Grimes sues Elon Musk to establish parental rights with her 3 children

Out Canadian musician Grimes is suing Elon Musk over their three children.

According to the San Francisco Standard, Claire Boucher, known professionally as Grimes, filed a petition to establish parental relationship on September 29. While the court filings have not been made public, the paper reports that the petition amounts to a request for a court order to identify the legal parents of a child.

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Grimes has not requested custody rights or child support, but Deborah Dubroff, a family attorney, told the Standard that the “driving force” behind a petition to establish a parental relationship is often a need for custody orders or child support.

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Grimes and Musk have three children together, X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, and Tau Techno Mechanicus.

The couple went public with their relationship in 2018, after connecting on Twitter, which Musk renamed X after acquiring the social media platform in 2022. They reportedly separated in September 2021. At the time, Grimes joked that she wanted to start a “lesbian space commune.” After she and Musk reconnected and separated again in 2022, Grimes was rumored to be dating WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Last month, the existence of Musk and Grimes’s youngest child, Tau, was revealed in journalist Walter Isaacson’s biography of the tech billionaire. The same week, Grimes reportedly responded to a tweet from Isaacson, asking the author to “Tell Shivon to unblock me and tell Elon to let me see my son or plz respond to my lawyer. I have never even been allowed to see a photo of these children until this moment, despite the situation utterly ripping my family apart.”

The since-deleted tweet appeared to be referring to Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Musk’s neurotech company Neuralink, with whom Musk had twins who were reportedly born weeks before his second child with Grimes was born via surrogate. Grimes later released a statement saying that she had spoken with Zilis and the two were “excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together.”

Musk is also the father of several other children, including 19-year-old Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is transgender and estranged from her billionaire father. Wilson filed court papers in 2022 to legally change her gender and her last name because, in her words, she no longer wished “to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

Since then, Musk has ramped up his attacks on the transgender community, posting on X this past June that he would be “actively lobbying to criminalize” gender-affirming care for trans youth. In April, X quietly revoked a policy that protected transgender people from deliberate misgendering and deadnaming, and Musk has said that the terms “cis” and “cisgender” would be considered “slurs” on the platform.

In August, Grimes told Wired magazine that Musk’s transphobia stems from his concerns over “fertility issues” caused by gender-affirming medications.