“X” Owner Elon Musk to Pay Legal Bills of Canadian Pediatrician in Libel Lawsuit Over Free Speech Censorship
- by Rishma Parpia
- Published
- Cultural Values
Canadian pediatrician Kulvinder Kauer Gill, MD has been given a helping hand by entrepreneur Elon Musk, owner of “X” (formerly Twitter), who volunteered to pay her legal bill in a libel lawsuit against the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CSPO) in Canada.
In 2021, the CPSO, which is a regulatory body that grants licenses to practice medicine in Canada, warned Dr. Gill, whose pediatric practice is based in Brampton, Ontario, about her tweets opposing COVID-19 policies on the social media platform Twitter. Gill had made statements saying COVID shots were necessary since most people had natural immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.1 She said was no scientific rationale for keeping people at home to prevent transmission of the virus.2
Doctors, academics and journalists criticized her for her opinions opposing COVID shot mandates and lockdowns. Consequently, she filed a $12-million libel suit against 23 defendants to clear her name from what she described as “spurious defamation.” She said she was harassed and experienced censorship for opposing Ontario’s COVID policies.
Justice Elizabeth Stewart struck down Gill’s lawsuit and told Gill to pay the defendants $1.1 million in legal costs. Gill appealed the decision and high court cost order, which resulted in a lower cost order of nearly $300,000 in February 2024.3
Elon Musk Offers to Pay Gill’s Legal Costs
In November 2022, Gill was ordered by the court to pay $300,000 by the end of March 2024. She said she did not have the funds, and went on to create a crowd-funding campaign asking for $300,000 to help pay for legal costs.4 A statement on the crowd-funding website which helped raised funds read:
Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill is a frontline physician in Ontario, Canada who supports fully informed voluntary consent without any forms of coercion or restriction in all medical decision-making. She is a long-time advocate for patient autonomy, evidence-based decision-making, protection of the patient-doctor relationship, and an accessible, quality healthcare system.5
With respect to the court order, Gill stated:
Everything I warned about in 2020, which at the time was based on peer-reviewed evidence, has now come to pass. It’s been absolutely heart wrenching and devastating watching the carnage unfold. And being helpless. Because it was all completely preventable. It seems that advocating for the truth and advocating for that scientific evidence to come forward has come at a huge cost.6
A few days prior to the court order deadline, Gill tagged multi-billionaire Musk, who had purchased Twitter in October 2002 and renamed it ‘X,” in a post on X asking him for help saying she owed $300,000 in legal costs that were due in four days. A few days later, Gill made an announcement stating that Musk reached out to her and committed to paying the remainder of her crowd-funding campaign and helping her appeal the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ cautions on her record from 2021.7
In August 2023, Musk had posted on X promising to fund the legal costs of anyone who was “unfairly treated” by their employer as a result of posting or liking something on the X platform. He said there is no limit on what he would pay in legal costs.8 On Mar. 24, 2024, the company stated in a post on X:
X is proud to help defend Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill against the government-supported efforts to cancel her speech… Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and a critical defense against totalitarianism in all forms. We must do whatever we can to protect it, and at X we will always fight to protect your right to speak freely.
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