Elon Musk has weighed in on the parenting controversy surrounding Megan Fox, after the actor was accused by Republican politician Robby Starbuck of forcing her sons to “wear girls clothes”.

On 8 June, former GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck tweeted a paparazzi photo of Fox and her three children: Noah, 10, Bodhi, nine and Journey, six. The image showed her eldest son Noah wearing a pink long-sleeved T-shirt and tie-dye shorts, while Bodhi and Journey were dressed in dark T-shirts and trousers.

“These are Megan Fox’s sons. We used to live in the same gated community and our kids played at the park,” Starbuck captioned the tweet. “I saw two of them have a full on breakdown saying they were forced by their mom to wear girls clothes as their nanny tried to console them. It’s pure child abuse. Pray for them.

The Transformers star then clapped back at Starbuck’s claims of “child abuse” when she posted a screenshot of his tweet to Instagram. “Hey @robbystarbuck I really don’t want to give you this attention because clearly you’re a clout chaser. But let me teach you something,” the 37-year-old actor began her post. “Irregardless [sic] of how desperate you may have become at any given time to acquire wealth, power, success or fame – never use children as leverage or social currency. Especially under malevolent and erroneous pretense.”

“Exploiting my child’s gender identity to gain attention in your political campaign has put you on the wrong side of the universe,” the mother-of-three said. “I have been burned at the stake by insecure, narcissistic, impotent little men like you many times and yet I’m still here. You f***ed with the wrong witch.”

Now, it seems that Twitter owner Elon Musk has sided with Starbuck, who ran in the Republican primary for Tennessee’s fifth district in 2022. On 11 June, Musk appeared to reference Fox’s response to Starbuck when he tweeted: “Looking to hire a VP of Witchcraft & Propaganda”

In the replies to Musk’s tweet, one user said that Fox was the “girl” for the job’.

“She is bad at propaganda though,” another Twitter user replied, to which the Tesla CEO wrote back: “Nobody is perfect”

Meanwhile, Brian Austin Green – Fox’s ex-husband and the father of her three children – has come to his ex-wife’s defence. In a statement to TMZ, the 49-year-old actor refuted Starbuck’s claims that he saw Fox’s children “have a full on breakdown” and his allegations of child abuse.

“It’s a totally bogus story,” Green told TMZ. “There are only a few people in their world that can actually verify wether [sic] or not a story like this is true and I can tell you with absolute certainty it is not. This person trying to claim this is true is a perfect example of someone with selfish motives that does not care about negatively affecting a parent child relationship.”

The Beverly Hills, 90210 alum added: “As a society I hope we continue to push to be better. This Robby Starbuck person is full of s***, and I have no idea who he is.”

Green and Fox were married for nearly 10 years before separating in 2020. In January 2022, Fox became engaged to singer Machine Gun Kelly.

Fox has previously spoken about raising her and Green’s children as gender neutral as possible. In a 2019 interview with The Talk, she shared how her eldest son Noah was mocked by his classmates for wearing dresses to school. She explained that her then six-year-old son often opts for dresses when he picks out his own clothes, and said that she’s trying to teach her son “to be confident no matter what anyone else says”.

“He’s really into fashion. He’s the one, like sometimes, he’ll dress himself and he likes to wear dresses, sometimes,” Fox said. “And I send him to a really liberal, like hippy school. But even there, here in California, he still has little boys going like, ‘Boys don’t wear dresses,’ or ‘Boys don’t wear pink’.”

Speaking to Glamour in April 2022, Fox also detailed the conversations she had with her eldest son about gender identity. “Noah started wearing dresses when he was about two, and I bought a bunch of books that sort of addressed these things and addressed a full spectrum of what this is,” Fox told the magazine.

“Some of the books are written by transgender children. Some of the books are just about how you can be a boy and wear a dress; you can express yourself through your clothing however you want,” she said. “And that doesn’t even have to have anything to do with your sexuality. So from the time they were very young, I’ve incorporated those things into their daily lives so that nobody feels like they are weird or strange or different.”