Saudi trans woman Eden Knight feared dead after posting suicide note saying family had hired "fixers" to bring her back to Saudi Arabia and force her to detransition

The VICE article on the same story dives a lot deeper, has a lot more info, and also names the American "fixer" who convinced her to leave Georgia.

In August, according to the note, Eden was contacted by a man offering to help her fix her fractured relationship with her parents. Hayden told VICE News that this was a phone call, which he overheard because Eden had put it on speaker; the man on the phone, he said, complimented half-naked photos of Eden he’d found online.

“I remember that really struck me as odd and that was my first red flag with the guy,” Hayden said. “He was such a fucking creep.” Hayden and Bailee said the man didn’t bring them into his conversations with Eden, despite the fact that she was living with them.

That man, according to both Eden’s note and direct messages which she sent at the time and were reviewed by VICE News, was Michael Pocalyko, CEO of Special Investigations—a Washington-area government contractor specializing in “investigations, intelligence, and cyber”—as well as a novelist and former Republican official whose website describes him as “a combat aviator, Navy commander, political candidate, venture capitalist, and global corporate chair.” In a private message, Eden described him as “famous.” Neither Pocalyko nor the chair of Special Investigations responded to requests for comment.

Pocalyko, she wrote in her note, “claimed he was a ‘fixer’ and wanted to ‘fix’ the issue that was between me and my parents. I thought this was impossible, I’m transgender and they are strict conservative Muslims, but I decided I would give it a shot because it can’t hurt right lmao?”

Hayden and Bailee said Eden spoke with Pocalyko weekly. In her note, Eden wrote that these calls “seemed innocuous and honestly pretty helpful,” and she ultimately moved out of their Georgia house in October after Pocalyko, according to her note and multiple friends, encouraged her to go to Washington, D.C.

Victoria told VICE News that Eden, who was in the U.S. without authorization, said she hoped she’d obtain U.S. citizenship there.

Eden wrote in her note that Pocalyko and his associate Ellen Cole (who did not reply to a request for comment), along with a Saudi lawyer named Bader, met her at the train station and took her to a hotel. Then, Bader became her sole point of contact. “He pampered me,” Eden wrote.

Bader, according to the note, got Eden an apartment, bought her meals, and put her in touch with therapists—all while subtly trying to convince her to detransition. (In a Nov. 1 text exchange between Eden and Hayden, reviewed by VICE News, Eden spoke of her apartment and sent Hayden a picture of her view.)

“He tried to get me to be ‘normal.’ Gave me examples of feminine men and said that they are transgender but they are hiding it, that it’s better to hide it. Told me stories personally about people he knew that successfully hid it,” she wrote. Over time, Eden wrote, she became entirely dependent on him; running away wasn’t an option. She also worried, due to her legal status, that if she ran away, she’d ultimately be deported.

Bailee, Hayden, and Victoria all say that their contact with Eden drastically decreased after she moved to Washington, and communication became more fragmented. But Victoria told VICE News she heard “bits and pieces” about how the person Eden was with forced her to dress masculine, and pressured her to stop hormone therapy.

VICE News reviewed Discord messages between Eden and her close friend Zoe in which Eden makes reference to her “lawyer”—Bader, who she described as representing himself as Harvard-educated—and his attempts to convince her to detransition. “He knows I left my family to transition and told me to lie to them and say it was grade issues,” Eden wrote at the time. “He like constantly says I look like a man and a teenager that’s confused which is fine cuz I have piercings and dyed hair but I’m just having fun with those things they don't make me a woman, nobody misgenders me so purposely like he does.” Eden would later find out that Bader had been hired by her parents, she wrote.

In Eden’s note, she detailed how she eventually stopped hormone replacement therapy, changed her clothes, and succumbed to the pressures to detransition. After a meeting with her parents, she wrote, Bader bought her a flight back to Saudi Arabia.

Friends told VICE News she moved back sometime in mid-December. Hayden said he received a text from Eden in early December, asking him to pick her up before she replied saying, “I don’t need it anymore.” Then, radio silence, Hayden said.

According to Eden’s note and her friends, Eden tried to continue hormone replacement therapy in secret while in Saudi Arabia, but her parents found her hormones more than once.

This is when, according to Eden’s note, it all came out: Her parents admitted that Bader, Pocalyko, and Cole were hired to get Eden back to Saudi Arabia; they also berated her and called her a “freak.”

The day after Eden posted her note, her family’s Twitter and Telegram channels posted that she had died. Eden’s father did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Saudi embassy in Washington.