‘I Was Terrified’: 22-Year-Old Tells CNN His Life Was Ruined After Elon Musk Amplified Conspiracy Theory About Him
Ben Brody, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who is suing Twitter owner Elon Musk, told CNN that the billionaire ruined his life after Musk amplified a conspiracy theory which alleged Brody was part of a false flag event.
After Brody was incorrectly identified on social media as a man who was involved in a far-right brawl, he received harassment online and was accused of being a federal agent.
Brody told CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan, “I started getting these text messages from my friends. ‘You’re accused of being a neo-Nazi fed, look at all this stuff that’s being said about you.’ And I was like, okay, this is just some prank.”
O’Sullivan explained, “The person in the video resembled Ben, but even though it definitely was not him, the trolls thought they had found their man. They pulled information from Ben’s fraternity page, which said after graduation he plans to work for the government, and turned that into a lie that he was a federal agent who was infiltrating the extremist group to make them look bad. A so-called false flag operation.”
O’Sullivan noted that while Brody released time-stamped CCTV footage, which showed him hundreds of miles away in California at the time of the brawl near Portland, he continued to be harassed online and even received the attention of Musk, who tweeted, “Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation.”
Brody told CNN, “I knew that this was snowballing, but once Elon Musk commented, I was like boom, that’s the final nail in the coffin.”
After O’Sullivan asked, “And how much does it intensify then after Musk’s involvement?” Brody replied, “It massively intensifies it. This guy DM’d me on Instagram, he’s like, ‘Now even Elon Musk thinks that you’re a fed,’ and what was really scary too is that these people were threatening to tell my school, and I was scared that I wasn’t going to graduate.”
“I was terrified,” Brody continued, revealing that one social media user even posted his address and a photo of his house online.
Asked whether he thought his “life was ruined” following the incident, Brody — who is Jewish — replied, “Yeah, completely… If you just put in my name into the search bar, you know, ‘neo-Nazi fed Ben Brody.'”
Brody’s attorney Mark Bankston told CNN, “This case, at its core, is about Elon Musk being reckless in making an accusation about this young man… Ben published a video online to try to clear his name. It didn’t work. So there’s this incredible feeling of helplessness, that there’s millions out there, millions, who think that Ben was involved in neo-Nazi activities.”
Bankston questioned, “How did we get to a place where somebody so powerful can make that kind of accusation based on something so flimsy, from just anonymous people on the internet?”
Watch above via CNN.
