Kash Patel, girlfriend announce engagement

FBI Director Kash Patel is engaged to Alexis Wilkins, the couple revealed Sunday.

“Went and got the law involved,” Wilkins wrote on social platform X , adding ring and heart emojis, tagging Patel and sharing a photo of the two featuring her wearing an engagement ring.

The FBI director responded to Wilkins using his personal account, posting the same emojis his fiancé did.

Patel, 46, began dating 27-year-old Wilkins in early 2023. The FBI director’s fiancé is a country music singer who has appeared in a handful of TV shows and movies.

Democratic lawmakers have criticized Patel during his tenure leading the FBI for flying on government-owned planes for private travel , including when he attended sporting events with Wilkins.

Wilkins in May filed a lawsuit alleging MS NOW reporters Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian defamed her with a report they wrote last year claiming that Patel directed a security detail to escort one of her friends home after a night of drinking.

In the report, which MS NOW published in December , Leonnig and Dilanian wrote Patel told the security detail protecting Wilkins to “escort one of her allegedly inebriated friends home after a night of partying” in Nashville.

“Defendants falsely asserted that Ms. Wilkins demanded, and Director Patel ordered, that federal agents assigned to her security detail — which did not even exist at the time — escort an intoxicated friend home after a ‘night of partying,’” lawyers for Wilkins wrote in a 16-page complaint they filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.

“They falsely portrayed Ms. Wilkins as being intoxicated even knowing that she does not drink,” the complaint added.

Wilkins sought more than $75,000 in damages from MS NOW. Attorneys for Versant, the media outlet’s parent company, filed a motion last month to move the case to federal court in Washington, D.C., and argued Wilkins has failed to make her case for why Leonnig and Dilanian defamed her.

A day later, U.S. District Judge Eli Richardson, an appointee of President Trump to the Middle District of Tennessee, scheduled a jury trial in the case for May 2028.