Alexis Rodman is the eldest child of the Hall of Fame forward Dennis Rodman and the former model Annie Bakes. She was born on 28 September 1988, she is 37, and she works as an assistant swimming coach at a youth club near Sacramento.
Almost every other fact in circulation about Dennis Rodman’s daughter reached the public secondhand. Her parents have been on the record about her since 1989. She has not.
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Alexis Caitlyn Rodman |
| Age | 37 |
| Born | 28 September 1988 |
| Mother | Annie Bakes, former model |
| Father | Dennis Rodman, five-time NBA champion |
| Husband | Robert Bunfill, married August 2014 |
| Child | Son, Vincent, born June 2017 |
| Job | Assistant swimming coach, Rio Del Oro Rapids, Sacramento |
| Half-siblings | DJ Rodman and Trinity Rodman |
| Net worth | No figure has been reported by a credible source |
| Height | Not reported by any credible source |
Table of Contents
Annie Bakes and the 1989 lawsuit
The first time Alexis entered the public record she was eight months old.
In June 1989, during the week Detroit swept the Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA title, Bakes filed a palimony claim against Rodman. United Press International reported the filing and named the baby: Alexis Caitlyn Rodman. Bakes was seeking more than a million dollars and $7,700 a month in support, and said in a sworn statement that the couple had separated the previous month after an incident that left her injured. Reporters put the suit to Rodman at the arena, hours before the title game. “I’m not talking,” he said.
Bakes has spoken about her daughter several times since. In 1996 she told the Los Angeles Times that Rodman’s memoir was dishonest and that she was writing an account of her own. In January 1997 she told the Chicago Tribune that Alexis had been telling children at school, “My daddy doesn’t come to see me,” and that the eight-year-old had started anger management sessions.
In 2013 Bakes went on Pawn Stars to sell a set of Rodman’s game-worn jerseys, one of them signed to their daughter. “I’m selling the jerseys today because I’m paying for our daughter’s tuition,” she said on camera.
Dennis Rodman’s account of his daughter
Rodman married Bakes in September 1992. The marriage lasted 82 days, according to People.
That December, with the separation only weeks old, the Los Angeles Times found him suspended, fined close to $100,000 and unable to explain his own season. “I never really paid enough attention because I was too involved with my job,” he said of the marriage. “I knew in the back of my mind that she and my child were the most important things. But I never really showed it. I was out of balance.” The reporter wrote that Rodman would show you the picture of his daughter tattooed on his left forearm. She was four.
By the spring of 1996 he was promoting Bad As I Wanna Be, turning up to signings on a Harley Davidson in a dress and feather boa. He also cried on The Oprah Winfrey Show when the conversation turned to his daughter, who was then seven.
Seventeen years later, in a 2013 interview for Oprah: Where Are They Now?, he described Alexis arriving unannounced at an autograph signing. He said he had not seen her in years. “I was so shocked I didn’t know how to act,” he said. She was 24.
How long the estrangement actually lasted
Getty photographers shot Alexis with her father at a Las Vegas club in May 2008, when she was 19, and again at a swimwear show in Miami in July 2013.
The 2008 pictures put a floor under the gap. Whatever Rodman meant in 2013 by years without contact, it started after that night in Las Vegas, which caps the estrangement at roughly five years. Neither parent has ever given it a start or an end date. Most accounts of this family leave the length open, which tends to read as decades.
The only words Alexis Rodman has said in public
In the 2019 ESPN documentary Rodman: For Better or Worse, Alexis described her father as a “really beautiful person.”
That is all of it. No interview with her appears in any published record, in any outlet.
Her father spoke at length for the same film. He told ESPN his “major demon” was “trying to convince” himself he was a good dad. “It’s very hard for me to try to break out of that cycle,” he said.
What Dennis Rodman’s daughter does now
She married Robert Bunfill in California on 30 August 2014, and her father was there. Their son Vincent was born in June 2017. The public learned of it on 25 June, when Rodman posted about the birth and then answered a follower’s joke about the baby’s rebounding with “Awesome dude. Love this.”
She was a swimmer before she was a coach. After a spell with a high school team she moved to Rio Del Oro Rapids near Sacramento, where she is listed as an assistant coach under her married name. The club’s own staff page gives her birthday, her strokes, freestyle and breaststroke, and a favourite line from Michael Jordan, her father’s old teammate at the Bulls: “If you quit once, it becomes a habit. Never quit.”
Several biography sites publish a net worth figure and a height for her. Neither has ever been reported by a credible source.
Her half-siblings went the other way. DJ Rodman played college basketball. Trinity Rodman won Olympic gold with the United States in 2024, scoring the semi-final winner against Japan, and this year signed a three-year contract with the Washington Spirit worth more than $2 million a season, the richest in the league’s history. She talks about their father publicly whenever she chooses to.
Alexis has not, in 37 years. Whether that is a decision or simply how things turned out, the record does not say.
