‘Drugs and force’: Prosecutors close sex trafficking case against Alexander brothers

MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York jury on Tuesday heard prosecutors’ final pitch to convict Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander on sex trafficking charges, following a grueling trial that elicited testimony from 11 of their purported victims.

For more than three hours, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Jones gave a rundown of the testimony jurors heard from those women, each of whom claimed they were sexually assaulted by at least one of the brothers.

He harked back to Maya Miller, a pseudonymous witness who said Tal Alexander raped her in the shower at a house in the Hamptons. He referenced Katie Moore, who also testified under a pseudonym and claimed Alon Alexander raped her while she was completely unconscious.

And he reminded jurors of Amelia Rosen, another pseudonymous woman who said she was just 17 years old when Oren Alexander filmed himself raping her lifeless body, which had been plied with drugs and alcohol, according to the government.

Jones played more than two minutes of that video to jurors on Tuesday to prove his point.

“To put it simply, they are rapists and sex traffickers,” Jones said of the Israeli American brothers, known best for their ties to luxury real estate in New York and South Florida.

Jones argued the witnesses’ experiences represented a yearslong pattern from the brothers, who are accused of flaunting their money and power to lure young women to various exclusive parties and gaudy properties — at times, flying them out — to force them into sex.

“The defendants had a playbook, using exciting and exclusive things — parties, boats, mansions, travel and accommodations — to entice girls and women to private homes, to boats, to parties, so they could assault them,” Jones said.

The government claims the brothers used a combination of force and drugs to rape their victims. Several witnesses testified that they believed their drinks were spiked while partying with them.

“I’m serious. I drug bitches,” Oren Alexander said in one video played to the jury at trial.

Jones said they employed this strategy to “prey on smaller girls,” some of whom were underage. He pointed to a text message from Alon Alexander, who boasted to one of his brothers that he “took down [a] 17-year-old” after purportedly raping a teenager in the bathroom of a hotel room.

While most women who testified didn’t know each other, Jones said their stories bore eerie similarities: the manner in which they claimed they were drugged, the symptoms they felt and the brothers’ repeated promises of afterparties to lure women.

“They had one horrific thing in common: they were each raped by these men,” Jones said.

The defense has repeatedly disputed the criminality of their clients’ sex lives, chalking them up to a byproduct of their rambunctious lifestyles.

Alon Alexander’s lawyer, Howard Srebnick, during his own closings on Tuesday, acknowledged his client’s womanizing behavior may have been “obnoxious, grotesque, pathetic” — but not criminal. His client “is not a mindreader,” Srebnick said, referencing the fact that one of the witnesses, who was 17 at the time, did not explicitly tell Alon Alexander that she did not want to have sex with him.

“We don’t typically have people sign a consent form before engaging in sexual activity,” Srebnick said.

He criticized the government’s repeated invocation of the brothers’ crude messages to one another and on online message boards. One text from Oren Alexander said the “boys need to hunt” because “we are running out of prey.” And the government claims the brothers authored a 2008 post on a blog called “Bent on Bitches” that said “it’s not rape if she doesn’t remember” and if “she secretly wants it.”

Srebnick likened the brothers’ banter to “shock jock” humor, name-dropping renowned radio host Howard Stern as a comparison. He even referenced President Donald Trump’s infamous “grab them by the pussy” remark in his bid to pass the messages off as locker room talk — but the references to Stern and Trump prompted relevance objections from the prosecutors, which were sustained by U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni.

The Barack Obama appointee urged the defense to keep its closings succinct. Srebnick will continue delivering his final arguments on Wednesday. After that, Tal and Oren Alexander’s lawyers will follow up with closings of their own.

Jurors are expected to start deliberating toward the end of the week.

The Alexanders face 10 charges in total, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. If convicted, they could face life in prison.

Oren and Tal Alexander broke ground as luxury real estate brokers in 2009, when they facilitated the sale of an $8.2 million Manhattan penthouse to star attorney Jim Ferraro. They have since sold homes to the likes of Leon Black, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.

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