FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend has tried to come to his rescue amid claims she was left grasping another man’s hand during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.
“I was only ever holding Kash’s hand; anything to suggest otherwise is false,” Patel’s 27-year-old girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, told the Daily Mail on Wednesday, lashing out at the “sick” New York Times for its reporting.
Forty-four minutes after shots first rang out at the Washington Hilton, the newspaper’s White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh posted an account of the immediate aftermath of the shooting on the Times’ live blog, writing, “Pandemonium reigned as top cabinet officials were evacuated.”
“Robert Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Cheryl Hines, came out and were ushered into an elevator. Then Jeanine Pirro emerged. The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, came tearing across the hallway with two men in tow; his girlfriend was hiding in a room with another man who was holding her hand,” wrote McCreesh, who was reporting as part of the White House press pool and said he had been “in a hall just outside the ballroom when the commotion first rang out.”
The Times has since updated the post for “additional context” to state that Wilkins “was in a nearby room with a man who appeared to be a member of a security detail and who was holding her hand.”
Wilkins, an aspiring country singer, accused the Times of pushing a “salacious” narrative about her relationship with Patel, 46, which has already drawn scrutiny over reports he used FBI resources in questionable ways for her benefit.
“It is sick for the New York Times to have used this time after a perceived active shooting as a political tool,” she told the Mail. “They will stop at nothing to push a narrative out that’s damaging to people they’ve determined they dislike,” she told the Daily Mail.
Wilkins claimed she was in a holding room with Patel, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and his wife. She said the room’s door was locked.
“The thing that’s really interesting about all of this is that never happened at all,” she claimed. “I was never in a different holding room outside of the holding room that I was in with Kash. I was sitting there with the acting attorney general and his wife, Kristine, and never held anyone’s hand.”
The Times told the Daily Beast it is standing by its reporting.
“A Times journalist on the scene of the Correspondents’ Dinner accurately reported during the breaking news events of the evening, including Ms. Wilkins’ sheltering in a room while holding a security officer’s hand. This reporting was published in a live blog Saturday night, and was updated for additional context to readers,” a spokesperson for the Times said in a statement.
Wilkins also told the Mail that Patel heroically covered her as shots rang out, and then snapped into “complete work mode.”
Viral videos have shown the embattled FBI director appearing to lean over Wilkins at their table in the ballroom and later calling someone outside the hotel.
Wilkins told the Mail, “He was in his chair, covering me, had me on the ground. He was firmly keeping me under the table. I wasn’t looking at anything, just looking down.”
The pair was seated with Daily Mail editors and executives at a table closer to the back of the ballroom than the dais where President Donald Trump was sitting.
After the initial commotion, the FBI director told the table he would have liked to stay but had to go and “sort out” the aftermath of the shooting.
The Daily Beast saw Patel and Wilkins in the central aisle of the ballroom at 8:40 p.m., six minutes after the shots rang out.
Patel could be seen taking his phone from his tuxedo’s breast pocket and reading it as he and Wilkins were escorted out of the ballroom by two of his protective detail.
Neither Patel nor the agent was holding her hand. Immediately before leaving the room, Patel began to speak on his phone, and Wilkins slipped her left hand into his right elbow.
Patel was not the first high-ranking official to be escorted out of the room. Daily Beast reporters witnessed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and Blanche all escorted out before him.
Wilkins offered a heroic account of Patel’s actions during the chaos.
“I can see him flip into, you know, complete work mode, and he is already on his work iPhone, getting things organized. He was getting me safe and then getting straight to work,” she told the Mail.
Wilkins said she didn’t have “time to process” the shooting because of the Times’ reporting about her “holding hands with someone.”
The Daily Beast reporters who attended the dinner saw at least one example of a Trump official being escorted out by an agent while the agent was holding their wife’s hand.
