Massachusetts Man Charged With Threatening FBI Director’s Girlfriend

A Massachusetts man is facing federal charges after allegedly emailing a threat to Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, according to court documents.

Alden Ruml, a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was indicted by a federal grand jury earlier this month, according to documents unsealed on March 19, for transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, stemming from an email sent on or around Feb. 28.

The email came from an anonymized address associated with Ruml’s Apple ID, and was sent to a publicly listed address on Wilkins’s website.

“Do you know how happy I’ll be when your [expletive] face is canoed by an assault rifle?” the email reads. “Tick tock [expletive]. Watch your back.”

Authorities argued that the term “canoed” refers to a V-shaped wound to the skull caused by high-velocity impact.

Wilkins received the email while in Arizona. She said the email frightened her and caused her to change her travel plans.

In an affidavit supporting a search warrant application, FBI Special Agent Keith A. Leavitt Jr. connected the anonymized email account to Ruml through Apple records, which showed that Ruml’s primary Apple ID had generated 134 anonymized email accounts. Associated devices included an iPhone 17 Pro purchased in September 2025 and other Apple products registered to him.

Investigators with the FBI’s Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force executed a search at Ruml’s residence at 29 Concord Avenue, Apt. 606, in Cambridge. Ruml confirmed sending the email during an interview earlier this month, but denied any intent to harm Wilkins, the affidavit states.

The indictment argues that the communication crossed state lines via email, which means that the interstate commerce element of the statute applies. If convicted, Ruml faces a penalty of up to five years in prison.

In a November 2025 interview, Patel told The Epoch Times that multiple threats against his girlfriend’s life had led the FBI to assign her a protective detail, saying that her life was “continuously being threatened.”

“When any individual across any agency head and their respective spouse or partner has a threat to their life, we come in hard,” Patel said. “And unfortunately, there are multiple threats against Alexis’s life that have caused us to properly secure her safety, and that is done independently by career FBI agents.”

“I don’t have any part in that,” he said. “They make those decisions. They are the ones doing the security backgrounds and security analysis.”

An FBI spokesperson confirmed in a statement at the time that Wilkins had received a security detail because hundreds of death threats had been made against her life because of her relationship with Patel.

Patel and an attorney for Ruml did not respond to requests for comment.