Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Is Driving MAGA Nuts

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages)

FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL’S RELATIONSHIP with country music “sensation” Alexis Wilkins (his word, not mine) has infuriated a legion of right-wing media figures who once counted Patel as an ally.

Pro-Trump pundits don’t care much about the $5,000-per-hour jet he’s been taking to see Wilkins in Nashville. They don’t even seem bothered by the Wall Street Journal report that Patel also used the jet to visit a Texas hunting lodge implausibly named the “Boondoggle Ranch.”

Instead, they are getting fed up with Wilkins’s penchant for suing conservative commentators over their claims that she’s an Israeli intelligence “honeypot” who’s only dating Patel to control him on behalf of the Mossad.

“Kash Patel has to step down,” Candace Owens tweeted on Monday, in the wake of another round of Wilkins lawsuits. “This is excruciatingly embarrassing. He’s a teenager in love representing the Federal government.”

The baseless claims that Wilkins is a Mossad agent date back to the spring, when Patel and Dan Bongino, the FBI deputy director, started to tell eager Trump supporters that billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself.

The honeypot accusations got worse when the Justice Department, with Patel’s participation, abruptly decided to stop releasing Epstein files.

This abrupt about-face from Patel, who had claimed before taking office that the FBI was holding back a real Epstein client list, created a conundrum for his admirers. And, as is their wont, some seized on a truly conspiratorial explanation: that Epstein was, in reality, an Israeli agent and that Wilkins, nearly twenty years younger than Patel, was a Mossad agent trying to cover it up on Israel’s behalf.

The Mossad connection to Wilkins is thin, even by the standards of right-wing media conspiracy theories. For one, Wilkins is a Christian. Still, her critics have seized on her work for right-wing content outlet PragerU, whose CEO worked in Israeli military intelligence, as the sole piece of evidence that she’s a Mossad operative.

Wilkins hasn’t taken it quietly. Since the initial Epstein blowup, she has been filing lawsuits against right-wing media figures. In August, she sued former FBI agent and Patel nemesis Kyle Seraphin, who responded in a recent court filing that he was using “satire” and “hyperbole” when he suggested she was a honeypot.

But the real drama picked up this week, when far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer revealed that Wilkins sued him on October 28 for $5 million over his own post about the honeypot allegation. Wilkins also sued conspiracy theorist Samuel B. Parker for his own honeypot suggestion on October 31.

Schaffer isn’t taking the lawsuit quietly either. In a video posted Monday, he said he was being punished for criticizing Israel.

“This is a proxy lawsuit to bully me,” Schaffer said, accusing Patel of being the hidden hand behind his girlfriend’s case.

Neither the FBI nor Wilkins’s lawyer responded to requests for comment.

Wilkins’s lawsuit against Schaffer does seem remarkably thin. The sole piece of evidence that Schaffer suggested Wilkins is a honeypot agent was a September 14 tweet where Schaffer, without caption, posted a picture of the couple together. But he also quote-tweeted a post about Mossad operatives in Iran “seducing top officials”:

In the absence of actual examples of Schaffer calling Wilkins a honeypot agent, much of Wilkins’s complaint focuses on Schaffer’s criticism of Israel to make the point that his tweet has to be about the Mossad. To be clear, Schaffer is definitely antisemitic, and has made references to the “zog”—a neo-Nazi acronym for “Zionist Occupation Government.” But by including so much about Israel in her complaint Wilkins opened herself up to the claim that she’s just trying to punish Schaffer for opposing Israel.

“They’re suing me for the implications, based on previous posts I had made on my X account, not about Alexis, not about Kash, but about the state of Israel,” Schaffer said in his video.

The idea that the FBI director would try to quash criticism of Israel through a proxy lawsuit has caused outrage on the right, where attacks on that country and Jews more broadly are gaining currency. Standing up for Schaffer quickly became a cause célèbre, with manosphere figure “Zherka” posting a picture of Patel and Wilkins with the caption “She can’t bully all of us.”

“I’m being reradicalized,” wrote Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

Comedian Tim Dillon skewered Wilkins in a skit where he pretended to sing one of her country songs, while inserting praise for Israel. Photoshopped pictures of Wilkins in a beekeeper outfit, or with Patel as a honey-addled Winnie the Pooh circulated online. Even former Hercules star Kevin Sorbo, as mainline a MAGA celebrity as you can find, was concerned.

“So we can’t seem to get the Epstein files, but we can weaponize the justice system against Americans without evidence?” Sorbo wrote on X. “This is disturbing…”

Even figures on the far left have been hooked. Max Blumenthal, a hardened anti-Israel writer for the Grayzone, warned that Wilkins’s lawsuit could open Patel up to discovery: “He’s risking the Bureau’s opsec to save his relationship!”

Why didn’t Wilkins’s initial lawsuit against Seraphin kick up a similar furor? I think it’s because Seraphin is a former FBI agent whose audience skews toward boomer conservatives who are more focused on rooting out the Deep State and fretting about who got a promotion at which FBI field office.

Schaffer, on the other hand, is a journeyman racist with connections across right-wing media after working for the Gateway Pundit and the Blaze. Schaffer blew up his promising perch as a quasi-late-night host at the Blaze after allegedly sexually assaulting a coworker and inspiring a sexual harassment lawsuit from a separate coworker in 2022. After that, he went on to run The Rift, a YouTube channel where he regularly struggles to clear 1,000 views per video.

So while Schaffer is not exactly a widely beloved or even widely known figure on the right, Wilkins’s lawsuit against him was enough to enrage right-wing media’s insurgent anti-Israel and often antisemitic faction.

There are also enough bread crumbs to suggest that Patel is behind the suits. Wilkins’s lawyer in all three cases, Jesse Binnall, has also represented Patel and leads Patel’s charitable foundation. Moreover, the idea of Patel encouraging a defamation lawsuit isn’t unheard of—in an unrelated lawsuit filed against the FBI by former agents, one of them describes Patel urging him to sue Seraphin, who has criticized Patel, and even offering to connect the then-agent with a lawyer to launch the suit.

Wilkins riled up her critics even more by adopting left-coded “microaggression” language to defend her lawsuit. After the initial backlash to the Schaffer complaint, Wilkins reposted an Instagram message that criticized the headline of an article about the lawsuit that described her as “Kash Patel’s girlfriend.” Instead, the Instagram user whom Wilkins was approvingly quoting said that the country artist should have been described as an “American patriot, successful singer, and activist.”

“She has her own name and her own identity,” the post read. “Mainstream media’s talent for microaggressive belittling of women is relentless.”

So far, Schaffer has raised nearly $30,000 for his legal defense fund to deal with Wilkins’s lawsuit. But I wouldn’t say he’s playing his hand well, either. In a live discussion on X, he delivered a lengthy monologue aimed at Patel, speaking crudely about Wilkins and warning that the FBI director’s “little Indian ass” should back off. In a multimillion-dollar defamation battle that could hinge on proving that Schaffer has “actual malice” for Wilkins, that is not ideal!

Schaffer’s Rift TV colleague Sarah Stock, whom people may remember as the racist blonde woman from one of those Jubilee chair-debate videos, isn’t helping either.

In a YouTube video posted Tuesday night, Stock said Wilkins was Patel’s “concubine” and explained that their relationship was suspicious because they weren’t “looksmatched”—Gen-Z slang for an attractiveness gap within a couple. She added in a tweet that Patel was the “simp of the year.”

Both the tweet and video have since been taken offline. Maybe Wilkins scored a win after all!