Kash Patel’s
Girlfriend Seeks Fame and Fortune, Escorted by an F.B.I. SWAT Team
Former F.B.I. officials say Mr. Patel
beefed up field office staffing near his girlfriend in Nashville and ordered a
team to ferry her on errands and to events.
Reporting from Washington and Dixon, Ill.
Feb. 28, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
You may never have heard of Alexis
Wilkins, but she is one of the best-protected country music singers in the
United States. F.B.I. tactical agents have ferried her to a resort in Britain
before a dinner at Windsor Castle and to an appointment at a hair salon in
Nashville. Last April, agents in two SUVs stood guard outside a senior center
in Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home of Dixon, Ill., while she sang for a few dozen
young conservatives.
Ms. Wilkins, 27, is the girlfriend of
Kash Patel, President Trump’s 46-year-old F.B.I. director, whose personal use
of government jets and F.B.I. agents for himself and Ms. Wilkins has led to
growing questions even inside the Trump administration.
“When Kash got confirmed, life changed
for her,” said Dianna Muller, the founder of the group Women for Gun Rights,
which briefly employed Ms. Wilkins as a spokeswoman.
To an extent not previously reported,
Ms. Wilkins is escorted in her travels by Special Weapons and Tactics team
members drawn from F.B.I. field offices around the country. SWAT teams are
chiefly trained to arrest violent criminals, free hostages and thwart
terrorists. But Mr. Patel’s demand that rotating SWAT teams provide his
girlfriend with security for singing appearances, personal engagements and
errands is unprecedented in the F.B.I., former agents said.
Ben Williamson, an F.B.I. spokesman,
said in a statement that Ms. Wilkins needed full-time SWAT protection because
“as a direct result of her relationship with Director Patel, she is facing more
than a dozen active death threats,” including some of a graphically violent
nature. Last November, he told The Times that
the death threats numbered in the “hundreds.”
Cabinet and congressional spouses do
not routinely receive full-time government security details. After Paul Pelosi,
the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a position second in line to the
presidency, was attacked in the couple’s California home, it emerged that the
Capitol Police had placed security cameras at the house, but no personnel.
Soon after becoming F.B.I. director
last February, Mr. Patel beefed up staffing in Nashville, where Ms. Wilkins
lives, then assigned a SWAT team composed of four agents and two vehicles to
protect her full-time, said an F.B.I. official briefed on the plans. Mr. Patel
overrode F.B.I. advice that such an unprecedented arrangement first undergo a
legal review, the official said.
Past directors’ spouses were protected
while traveling with them, but did not get a personal government detail. .
Christopher O’Leary, a former senior
executive in the F.B.I.’s counterterrorism division, said that while threats
could temporarily change that posture, it was unheard-of for the F.B.I. to
provide open-ended, around-the-clock SWAT coverage for a girlfriend living in
another city. “If you want to be a celebrity or a social media star, get your
own security,” he said in an interview. “The inappropriateness of this cannot
be overstated.”
Mr. O’Leary said Ms. Wilkins’s detail
was emblematic of what he characterized as Mr. Patel’s abuse of government
resources intended to keep agency officials safe: his use of F.B.I. jets for
vacations, dates and hybrid business and leisure trips, like his visit to Italy
last week, where he partied with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team.
Last month, a three-man SWAT team
fanned out at a fund-raiser at the Chaparral Country Club in Palm Desert,
Calif., where Ms. Wilkins sang the national anthem and posed for red carpet photos with
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Cheryl Hines. Afterward,
agents drove Ms. Wilkins 135 miles to Los Angeles International Airport,
according to a person briefed on the arrangements.
Last May, Mr. Patel attended a secret
national security conference at an exclusive resort outside London, and invited
Ms. Wilkins to join him at a group dinner with King Charles III at Windsor
Castle. The Royalty and Specialist Protection service balked at fetching her
from the airport, so the F.B.I. scrambled tactical agents and an embassy
vehicle, according to a person with knowledge of the plan.
Ms. Wilkins declined to be interviewed
on the record for this article and criticized reporting for it on her X
account. But Mr. Patel has defended their travel arrangements.
“If I was actually abusing it, I would
go see every one of her shows,” Mr. Patel said on a podcast with Katie Miller,
the wife of Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deportation mastermind, as Ms. Wilkins
smiled alongside him.
Last fall, he defended Ms. Wilkins
after critics highlighted his use of a government jet on a trip to a wrestling
event at Penn State University, where she sang the national anthem, and then to
Nashville. “She is a rock-solid conservative and a country music sensation who
has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes,” Mr. Patel wrote on X.
A MAGA First Meeting
Ms. Wilkins met Mr. Patel in the fall
of 2022 at a party in the Nashville home of the country music artist John Rich.
The event was to celebrate the release of Mr. Rich’s “Progress” on Mr. Trump’s
Truth Social platform.
Mr. Patel, who had been a Trump aide
in the president’s first term, was at the time a Truth Social consultant
opining on conservative podcasts and selling “K$H” branded merchandise and
children’s books praising “King Donald.”
Ms. Wilkins, who was struggling to
start a country music career, lived in Nashville and was brought to the party
by a publicist in an effort to make new contacts, according to a person who was
there.
Mr. Patel complimented Ms. Wilkins on
the jacket she was wearing that night, he told Ms. Miller on her podcast. By
early 2023, he and Ms. Wilkins were dating.
Ms. Wilkins, the daughter of a
financial specialist in the aerospace industry (her mother) and a global
consumer products executive for Gillette (her father), had lived in London and
Switzerland, and for a time attended elementary school at Collège du Léman in
Geneva. She is originally from the Boston suburb of Weymouth, but likes to
emphasize her time living in Arkansas.
“There are just some things the
limousine liberal will never understand from the coasts,” she recently wrote.
As a child, she sought work as an
actor in Los Angeles, where a high point was appearing in small parts in two
episodes of the sitcom “Modern Family.”
She began her music career in earnest
after her 2020 graduation from Belmont University, a private Christian school
in Nashville. Her 2020 debut single, “Holdin’ On,” was a ballad about family
and the love of “true friends who really know who I am.” She wrote the song
with the country singer-songwriter Mitch Rossell, who went on to open for Garth
Brooks, the country music superstar. These days, Ms. Wilkins’s country music
website says “NO UPCOMING SHOWS,” but she does a brisk business singing
patriotic songs at conservative gatherings.
“I would say she is an amateur, maybe
an aspiring country music artist,” said the longtime country music critic Kyle
Coroneos, of SavingCountryMusic.com. On the national anthem, “I’d probably give
her a 7.5 on a 10 scale,” he said.
A Star-Spangled Planner
Ms. Wilkins’s and Mr. Patel’s
relationship became better known in Washington in early 2025, when she sat in
the gallery during Mr. Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing. She held the copy
of the Bhagavad Gita he used when he was sworn in.
Within weeks of Mr. Trump’s
re-election, Ms. Wilkins got a job as press secretary for Representative
Abraham Hamadeh, a friend of Mr. Patel’s and a conservative freshman
congressman from Arizona who supported Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020
election had been stolen. She left after a month.
Last April, she went to work for Women
for Gun Rights as the director of strategic communications, but lasted only
three months.
“She didn’t have the bandwidth,” said
the group’s founder, Ms. Muller, who is under a nondisclosure agreement and
declined to elaborate, except to say, “I’m too busy to think much about her.”
Newly styling herself as a “political commentator, country
music artist and consultant,” Ms. Wilkins has increasingly used her
social media accounts to criticize undocumented immigrants, their defenders,
college liberals, “leftist” media and Alex Pretti, the V.A. nurse killed by federal
agents in Minneapolis. Beginning a day after Mr. Pretti’s
killing, Ms. Wilkins referred to him on X as a “domestic terrorist,” an “idiot”
and a “vigilante.”
Ms. Wilkins told Megyn Kelly that she
is an online proxy target for people angry at Mr. Patel for, among other
things, delays and redactions in releasing the F.B.I. files on Jeffrey Epstein,
the convicted sex offender.
She is suing three conservative
influencers for defamation, seeking at least $5 million from each for airing
what she calls lies that she is a “honey pot” spy, paid by Israeli intelligence
to extract state secrets from Mr. Patel.
On recent podcasts she has complained
about both the country music industry and Belmont University for being too
woke, which is not a typical critique of either institution.
But in a post on X on Super Bowl
Sunday, she portrayed marketing materials for the Bad Bunny halftime show as
“fantastic” and “super aesthetic” branding for Democrats. After harsh pushback from the right, she
said she had been misunderstood.
“I didn’t watch Bad Bunny’s
performance at all,” she wrote on X the next morning. “My point was that we
can’t give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election.”
