The girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, country singer Alexis Wilkins, has filed a defamation lawsuit against MS Now for a report the outlet published alleging Patel had ordered Wilkins’s security detail to give her friends a ride home.
The outlet, formerly MSNBC, published a report in December 2025 based on three anonymous sources that Patel had, more than once, called the members of Wilkins’s security detail and requested they give rides home to her friends after nights of drinking in Nashville, Tennessee. The FBI vehemently denied the report’s allegations, calling them made-up.
Wilkins is now suing MS Now and the story’s two reporters, Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, filing the 16-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, alleging defamation and false-light invasion of privacy against the defendants. Wilkins’s lawyers wrote in the complaint that MS Now published the piece “using sham ‘anonymous’ sources to push knowingly or recklessly false allegations.”
“This was hogwash and they knew it,” Wilkins’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Journalists cannot avoid accountability by hiding behind fabricated ‘anonymous’ sources. This lawsuit seeks to bring accountability for Defendants’ egregious lies.”
“Ms. Wilkins neither requested, nor did Director Patel order (much less yell at), any federal agent to escort any of Ms. Wilkins’ friends home (intoxicated or otherwise),” the complaint reads. “Ms. Wilkins does not even consume alcohol, and she did not have a security detail in Spring 2025.”
Wilkins’s lawyers denied the outlet’s reporting in the complaint and also said there were complications with the timeline of the report. Wilkins’s lawyers note that the article alleges Patel requested one of these rides home in the spring of 2025, while also pointing to a separate MS Now story that broke the news of the existence of Wilkins’s security detail in November 2025. Wilkins’s complaint reads that during the alleged spring incident, “Ms. Wilkins did not have a security detail at that time” and argues “Defendants were aware of this.”
“Defendants had previously published, on November 17, 2025, an entire article about Ms. Wilkins’ security detail,” the complaint reads. “Defendants were the first to break that story as Ms. Wilkins had only then been recently assigned a detail, necessary due to credible death threats made against her.”
MS Now defended themselves against the lawsuit, saying in a statement to the Washington Examiner, “We stand firmly behind MS NOW’s reporting. As a general matter of practice, we don’t comment on ongoing legal matters.”
Wilkins lives in Nashville, where the lawsuit was filed, for her career in country music.
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Wilkins is seeking damages of no less than $75,000. The case has been assigned to Trump-nominated Judge Eli Jeremy Richardson.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to MS Now for comment.