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12-02-2025
WASHINGTON: When 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 media 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.
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.
Being transgender in Saudi Arabia is not tolerated by society or 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 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.
Other friends have shared messages with us from Eden, which say Pocalyko told her she needed to move from Georgia to Washington DC to lodge her claim.
According to the final message she posted, 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 media, that Bader was “de-transitioning” 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. (Int’l News Desk)
