BBC Eye Investigations
XWhen a prominent Saudi trans woman posted her suicide note on X, her friends and followers were devastated. The note, viewed by millions, said a lawyer in the US – where she had been trying to claim asylum – had persuaded her into returning home to a family and country that would not accept her identity.
The BBC World Service has identified this man as Bader Alomair, who has worked at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC, evidence suggests. He is linked to controversial returns from the United States of several other Saudi students – including two later accused of committing murder during their time at university.
Mr Alomair has not responded to the allegations raised in our investigation.
Eden Knight was from one of the Middle Eastern kingdom’s most respected families. After moving to Virginia in 2019 on a Saudi government scholarship to study at George Mason University, Eden made the decision in early 2022 to transition from presenting as a man to presenting as a woman, by wearing feminine clothes and taking female sex hormones.
Eden found a community on X and Discord where she felt accepted and started to grow a following online. In one post, she shared a picture of her Saudi ID photo next to her new feminine look and the post went viral.
![X Tweet from Eden Knight which went viral. It reads: "What the person at the counter sees on my identification versus me now, lmao [laughing my ass off]."](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/2269/live/54c25320-e7ab-11ef-a319-fb4e7360c4ec.jpg.webp)
XBeing transgender in Saudi Arabia is not tolerated by either society or the government – we have spoken to several transgender Saudis, now living outside the kingdom, who told us about the harassment, and in some cases violence, they had experienced.
Returning to Saudi Arabia could therefore have been difficult for Eden. We understand her student visa expired at around the time of her viral tweet so she decided to seek asylum in the US in order to stay there permanently.
Eden said she was messaged by an old friend who put her in contact with an American private investigator Michael Pocalyko. He offered to help with her asylum claim, and mend the relationship with her family – according to another friend, Hayden, who Eden was living with in Georgia at the time.
SuppliedOther friends have shared messages with us from Eden, which say Mr Pocalyko told her she needed to move from Georgia to Washington DC in order to lodge her claim.
According to the final message she posted on X, in late October 2022, the private investigator met Eden off the train in the US capital. He was accompanied by a Saudi lawyer named Bader, she wrote.
“I genuinely was optimistic and believed this could work,” Eden said in her final post. She said Bader put her up in a nice apartment near Washington DC and took her sightseeing.
But over time it seems she began to question his motives. Eden wrote to friends, in messages shared with the BBC, that Bader was “detransitioning” her. She told them that Bader tried to throw out all of her feminine clothing and told her to stop hormone therapy.
Eden also told friends that Bader advised her she could not apply for asylum in the US and that she must return to Saudi Arabia to do this. A US immigration expert said such advice would be incorrect.
In December 2022, Eden messaged friends to say: “I am going [back to Saudi] with a lawyer and wishing for the best.” Her suicide note on X makes clear that the lawyer in question was someone called “Bader”.
It was not long before Eden was telling friends that returning was a mistake.
She messaged them to say her parents had taken her passport and the government had instructed her to close her X account. Eden told friends she had evidence her parents had hired people to get her back to Saudi Arabia, though she never shared that evidence.
“The lawyer that was helping me with asylum was working with my parents behind my back,” she told one of them.
Over the next few months, Eden’s friends say, she lost any hope of escaping Saudi Arabia.
She worked in a junior position at a tech company and in public assumed her original male identity. Eden messaged a friend to say she was trying to continue taking female hormones, but that her parents repeatedly confiscated them. Eden told friends that she suffered constant verbal abuse, and sent the friends a video – which we have seen – that she secretly recorded of a family member shouting that she had been brainwashed by Western ideas.
Eden took her own life on 12 March 2023.
We wanted to find “Bader” – the lawyer who Eden accused of detransitioning her and persuading her home, to ask him more about the events running up to her death.
We searched for lawyers of that name in the DC area, and one came up: Bader Alomair. There was limited information about him online, but an outdated directory for professionals working in Riyadh gave his full name in Arabic – which in turn led us to an inactive Facebook account showing a photo of him at Harvard Law School.
In texts Eden sent to friends, she mentioned her lawyer had been Harvard-educated.
Then, a source shared a crucial photo – taken by Eden from the apartment Mr Alomair had installed her in. We were able to geolocate it to a residential block on the outskirts of Washington DC.
One person there told us he had known Eden and had seen her with Mr Alomair.
He said Eden owned feminine clothing, jewellery and make-up, but would have to hide it when Mr Alomair came over. He made her cut her hair and told her not to shave, the witness said.
We repeatedly tried to contact Mr Alomair, but he did not respond. When we visited the address listed on his DC Bar registration, we saw a man matching photos of him get into an SUV and drive away.
We followed, noting the car’s unusual number plate – its code indicated the car was issued by the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC, and that the vehicle’s owner was embassy staff.
Mr Alomair’s role in the embassy was to support Saudi students in the US – a lawyer who previously worked with him told us.
We discovered news articles highlighting instances of Mr Alomair helping those left homeless by a hurricane in Florida, for example. But we also discovered his assistance had extended to more controversial situations.
On 13 October 2018, two Saudi students were questioned by US police over the death of an aspiring rapper in North Carolina – stabbed, reportedly after an altercation with the pair.
Some two months later, Abdullah Hariri and Sultan Alsuhaymi were charged with murder, but by then had left the US.
Just four days after the stabbing, Mr Hariri was on a flight back to Saudi Arabia, an email shared with us suggests. It includes details of the flights home which our source told us Mr Alomair organised for both Mr Hariri and Mr Alsuhaymi.
Neither student has ever commented publicly on the case.
Mr Alomair was sent an invoice for the flights a month later, another email shows, which our source says he would have needed to get reimbursement from the Saudi embassy.
SuppliedAnother source says he has worked with him to represent dozens of other Saudi students in the US against charges ranging from speeding to drink-driving.
“Bader would come to the meetings with an Arabic form headed by the Saudi embassy for students to sign [which] promised to pay back legal fees to the Saudi government once they returned home.”
The source told us the students would appear at their first hearing but vanish before any subsequent hearings, though we do not know if Mr Alomair had any role in this.
In 2019, the FBI warned that Saudi officials likely facilitated the escape of Saudi citizens from US legal proceedings.
“The FBI assesses that Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officials almost certainly assist US-based Saudi citizens to avoid legal issues, undermining the US judicial process. This assessment is made with high confidence.”
Sources have told us Mr Alomair continues to live and work in the US. He owns multiple commercial properties around Washington DC and in August 2024 appears to have set up a new law firm in Virginia, where he is a named partner.
Michael Pocalyko, Bader Alomair and the Saudi embassy in Washington DC did not respond to our questions.
We contacted Eden’s family to ask if they wanted to take part in this story but they did not respond.
BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world every year. Follow BBC 100 Women on Instagram and Facebook. Join the conversation using #BBC100Women.
Leave a Reply