Alexander brothers tease taking the stand as sex trafficking trial nears close

MANHATTAN (CN) — Federal prosecutors on Monday rested their sprawling sex trafficking case against a trio of wealthy Israeli American brothers, well-connected in the real estate world, who are accused of raping dozens of women and teenage girls over the past two decades.

For the past five weeks, a Manhattan jury heard from numerous witnesses who claimed that Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander sexually assaulted them. Some women testified that one or more of the brothers held them down to rape them amid pleas to stop. Others said they were drugged and hardly, if at all, remembered their sexual encounters with them.

“The first thing I said to him was, ‘I won’t want to have sex with you,’” one witness, identified by the pseudonym Katie Moore, testified about waking up to a naked Alon Alexander standing over her in 2012. “And his response was to laugh in my face and say, ‘You already did.’”

The brothers face 12 charges, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. But the count could drop to 10 after prosecutors moved last week to drop two of the trafficking charges amid concerns of witness intimidation by private investigators hired by the defense. Lawyers for the Alexanders have vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

Oren Alexander’s lawyer Marc Agnifilo told the court that at least one of the brothers could take the witness stand in their defense case, which started on Monday afternoon. The first two defense witnesses were both former private chefs for the Alexanders. They testified that they never saw the brothers use or distribute drugs while working for them.

The crux of prosecutors’ sex trafficking theory relies on the basis that the brothers, flexing their money and power as real estate moguls and socialites, lured young women to various parties and properties — at times, flying them out — to force them into sex.

One woman, who testified under the pseudonym Maya Miller, said that Tal Alexander flew her from Nevada to a house in the Hamptons for a weekend in 2014. She told the jury she grew increasingly uncomfortable with him and tried to leave early.

Instead, Tal Alexander chased her into a bathroom and raped her in the shower, Miller said.

Some of the brothers’ purported victims claimed to be underaged, like one woman who testified earlier this month that she was just 17 years old when Alon Alexander drugged her at a nightclub, then raped her in a hotel room.

“I was so scared,” she said of the 2017 incident, crying on the witness stand. “He just did what he wanted.”

After her testimony, prosecutors read a message from Alon to Oren Alexander, which boasted: “I took down [a] 17-year-old.”

The brothers’ crude messages to friends and to each other made frequent appearances throughout the trial. In one text read to the court, Tal Alexander referenced wanting to “trick and trap” women. In another, Oren Alexander said that the “boys need to hunt” because “we are running out of prey.”

Jurors also saw a video showing Oren Alexander joking about drugging women on vacation.

“I’m serious. I drug bitches,” he said in the clip.

Jurors may start deliberating as early as this week. The brothers could face life in prison if convicted.

Oren and Tal Alexander made waves in the real estate world in 2009, when they facilitated the sale of an $8.2 million Manhattan penthouse to star attorney Jim Ferraro. Three years later, they founded the Alexander Team and Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Their illustrious clientele has since included the likes of Leon Black, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

Alon Alexander, Oren Alexander’s twin, worked as an executive at his family’s private security company.

The defense team has disputed the criminality of their clients’ sex lives. At the trial’s opening last month, the brother’s lawyers acknowledged that they had sex with lots of women — at times together — but bucked claims that they had done anything illegal.

“That’s not trafficking,” Oren Alexander’s lawyer, Teny Gregaros, said. “That’s dating. That’s hooking up.”

In the second week of the trial, the brothers’ names appeared in a Justice Department dump of documents related to late financier and pedophileJeffrey Epstein. According to one document, a six-page spreadsheet of tips related to Epstein, an anonymous tipper said that Oren and Alon Alexander “lured” her upstairs at one of Epstein’s parties in New York when she was 16.

“A third brother, Tal, raped a 14-year-old girl named Katie,” the document read.

The defense team was concerned that the media attention surrounding the Epstein files could compromise the jury in this case. As a remedy, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni, a Barack Obama appointee, barred the Justice Department from releasing any more files mentioning the Alexanders for the remainder of the trial.

Follow @Uebey Follow @uebey.bsky.social