybody around the relationship.

And so, I think that that, that is true of Grimes.

And I also think that like, if we just end the conversation at she's an irredeemable person and we don't feel bad for her, then we're not doing anything to challenge like the rhetoric that underlines Elon's ability to abuse all of these different women.

I also think it's important to point out because I referred to the behavior as like rational versus irrational.

Some things appear irrational to us because we are not privy to what is going on in that relationship.

So for example, this is just a hypothetical, like sometimes within abusive relationships behind closed doors, the way that abusers treat their victims is they see how far they can push them and things that they can get them to say and do, sometimes publicly, to sort of like, it's part of the process of coercive control.

Victims will oftentimes like privately and publicly

respond with like the fawn response, which is to like tell the abuser that they're a good person, tell them that like they're not being abused, like deny that the abuse is happening, because it's a way of like maybe making sure that the abuser stays calm and doesn't become angry and doesn't flip out on you, or maybe it's a way of like bargaining to try to get things like being able to see your children, for example, or getting your abuser to respond to you if like your child is having a medical emergency.

With like the tweeting at Elon, we don't really know what's going on in that relationship because the parties parties who have knowledge of it haven't told us.

All we can really do as bystanders is like guess.

And that is a really imperfect way of like handling this situation.

But I think that because it's the one we're all in together, you see how people just repeatedly do not give victims the benefit of the doubt.

They actually tend to like villainize victims and like cast the worst possible like guess of what is going on in that situation and project that onto the victim.

So I think like knowing what we know, it's fair to say that there are probably elements to Grimes' behavior that involve factors we are not privy to and may make her look more sympathetic or may at least provide like context that we don't have.

Well, and speaking of behavior that seems from the outside pretty irrational and like straight up bizarre, did you guys see the tweet about the video games?

She like, she tweeted about Elon like being good at video games.

Here's the tweet from January 18th.

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first American druid.

I'm sorry.

I don't know video games.

I'm sorry if I fuck up these words.

Was the first American druid in Diablo to clear the abattoir of Zir

and ended that season as the best in the USA?

He was also ranking in Polytopia and beat Felix himself at the game.

I did observe these things with my own eyes.

There are other witnesses who can verify this.

That is all.

She ended up with egg on her face with this because, right?

Because then it came out that, like, he did actually, I think, like, have someone playing for him or something.

But I was like, did he make her tweet that?

When I saw that, I thought it was so incredibly bizarre.

And I don't know if it came from a place of like, either, I mean, all of the sort of hypotheticals are equally dark, where it's like, either she noticed that this is something that was really bothering him on the internet and she's trying to curry favor by espousing this ultimately like kind of false information about like how great he is, or he asked her to back him up because at that point he had not come clean.

There was now ended up being irrefutable evidence that he cheated.

On the video game?

On the video game, yeah.

He had like had someone play for him or something because basically somebody that actually knows about video games did this like YouTube investigation and found out that like there was no way that he could have played those amount of hours at these times or whatever, whatever.

And so, then he kind of sort of admitted it.

And people were like, Grimes, you're such a liar.

But it's just like, to me, when you see that stuff, it's so sad.

There's an audience of one for that tweet, which is Elon.

And it's again, her sort of lashing out, you know, sort of like flailing in public, trying to get him to respond to her, respect her, trying to get favor with him.

Like, I mean, what he put her through financially, emotionally.

And the way he takes, I mean, X is obviously his favorite child, and he has latched on to X and brings X everywhere in the public eye, which she obviously doesn't like.

And it's like, it's this constant reminder of control.

And that's your child.

Imagine having your child, which you have to watch publicly be paraded around.

I do think we can be like, oh, this woman is problematic.

And also be like, oh, it's like so objectively horrifying that people online, everyone kind of agrees that Elon is carrying X around as like a human shield.

Imagine if that is your child and not only do you have to see everyone basically say that like your kid is going to get assassinated, which is not an impossible thing to happen, but also like his father is not letting you even see him.

Like it is so dystopian and horrifying.

What Grimes is living through is a straight up horror movie.

And what all of like Elon's baby, the women who have his children, what they're all living through is like a horror movie.

and they don't all have to be like good people for that to be the case.

The whole thing is wild.

It's like it feels very like palace intrigue-y, like you're seeing, you're getting this window into the lives of these people.

And I don't know what, how reflective that is of what's really going on inside.

But it does remind me also the last thing I wanted to say, which is, I don't know if you guys have seen that thread, and it's like someone on Twitter was creating like a version of Elon and all the women who are mothers of his children and comparing them to like a royal dynasty like tropes.

And they were like, Crimes is like his ultimate love, but she faces the worst punishment because she refuses to conform.

Siobhan is like the one who plays the game the best.

And she like, her son ultimately gets picked to be like the next person in line.

And like they're doing all the different women who Elon has been with.

And Grimes responded to this and was like, lol.

And I was just like, this is so sad.

This is dystopian.

it's like so reminiscent of historical fiction and how like kings have wives and concubines and all of this historical stuff and i'm like this isn't okay that this is happening and we shouldn't be like glorifying it or like treating it as it's just like palace intrigue about rich weird people like it's kind of like a

It's like an act of gender violence that's like happening in front of us involving the richest and most influential people in the world.

I think that ultimately the biggest story here is not really like whether or not Grimes is a person who is redeemable, but rather that Elon Musk is a person who is currently unaccountable.

And I think that what is like so often lost is that to consistently oppose abusers and to consistently support victims, that involves cases that are morally gray.

And I think that like it actually more frequently comes off morally gray than it comes off nice and easy because the victim is like so great and easy to support and the abuser is so easy to hold accountable.

Like, I think with these cases, they're so frequently framed as like the outliers because of how rich and famous and celebrity the people involved are.

And while I don't want to discount the role that like privilege and other, like all these different forms of privilege carry in this situation, one consistent theme throughout this episode has been like, what Grimes is experiencing, it's the same playbook, it's the same pattern as any abusive relationship.

Love bombing, like hiding who you really are, turning into a different person, the way that the courts and custody system have been weaponized against her.

These are things that every victim faces.

And so, it's never about like the individual victim and their strengths and weaknesses, but rather it's about what abuse is and what we can do about it.

And what we can do about it is we can like acknowledge it because you can walk away and be like, I still hate her.

I hate everything about her.

She's the worst person in the world.

As long as you are still like, but he is abusing her, that's like, that's a still positive step in the right direction.

Because we can't do anything about like victimhood and abuse if we can't even agree on a common definition of what victimhood and abuse are.

Aye, aye, aye.

What a ride.

What a ride.

Grimes, the web that you weave.

The web that you've been weaving since you sunk your alien claws in me 13 years and two months ago when I first heard Oblivion.

I certainly could not have predicted then that we'd all end up here now.

And you know, sometimes when I shut my eyes, I'm 15 again, in the closet, in my childhood bedroom, reblogging photos of you with some good old DIY bangs.

Take me back.

Taylor and Kat, thank you so, so much for being here today.

Thank you for having us.

I'm so glad we got to talk about this.

And thank you.

I don't know.

Maybe all of my episodes are this like roller coastery, but this, maybe it's because of my personal relationship to Grimes.

To be clear, a parasocial one, but one that I've been fostering for over a decade.

Maybe this just felt so heavy.

And, you know, I think objectively it is.

So thank you for making it this far.

If you have, thanks for listening to this podcast.

Once again, if you would like to experience the podcast live, experience our conversations live, and are in a city where we're doing a show, please come through.

I'm so excited.

Take care of yourself, please, so we can all see each other through the other side of this madness when it's over, and it will be.

I love you, and until next time, stay fruity.