FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, filed a defamation lawsuit against MS NOW and reporters Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian over an article published in December that cited unnamed sources in reporting that Patel had, 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.”
In her federal complaint filed in Tennessee, Wilkins’ lawyers alleged that the article “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.’”
The suit alleges that the defendants “published these lies knowing they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth.” That language mirrors the “actual malice” standard that plaintiffs who are public figures must satisfy to win defamation suits under the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan. There has been an ongoing unsuccessful effort to get the justices to reconsider Sullivan over the years, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch having expressed interest in doing so, but it takes four justices to grant review of a petition.
In her complaint, Wilkins’ lawyers said she doesn’t need to meet that high standard anyway because, they write, she “is not a public figure” and therefore only needs to show negligence. “The fact that she is in a relationship with Director Patel does not promote her to the status of public figure or excuse journalists from exercising ordinary care. Neither should false allegations of her benefitting from misappropriated FBI resources,” they wrote in the complaint.
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Jordan Rubin
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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