You’ve probably heard about Kash Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins. And one of the reasons she has been in the news is because of an MSNOW story published last December which claimed that Director Patel was having FBI agents escort her friends home because they were drunk. The story by Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian is still up on the MSNOW website. Here’s a bit of it.
FBI Director Kash Patel has — on more than one occasion — ordered that the security detail protecting his girlfriend escort one of her allegedly inebriated friends home after a night of partying in Nashville, according to three people with knowledge of the incidents.
Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, asked FBI agents on her security team at least two times, including once this spring, to drive her friend home, and agents objected to diverting from their assignment, said the sources, who were granted anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters. But Patel insisted they do as Wilkins requested and in one case called the leader of Wilkins’ security detail and yelled at him to do so…
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson broadly disputed that such events took place.
“This is made up and did not happen,” Williamson said…
Former FBI agents and senior law enforcement officials said it was already disturbing that Patel had pulled elite tactical agents away from their SWAT mission to drive his girlfriend around town. But they told MS NOW they were shocked that the director instructed tactical agents to use their time on yet another person the FBI had no reasonable duty to protect.
In her lawsuit filed today, Wilkins claims she has been defamed and that the allegations in the story are “entirely false.”
This is entirely false. Director Patel has never ordered any FBI agent or member of Ms. Wilkins’ security detail to escort any of Ms. Wilkins’ friends home— inebriated or otherwise—nor did Ms. Wilkins ask any of them to do so. Not only did these supposed demands/orders never take place, but the entire scenario is fabricated. No FBI agents have ever escorted any of Ms. Wilkins’ friends home.
Defendants claimed in the Article that the substance of their defamatory allegations supposedly occurred in Spring 2025. Notably, Ms. Wilkins did not have a security detail at that time. Defendants were aware of this…
On December 2, 2025—three days prior to publication of the Article at issue in this case—Defendant Dilanian reached out to FBI spokesman, Ben Williamson, to obtain comment on the accusation that Ms. Wilkins’ detail had been diverted to escort her friends home. Defendants grossly misrepresented and diminished the FBI’s response in the Article, writing:
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson did not answer questions about multiple inside accounts of Wilkins’ detail being diverted, but broadly denied such events took place.
“This is made up and did not happen,” Williamson said.
You may notice that those lines from the original story are slightly different than the ones I quoted above. A footnote in the lawsuit explains why. “Since its original publication, Defendants have stealth-edited the Article, without any acknowledgement of the change. In the current online version, the sentence reads: ‘FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson broadly disputed that such events took place.'”
The lawsuit also includes a text exchange between the FBI spokesman and Ken Dilanian in which Dilanian either could not or would not provide any information on who allegedly got an FBI ride home or even a date when this allegedly happened.
WILLIAMSON: This detail thing you emailed about looks like it’s made up. I just checked. No record of it anywhere and Alexis, who doesn’t even drink, said it’s not true. As did Director. Do you have any more details? General date? Who is the friend? Anything.
DILANIAN: Stand by
WILLIAMSON: Do you not have this info already?
DILANIAN: Just to be clear no one is saying Alexis was drunk. We don’t have the details you are looking for but we are comfortable with our sourcing. So just looking for your official comment.
WILLIAMSON: So you have no name, no date range, no nothing – just comfortable with your sourcing. Are you serious? Respectfully
It’s hard to make a more specific denial when the article doesn’t offer any specifics. And the claim that Williamson did not answer questions is obvious wrong, which is why the stealth edited it out of the story. According to the lawsuit, Dilanian did have more specific information but didn’t relay it because it would have allowed the FBI to conclusively dismiss this as false.
Additionally, Defendant Dilanian lied to the FBI in the text exchange, falsely claiming that he had no information on the general date of the alleged incident. Had Dilanian provided the Spring timeframe for the allegation, the FBI could, and would have even more conclusively refuted the story by pointing out that Ms. Wilkins had no security detail at that time. Defendants, in calculated fashion, avoided that truth. They knew about the recent assignment of Ms. Wilkins’ detail by virtue of their own November 17 article. They knew that if they were to give the FBI the Spring timeframe, it would result in more than just the “official comment” they were looking to get and would derail their desired narrative.
Wilkins is asking for damages in excess of $75,000 and a jury trial. MSNOW is standing behind their reporting.
In response to a request for comment, MS NOW President Rebecca Kutler said in a statement: “We stand firmly behind MS NOW’s reporting. As a general matter of practice, we don’t comment on ongoing legal matters.”
This may be the first time MSNOW has been sued for defamation but it’s predecessor MSNBC settled a case (which it would have lost in court) just over a year ago.
In January, 2025 the site was sued over a false story that referred to a doctor working at a migrant detention center as a “uterus collector.” They suggested this doctor was carrying out unneeded surgeries on women under his care. That story was written by Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley and then given a boost by Rachel Maddow.
A month later MSNBC settled the lawsuit. Part of the settlement was obviously an agreement not to publicly discuss the terms of the settlement so we never learned how much MSNBC had to pay, but we do know the doctor was seeking $30 million after having his name falsely dragged through the mud.
So we’ll have to wait to see how this plays out but this story does remind me of another case of bogus reporting that got MSNBC in trouble.
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