I absolutely would have never called Unsworth pedo guy in any public conversation. There’s no evidence at all that inference is justified. His Thai wife is an adult woman.
I admit the association of foreign, middle aged, white men taking sex trips to Thailand is very strong. Sadly teen & even younger prostitutes in Thailand and other countries has been a concern for decades. I’ve been told they were readily available in Vietnam during the war years. It was such a problem that a US law passed making it a crime to travel overseas for the purposes of seeing under age prostitutes.
It certainly doesn’t mean Unsworth did anything wrong. I still couldn’t help but wonder about his presence in Thailand. Thankfully nothing scandalous came out. That would have been the end of it until Musk and Unsworth got into a war of words.
Musk was dumb enough to mention publicly what others were privately thinking. It’ll cost him a few million.
**Unsworth was not a cave diver. He had explored and mapped the caves while they were dry.
I’ve never been to Thailand myself, but I understand it’s a very popular travel destination, especially for folks from Australia and New Zealand, with lots of interesting cultural sites, food, beaches, etc. If I heard about someone going on vacation there without any other context, I wouldn’t assume they were there for sex tourism any more than I would assume an American going on vacation to Mexico was going there for the drugs.
We can assume that if there was any shred of evidence to back up Musk’s allegation, Musk would have found it. He must have had investigators on the case.
Musk has simply demonstrated how arrogant and immature he is. Unsworth insulted his useless submarine and said it was just a PR stunt. Obviously that hit a nerve, and Musk hit back with a groundless personal insult. And then compounded it by taunting Unsworth to sue him.
I hope the jury awards Unsworth a very large amount of money.
That association is understandable, but easily dismissed if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
Out of all the foreign, middle-aged white men who are present in Thailand at any given moment, the ones most likely to show up in your news feed are the few who are pedos.
Non-pedo white men in Thailand almost never will show up in your news feed, because the vast majority of them aren’t doing anything newsworthy.
The overrepresentation of foreign, middle-aged white pedos in your news feed does not mean that any random foreign middle-aged white man you care to point to in Thailand has a high likelihood of being a pedo.
The kind of shallow thinking that leads people to reflexively think “pedo” whenever they see a white dude in Thailand is the same sort of shallow thinking that allows a lot of racism to persist.
It’ll be up to a jury to decide on Unsworth’s actual damages, and punitive damages against Musk. I hope Unsworth pursues his case to judgment instead of settling.
I have some prejudices against westerners who marry East-Asian women, but I don’t assume they are pedophiles or think absolutely all of them are creeps. I have much stronger prejudices against white South Africans.
In my experience, if you call someone a motherfucker you are accusing them of being a jerk, if you call someone a cocksucker you are accusing them of being a jerk, and if you call someone a pedo you are accusing them of having sex with small children. No equivalence.
The claims that it was just an general curse word might have held up, if not for the fact that Musk doubled down on the accusations later. He claimed that Unsworth had moved to Chiang Rai “for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time,” and told a journalist to “stop defending child rapists”. (Source.)
The only westerners I know in person who have married East-Asian women are perfectly nice guys who happened to meet someone while vacationing or working there and fell in love.
But through my lifetime I’ve also noticed all the stories of more flawed men who have specifically sought out East-Asian women online or in person on “vacation” because they were unable to find a wife at home who would put up with them or where they lived. There are rural areas of Norway were every other farm has a someone pitiful farmer married to a much younger Thai woman.
Combined with the prevalent image of some nations as “sex tourism destinations” (the search results when I tried to find an English language article describing the Norwegian phenomenon mentioned were horrendous) this has given me some prejudices, even if I know they are only partially deserved.
For people like Unsworth who actually live in Thailand I probably have stronger prejudices against expats. (Like with pedophiles, it’s the “I don’t like foreigners destroying my country so I moved abroad” kind that more often make the news.)
And notice I’m comparing prejudices here. Stronger doesn’t mean strong. Having prejudices is normal.
As an American I was aware of the sex trade reputation long before I was aware of its other attributes as a tourist destination. Now I’m aware of its beauty, beaches and resorts. I’m a lot less likely to jump to a conclusion now.
It IS possible to meet an East-Asian woman in the US. Something I had to repeatedly explain to people who, like you, assumed we met in Korea. Usually “When were you stationed in Korea?” was the first question.