Meet the MP suing the richest man in the world

Earlier this year, online trolls used Grok, xAI’s chatbot, to create disturbing sexualised images of Jess Asato. She tells Radhika Sanghani about her decision to take on Elon Musk

- 

Jess Asato, the 45-year-old Labour MP for Lowestoft, is no stranger to online abuse.

“It’s just such a big part of what you have to deal with,” she says. “I’ve had people say, ‘You’ll be the first up against the wall when it comes to judgment day.’ I’ve had people send me pictures of handguns. And then lots of just gendered language: bitch, slut, whore. It’s nothing unusual. You can go on any female MP’s account today and you will see all of that happening in front of you.”

It’s a depressing reality that female MPs bear the brunt of online abuse. More than 4,000 crimes against MPs have been reported since 2019, with female and ethnic minority MPs subjected to the greatest number of threats, according to a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Earlier this month, a 59-year-old man was convicted of sending a “grossly offensive” email to Asato, in which he threatened that she and her children would die “horrendous deaths”.

But earlier this year, Asato found herself the victim of a new kind of online abuse that made her feel deeply violated. After speaking up in January about xAI and Grok being used to create millions of non-consensual intimate images of women and even children, Asato became a victim of exactly what she was calling out.