Kash Patel's Girl Friend Wants Fame and Fortune and to Keep the Escort of Swat FBI Team

Alexis Wilkins with Kash Patel as he is sworn in as F.B.I. director at the White House in February 2025.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

 By Elizabeth Williamson

Reporting from Washington and Dixon, Ill.

New York Times

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.

Four people pose for photos on a small red carpet.

Alexis Wilkins (left), Cheryl Hines, Daphne Barak and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the “Starry Starry Night 

Gala” at Chaparral Country Club in Palm Desert, Calif.Credit...Andy Abeyta/The Desert Sun, via Imagn

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.

Three people performing on a stage outdoors.

Ms. Wilkins performing in 2023 onstage outside Fiserv Forum before a Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee.Credit...Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Image

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 woman in a striped suit has a microphone in one hand and is giving a thumbs up with the other hand. An American flag is behind her.

Ms. Wilkins performing at an event at Louisiana State University last October in Baton Rouge, La.Credit...Gage Skidmore/Zuma Press, via Shutterstock

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.”