The Alexander Brothers Built an Empire. Their Accusers Say the Foundation Was Sexual Violence.

Jane left her two sisters and a friend napping at their hotel, resting up for the New Year’s Eve festivities. It was late afternoon by the time the Uber dropped her alone at the Miami Beach apartment building, with its lobby of marble and dark wood and an elegant pool backing out onto the sand. Alon, the tall, handsome, successful man she’d been excited to see a third time, had texted her a picture of a barbecue in full swing. He came down to meet her, greeting her with a hug, and up they went.

The elevator opened into an airy apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, where two other men stood beside a kitchen island. One of them, Oren, was Alon’s identical twin. Alon introduced her to the other, Ohad, as their “cousin.” But Jane was immediately confused—there was no sign of any other guests, no barbecue apparent at all. Nonetheless the group made small talk for several minutes before Alon beckoned her to follow him to another room.

She had matched with him over the summer on Bumble, while she was living in New York; they had a mutual acquaintance from her college days in Orlando. They’d first met for drinks at his sprawling SoHo loft—and they had sex, consensually—and again just after a Carrie Underwood concert.

They’d reconnected after realizing they were both in Miami Beach for the holiday. Jane hoped the invitation that afternoon indicated Alon might consider her more than just a casual hookup. But as she followed him through the doorway to a bedroom, shooing away a maid, Jane suddenly understood she was not being given a tour of the apartment. And then Ohad and Oren walked in, single file.

Oren closed and locked the door. Ohad clambered onto the bed, pulled Jane back by the shoulders, then pinned her upper arms beneath his knees. “It was like a ritual thing,” she recalls now. “Everyone knew what to do.” Terrified, her heart rate spiked and tears began to pour as Oren, speaking nonchalantly to Alon about “who’s gonna go first” despite Jane’s clear distress, wrestled off her jean shorts and bikini bottom, took off his own pants, and rolled on a condom.

“Please don’t,” she cried out as he painfully penetrated her, turning toward Alon, who had taken a seat next to the bed and watched in silence. “They were just completely ignoring me,” she recalls, “I was there—but I wasn’t there.” She thought feigning enjoyment might bring the nightmare to an end faster, but her pretense seemed to irritate Oren. Muttering “Fuck this,” he ripped off the prophylactic and stormed out. Jane began to cry hysterically.

Alon then stood, put on his own condom and began to rape her too, as she continued to sob. After he finished, he fell back onto the chair and casually picked up his phone. Without looking up, he addressed her for the first time since they had entered the room. “We’re not leaving here until you fuck my cousin,” he said, referring to Ohad. “Please no, please no, please no,” Jane remembers begging him. “Well,” he relented, “you have to at least give him head.” She continued to refuse, whimpering, until Alon gave up and ordered her into a shower. As she left the apartment, Alon dashed up with a towel around his waist and kissed her on the cheek with a warning: “Don’t tell anybody about this.” She took an Uber back to the hotel, where she slumped in another shower, barely able to breathe, and told her sisters everything.

“I felt guilty for not coming forward, but I also felt guilty for holding it in,” says a woman who has accused Oren of raping her during a tour of the Versace mansion. “I thought that he was evil. He’s a monster. But I also thought that maybe I’m the only one.”

Now, eight years later, Jane’s allegations—recounted in more starched legalese—form part of an indictment against Alon and Oren Alexander, issued on December 11 by Florida’s Miami-Dade state attorney. The same day, the US Attorney for New York’s Southern District charged the twins and an older brother, Tal, with three counts of sex trafficking offenses, including a conspiracy involving all three from at least 2010 through at least 2021. Prosecutors say they have interviewed at least 60 women, and have accused each of the three brothers of violent, forcible rape of at least 10 women each, leaving their victims frightened that the alleged assailants might hurt or even kill them—or hunt them down afterward if they divulge their experiences.

Right after those criminal charges landed, Jane Doe became one of what, at the time of publication, are 34 women to have filed civil lawsuits against Oren, Alon, and Tal alleging sexual assault or rape. All of those suits remain open, except for one that included all three brothers, which a New York judge has dismissed due to a missed filing deadline. (The accuser plans to appeal.)

Oren, Alon, and Tal have maintained their innocence, as has Ohad Fisherman, whose attorney Jeffrey Sloman told VF that Fisherman denies the allegations in the state charges as well as Jane Doe’s civil case, noting that Fisherman is not a relative of the Alexander brothers. Through his attorney, Howard Srebnick, Alon said, “The only sexual encounters I have had in my lifetime have been consensual and legal.” Through Jennifer Wilson, his counsel, Oren denied ever raping anyone, adding, “These character-smearing attacks—many of which result from plaintiffs’ lawyers’ recruiting efforts and individuals seeking to personally profit at my expense—will not hold up in court.” Deanna Paul, an attorney for Tal, told VF her client had never “raped or sexually assaulted anyone” and that “no number of false allegations or salacious media coverage change that reality.” All four men have pleaded not guilty to all charges. Denied bail in their federal criminal case, the three Alexander brothers sit in a Brooklyn jail, awaiting trial currently scheduled for January 2026.

It’s a far, fast fall from the peak of their recent status as a high-powered real estate family. Tal and Oren had become two of America’s leading brokers amid a sea of reality TV–powered super-sales. They helped sell a $238 million Central Park apartment to hedge fund titan Ken Griffin, and became go-to agents for boldface names including Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Alon, a graduate of New York Law School, helped expand the family’s private-security business from Miami to New York and across the country. In 2022 The New York Times profiled Tal and Oren for a piece titled “How Two Luxury Real Estate Agents Spend Their Sundays.” A month later, The Wall Street Journal splashed an “exclusive” on all three brothers selling a shared property, in a story titled “Real-Estate Power Brokers List Miami Beach Home for $31.5 Million.” The following spring, Vogue featured Oren’s wedding to a Brazilian model, sharing details of his Aspen proposal and their 350-person engagement party during Miami’s Art Basel week.

But beneath the trappings of luxury was a much darker story. Over the course of several months, Vanity Fair spoke to dozens of sources, including many of the accusers, as well as friends and business associates, to paint a picture of staggering contrast: the brothers Alexander, shining testaments to American wealth, winning public recognition at charity galas. The brothers Alexander, who have allegedly perpetrated years of sexual violence, leaving deep emotional trauma and outright terror in their wake.

Throughout their time at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in North Miami, the Alexander twins and their tennis star brother, Tal, had reputations for arrogance and hard partying, and ran with a small clique of other highly privileged boys. At luxurious homes in gated communities, according to a number of high school contemporaries, the brothers and their friends hosted large gatherings with minimal parental supervision, where young people used kitchen counters to crush and snort benzos, downing booze by the handle. Occasionally, some of the boys would retire to dimly lit, beautifully appointed bedrooms for sexual encounters that were rarely private, say multiple sources, frequently recorded on camera, and not always consensual, with girls who were not always conscious.

One woman remembers a drunken teenage makeout session with Alon at the brothers’ home in upscale Bal Harbour: Oren had stopped at the doorway and asked a question in Hebrew. Alon translated it for her—“He wanted to go get the video camera. And I said no,” she recalls him explaining. Other girls, according to multiple sources, did not receive the same reprieve. The Alexanders and their friends would arrive at parties in small convoys of luxury cars, say the contemporaries—BMW X5s and Cadillac Escalades, with DVD screens on seat backs playing porn, including recordings of their own exploits.

When the twins were sophomores, they began hanging out with a group of freshmen girls every other weekend. One of those girls, who has since pursued a medical career and who hasn’t spoken about her experiences until now, hooked up with Alon while her friend fooled around with Oren. Occasionally the Alexanders’ parents would be home and react angrily to the goings-on, the woman says, but the twins had bedrooms on the ground floor of the 6,000-square-foot house, far from where their parents slept, and spent unsupervised time at a nearby unfurnished property that their father, Shlomo—known as Shlomy—was developing. (The Alexander parents did not respond to a list of detailed questions sent to them by Vanity Fair.)

At some point during this period, Alon began to invite other teenage boys into the room when they had sex, the woman says, over her stated objections. But during a monthslong period in 2002, she began losing control of her faculties and memory in the twins’ company; she now suspects her drinks were being spiked. “It started off just being kind of just normal,” she recalls. “It ended up escalating to like, you no longer essentially would remember the night, or you would remember essentially just little bits and pieces of the night.” Asked if boys other than Alon, including Oren and Tal, may have had sex with her while she was unconscious—had raped her—her response was immediate. “Probably. Probably—100 percent.”

Once she learned from friends that the brothers and their buddies were bragging about having sex with her—or, from her point of view, raping her when she was passed out—she says that she and her friends stopped hanging out with them. But the reputational damage was done. “Throughout high school, actual dating was a lot more difficult,” the woman says, “probably because of what happened my freshman year.” She warned other young women at Krop to avoid the Alexanders, calling them “scumbags.” When she heard about the allegations against the brothers over the summer of 2024, she was initially shocked that they could have continued for so long—but then a grim realization set in. “I guess it kind of makes sense,” she explains. “They never really had any kind of consequences.” (Alon told VF he has never drugged a woman, nor “had sex with a woman who I believed was drugged.” Oren said he’d never drugged anyone and any person saying otherwise “is lying.”)

“It’s a little late,” says one of the high school accusers. “They were able to really enjoy life, and enjoy all the stuff that they were doing. But better now than never.”

Another Krop alum went to a house party of a friend of the twins when they were all juniors. She had only drunk a small amount, she recalls, but her memory is patchy, fused with accounts shared with her by friends. She now believes she was drugged. In one flash of memory she was upstairs with Tal, who at the time was a stranger—she had no idea the dark-haired twins in her grade had a blond older brother. In another flash of memory, he was suddenly on top of her in a pitch-black bedroom. (In addition to a blanket denial of claims against him, Tal says he has never drugged anyone.)

She regained consciousness in the back of an SUV belonging to a guy she knew, with her underwear around her thighs. “That’s when I knew, like immediately, and I freaked out.” She began to shout at the boy driving to stop the car. “Why am I waking up like this? Like, what happened? What happened?” It was clear she had been raped, she shouted, but the others in the vehicle “got mad” and shouted at her—“You’re accusing us” of being involved, she recalls them saying. Later, a friend’s mother who was a nurse took a blood sample to test for STDs or pregnancy. Fearful of personal consequences, she didn’t report it to police. “We’re doing drugs and we’re drinking,” she says, thinking back to that time, “we’re doing things that we’re not supposed to be doing anyway.”

While the twins were sophomores in high school, they and Tal were among the subjects of a police investigation after a 14-year-old girl—who confirmed certain details to VF—reported an encounter to her school counselor and the counselor informed police. The police report, which is redacted in places, documents that the girl became “frantic” and began to “cry hysterically” at school after rumors emerged she had had sex with “seven guys” while she had been under the influence of Xanax and alcohol. She reported she had been “sexually battered by several males”; that she had bitten the penis of one of the males when she was asked to give him oral sex; that she had been unconscious at other points; and that she was “unsure” she had ever given consent to multiple males (she said she had only wanted to engage with one of them). Accompanied by one of her parents, she was examined at a rape crisis center and her belongings were impounded, but “based on the facts that the males admitted to having consensual intercourse and the fact that the victim’s statements where [sic] inconsistent during the interviews,” reads the report, the charges of sexual battery were ultimately dropped, and no arrests were made. “As I pointed at a white dry-erase board located in the same room, I asked [victim] that if it would be the truth or a lie if I told her that the board was green in color,” an officer emphatically recounts in the report. “The victim replied, ‘it would be a lie.’ I then asked her if it was good or bad to lie and she replied, ‘bad.’ ”

The girl left Krop later that year, in part because of the alleged assaults, and moved to Key West. She initially informed police that Tal, Oren, and Alon had been among the boys involved. But even though she believed she had been raped, she told VF by phone, as a teenager, she had been worried about her social standing. “If I got them in trouble, or whoever in trouble that was involved, then I would lose my friends,” she says now. “I didn’t want to lose my friends, because I had just made some of these friends.”

“It was a privileged bunch of privileged kids,” recalls a classmate. “They got to do whatever they want, they say whatever they want—without any consequences.” After Krop, Tal went to college in New York. A year later, Oren headed off to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, and Alon to the University of Maryland.

The brothers’ real estate origin myth, oft repeated, involves the most expensive single home transaction in Miami history at the time, and came courtesy of their hard-charging father. Israel-born Shlomy cofounded Kent Security, which provides private guards, home surveillance, and property management services, but he began developing luxury homes when his sons were still teenagers. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, he had focused on one spectacular property, 3 Indian Creek, which he originally bought with a partner for $10 million in 2007, then renovated and promoted all over the place, including a segment on ABC News’s Nightline.

In 2012 a wealthy Moscow businessman visiting Miami with his wife and son was on the hunt for a trophy home—he wanted at least 20,000 square feet, with a large waterside plot, high security, and maximum privacy. One morning, brokers took him to the imposing, recently finished property on Indian Creek, listed at $52 million.

During the viewing, according to two people familiar with the transaction, the buyer’s son, who was in his 20s, asked the seller’s agent about the seller’s identity. The son remarked he had previously met Oren Alexander at a nightclub. A few minutes later Shlomy himself arrived to join the tour, and soon enough, buyer and seller had made a dinner date for that evening—without telling the buyer’s brokers. Oren hopped on a plane down from New York to join the meal, and that night struck a deal for $47 million, with Oren slated to be the buyer’s agent of record.

But when the buyer learned from a friend that this was not the way US property transactions were typically executed, and after one original broker threatened to raise hell through their powerful multinational employer, the Alexanders faced a reckoning. After an awkward and sometimes heated meeting the next day in the presidential suite of the St. Regis Bal Harbour, father and son backed down, slightly. On top of his share of the selling commission, Oren would now walk away with only half of the buyer’s agent fee—$500,000, a sizable payday for a night of schmoozing with his dad. He immediately informed the New York Post that he alone had been responsible for bringing the buyer to the table.

By that point, Tal and Oren had become frequent fodder in the press, as the high-end markets in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles were exploding. “Real estate agents went from being just kind of service providers to these people who live in this strange alternate universe where they believe themselves, often, to be some kind of semi-celebrity,” says Rob Giem, a California broker whom Tal once spent months trying to recruit. “Aside from being ridiculous and distasteful, it’s not real.”

The brothers certainly seemed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle—with Alon frequently along for the ride—which they documented in great detail on Instagram. Industry peers and impressionable young women alike saw them sailing on yachts and lounging on jets—typically belonging to their far wealthier clients—bringing the party and eye candy wherever they went.

Tal ultimately focused mostly on the market in New York, where the Alexander team was selling many of the city’s newest buildings, including a tower at 57th Street and Park Avenue, at the time the tallest residential building in the world. He rented a place for himself there and invited women he met on a dating app over for dinner. He warned one woman, then in her early 20s, not to post photos of the space’s 15-foot ceilings before telling her during a game of backgammon that he liked “rough” sex. After dinner at the restaurant downstairs, Tal issued what felt like an ultimatum: “ ‘If you’re not gonna have sex with me, you should just leave,’ ” the woman recalls him saying. “So I left.”

Oren, meanwhile, perfected the South Florida lifestyle, playing paddle ball, kitesurfing, and wooing girls on big boats. Miami was a small world for the young, rich, and beautiful.

Oren often messaged models on the same social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, that he and Tal used to build their business. Some of the women believed that Oren kept screenshots of their communication with him as leverage to throw back in their faces if they ever accused him of anything untoward. In one civil suit filed late last year in Colorado, a woman alleged Alon had raped her in Aspen as a 17-year-old, then minutes later opened her phone, followed himself on Instagram from her account, then sent himself a message as if from her that read “hey babe.”

The Facebook messages that Maria Suska received in April 2014 were unusually direct, though Oren was “kind of handsome” and friends with others she knew from the Miami party scene. “I leave to LA on Saturday but let’s meet before,” he wrote to the Polish American model and cardiac nurse. After a brief back-and-forth, Suska agreed to have dinner that week with the “courteous” stranger, who invited her to Zuma, a high-end Japanese restaurant.

Suska was surprised when she arrived the following night to find two other men and nine women at Oren’s table—she assumed they were going on a traditional date, just the two of them. He was “flirty” and “touchy” throughout dinner as he fed her sushi—winking and smiling but not really engaging in actual conversation. The other women barely spoke, but Suska decided to accompany Oren and several fellow diners to another party, hoping to get to know him better.

When Suska, Oren, and the others arrived at the Versace mansion, a security guard took her phone and warned there could be no photos before directing the group to a poolside patio area with catering but no music. Oren vanished, but Alon soon arrived, jumping into the water nude and yelling at women around the pool to join him. When nobody accepted his invitation, Alon exited angrily, dried himself off, and got dressed, as Oren reappeared by Suska’s side. He asked if she wanted to check out the view from the building’s tower—you can see it in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story—and they ascended its narrow staircase. Suska still hoped for a romantic moment, maybe a kiss at the top. Instead, as she entered the small space with no lights or furniture, Oren’s charm vanished, aggression in its place.

An athletic 27-year-old tennis player, she struggled as he tried to rip down her dress and expose her breasts, pushing her to the ground. Then he yanked her underwear to her knees, masturbated, and penetrated her without a condom or her consent, she says. Suska yelled for help and told him repeatedly to get off, but Oren only grunted and told her to “shut up” again and again. “I was afraid of him,” she says, recalling the pain, and how his weight drove her into the hard floor. “I was just fighting for my life. I just wanted him to release me,” she says. “I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.”

Oren pulled out and ejaculated on her chest, smirking as he said, “Oh, that was good,” then stood up, zipped up his pants, and left—“like nothing happened,” she says. He never contacted her again. Suska says she experienced nightmares and flashbacks, took months off work, stopped going out, and spent years in therapy. She recently told her mother about what happened, as well as the FBI and a Miami police detective, but has not moved forward with civil charges. “It was very hard for me, because I felt guilty for not coming forward, but also felt guilty for holding it in,” she says now. “I thought that he was evil. He’s a monster. But I also thought that maybe I’m the only one.”

She wasn’t.

A couple years after Suska says she was raped, a message popped up on the Instagram account of another model who had recently moved to Miami. The 26-year-old woman agreed to meet Oren on the beach one afternoon with a group of his friends. He seemed standoffish, almost shy, and spent much of the time on his phone, but Alon meanwhile told her she’d be “ ‘a nice addition to the family,’ things like that,” she remembers. “I literally fell for it.” In October 2017 she joined Oren at a restaurant with a big group, as well as a launch event for a new building cohosted by Oren’s boss, Douglas Elliman chairman Howard Lorber.

Once again, Oren barely spoke all evening, but it wasn’t that late when he asked her back to his place for a glass of wine. She’d hardly had anything to drink, but she enjoyed wine and thought he might finally open up to her a little. When she entered his living room, the first thing she noticed were the striking floor-to-ceiling windows—the same ones that had so impressed Jane Doe several months earlier. He offered her a drink as well as a virtual reality headset that allowed his clients to tour apartments remotely—someone in Miami could check out a New York penthouse without hopping on a plane.

While she had the goggles on, she was directed from the kitchen into an adjacent bedroom. Suddenly, without asking, Oren unzipped her dress down the back. She nervously told him she wasn’t ready for that, but he pushed her onto the bed, forcibly flipped her around, and immediately penetrated her. “I felt unheard, like I already voiced rejection, and now you didn’t listen,” she recounts. “Instead of laughter and anxiety, I have anger and sadness.” She remembers a feeling of physical powerlessness coming over her, like she’d taken antianxiety medication—though she hadn’t knowingly done so. She began to sob. “ ‘Stop crying, be quiet, you’re ruining it,’ ” she recalls Oren saying. “He knows what he’s doing is wrong: There’s no confusion at this point,” she says to me. “There was no misunderstanding.” Afterward, she passed out.

When she regained consciousness, she was still naked. Oren was back to his “weird, awkward self” and ordered her an Uber. She spent the next day in her bedroom crying, feeling dirty and embarrassed, but also angry. She soon told her sister, who was her roommate at the time. When Oren asked her to hang out again two weeks later, the pair decided it would be a good opportunity for her to confront him. She turned up planning to “yell at him and give him a piece of my mind.” Instead of apologizing, he tried to kiss her, and when she pushed him off, he started masturbating and ejaculated on her seconds later. “Nothing I did helped the situation,” she recalls thinking as she fled. “I go home, and I’m as angry as I can ever be.”

When Oren heard she was telling people what had happened, she says he texted her to stop talking about it or he would ruin her. This woman says she has shared her account with her husband, local police, and the FBI, but is also not pursuing a civil case.

Other women who have spoken out have faced public harassment. Soon after the initial allegations against the brothers became public last June, an anonymous website sprang up, accusing several by name of extortion. A few months later, my own personal Instagram account—where I had exchanged messages with some of the sources for this story but rarely used otherwise—was unexpectedly suspended. An email informed me that my account, or activity on it, had somehow breached Instagram’s “community standards” of integrity. “We don’t allow people on Instagram to pretend to be someone well known,” a message on the app said. When I appealed to reopen my account with the help of Vanity Fair’s social media team, Meta quickly reinstated it, but the same thing happened twice more. Eventually someone at Meta told us that an impostor account had gotten itself verified as me, blue check and all, and had been cloning images from my real account. The whole episode started the day after I arrived in Miami.

By around 2019 the high-end real estate market was rapidly morphing into a personality-led world where individual brokers and their teams—think Million Dollar Listing and Selling Sunset—often outshone the sometimes staid businesses that ultimately backed them. In the Alexanders’ case, that was the century-old Douglas Elliman, where chairman Lorber had taken Tal and Oren under his wing, according to sources who worked at the firm. A rep for Lorber disputed this characterization, saying he had only “supported the commercial efforts of the Alexander team in the same way he supported the efforts of other brokers” at Elliman.

Lorber left in October 2024. The company told the SEC that his retirement “was not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.” In February, several plaintiffs, including a former Douglas Elliman broker, filed a lawsuit against Lorber, Douglas Elliman, and both Alexander parents, in addition to the brothers and the family business, alleging that “Lorber provided money, resources and corporate cover to the Alexander Brothers to sexually abuse, assault, batter, rape and/or otherwise sexually abuse women, including plaintiffs in New York City and the Hamptons.” The suit also states that Shlomo and Orly “enabled the Alexander brothers by providing them with money, property, and other resources that were used to sexually abuse, assault, batter, drug, and rape women.” Shlomy Alexander declined to comment when reached by phone; Orly Alexander did not respond to requests for comment. Her brother, the CEO of Kent Security, did not respond to emails, while employees at Kent Security repeatedly hung up on VF. A representative for Douglas Elliman did not respond. A representative for Howard Lorber said that the allegations in the suit were “false and defamatory, with no connection to reality.” A representative for Tal called the lawsuit “an outrageous eleventh-hour attempt to take financial advantage of Tal and his family.” An attorney for Oren said, “Friends-and-family style of complaint is monumentally stupid and legally unfounded,” while a lawyer for Alon called it a “desperate attempt at a payday,” asking: “Who will the lawyers sue next: the grandmother?”

In 2022 the Alexanders decided to fly the nest, striking out with three other industry heavyweights, to found a firm called Official. The collective—the other partners were Nicole Oge, Andrew Wachtfogel, and Richard Jordan—hoped to target America’s 0.01 percent.

Tal and Oren were “more interested in lining their own pockets than anything else,” says one top Miami broker who knew them at Douglas Elliman. During the Alexanders’ stratospheric rise, many of the brokers who encountered the brothers described their approach to dealmaking as hypercompetitive, prompting envy and occasionally grudging respect but, very often, deep distrust.

“They were maybe laser focused on the chicks and less so on the partying,” recalls one club promoter who encountered them often in New York, where they frequented venues like Marquee, 1OAK, Tenjune, and SL. Sometimes, their presence was unwelcome. At one Malibu house party, the host recalls, several women approached him about Alon. “ ‘That guy’s got to go,’ ” he recalls them saying. “ ‘He’s a dirtbag’—all they ever said to me.” Alon was leaving anyway, the host says. “So we didn’t have to boot him.”

Yet their rise continued. Kanye West reportedly sought them out for a $14 million Miami apartment he bought Kim Kardashian as a surprise Christmas gift in 2018. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner apparently used them to buy a $24 million home in Indian Creek. Other reported clients splashed across tabloid and industry press included supermodel Adriana Lima, billionaire investor Daniel Sundheim, fashion mogul Tommy Hilfiger, music producer Timbaland, and the state of Qatar, which offered close to $100 million for the 20,000-square-foot Wildenstein family town house on New York’s Upper East Side that would serve as a new consulate. The New York Post described it as the most expensive town house sale in New York history, but the deal fell apart within a year.

“You become so fucking magical that you just become, in your mind, invincible,” said one of Miami’s top brokers, using “nuke” to describe the Alexanders’ collapse. “Sometimes the wicked-ass comes back to fucking haunt you.”

Adam Neumann, the Lazarus-like cofounder of WeWork, became a client when he wanted to offload his penthouse in New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood. Weeks after Official listed it for about $30 million, in July 2023, Neumann attended Tal’s wedding to Arielle Kogut, a financial industry recruiter. (She filed for divorce in New York early this year, according to her attorney Dan Nottes. Neumann did not respond to VF.) Oren had gotten married only months before, to Kamila Hansen, the Brazilian model, who told Vogue that Oren had picked her up in a Vegas hotel by asking if she was lost. (To date, nobody has purchased the $2,400 Miele coffee maker off their registry.) Alon was the first of the brothers to marry—in May 2020, to Shani Zigron, an Israeli model, with whom he has two young children. (As part of their registry, they solicited cash for an African safari.)

Then their world came crashing down.

Just minutes after midday in late January 2024, Alon’s wife, Shani, answered the door at their four-bedroom home, where Range Rovers with license plates like “ATEAM-7” and “ATEAM 11” were sometimes parked outside. A process server handed over an envelope of documents. Inside was a summons for Alon, tied to civil suits in New York, filed by two women, Kate Whiteman and Rebecca Mandel (neither of whom spoke to VF). A month or so later, the same process server handed a similar envelope to Oren’s wife, Kamila, when she answered the door at a different waterfront home, which the Alexanders had bought a few years earlier for $10 million, on nearby Lake Avenue.

Before filing the lawsuit, Whiteman’s attorney had sought a multimillion-dollar settlement from the brothers, according to messages sent by the brothers and obtained by VF. But they had balked, and the messages indicate the brothers had only been willing to consider a fraction of that. They also insisted any settlement stay sealed, according to someone familiar with the mediation, which she was unwilling to accept. According to a submission from the Alexanders’ legal team for a mediation process in the summer of 2022, Whiteman had sent messages to both Alon and Oren that showed what the brothers argued was consensual, mutual desire, including social invitations. Alon and Oren’s attorneys at the time used screenshots of the communication to bolster their clients’ position during the mediation process. She and her original lawyer parted ways, and Whiteman ultimately pursued her claims in a public suit with a new attorney. (An attorney who represented Oren and Alon during the mediation declined to comment. One of Oren’s current attorneys told VF that negotiations around any “nuisance settlement” are confidential.)

“Kate was not raped by some strangers in a dark alley. She was assaulted by actual brothers she knew and trusted,” Whiteman’s current attorney Evan Torgan wrote, in a statement sent to VF, adding that she “knew that if she brought the lawsuit, she would be smeared because of those messages, but she went forward anyway, because she knew that she wasn’t alone and that there were other victims as well.”

Under the pressure of these two lawsuits, Alon and Oren hired Jim Ferraro, a seasoned Miami trial attorney who more than a decade earlier had purchased two adjacent Manhattan penthouses for more than $15 million in deals brokered by Oren after meeting him skiing in Aspen. The filings came at a time of increased family tension, as Oren and Tal started charting separate paths. Tal in New York was dedicated to individual transactions, while Oren in Miami was increasingly focused on long-term gains from developments outside of Official’s day-to-day operations. Tal’s revenues were consistently outstripping Oren’s, with sales figures of around $50 million a month in his city’s super prime market.

For much of 2023 and early 2024, the brothers had not often seen eye to eye and had lost out on major opportunities—including a potential transaction involving Jeff Bezos—leaving Tal frustrated, according to messages he sent obtained by VF. He had even considered making changes to the partnership between himself and Oren. (Tal did not respond to requests for comment about this period.)

In early May 2024, Oren and Ohad Fisherman—Jane Doe’s third alleged assailant—sold a Bay Harbor Islands penthouse for $11.25 million, and Oren began to feel hopeful about successfully confronting the allegations. Though a trade publication, The Real Deal, by then knew about the lawsuits, it had not yet reported on them, Oren told several people, and he was confident he could persuade The Real Deal’s publisher, Amir Korangy, to spike a story. Korangy explained to VF that he has in the past held information if it could lead to a bigger scoop, but this was different. “ ‘You’re not understanding the situation,’ ” he recalls telling Oren. “ ‘I’m not trying to trade some celebrity buying a house in Miami for you guys raping people. This is not a trade that we’re doing.’ ” Oren later threatened he would encourage the site’s advertisers to leave, and subsequently vowed to sue the publication, according to Korangy.

But then a reporter at The Real Deal reached out about the lawsuits to an executive at Side, the business that provided Official with its support technologies and held the Alexanders’ brokerage license. (Side is now suing Oren and Tal in a California court for defaulting on a loan they had used to set up Official.) Until then, Oren had barely mentioned the case to anyone, including his parents. He was in the Bahamas with his wife, Kamila, pregnant with their first child, when he first told her about the lawsuits. Kamila told him she was glad he hadn’t settled, according to messages sent by Oren.

On June 8, The Real Deal dropped the bombshell. Oren told business associates he felt like passing out and cried on several phone calls with friends and clients. Though he couldn’t seem to tear himself away from the devastating commentary on Instagram, messages he sent at the time suggest he was also still bullish about his ability to respond to what he and his brothers considered a witch hunt. Justice would prevail, and Oren would be exonerated. That night, he and Kamila shared dinner looking out over the Atlantic, at a table lit by tiki torches, with a single pink rose in a small glass vase.

June ended up being the strongest month in the two-year history of Official, with closed sales totaling $150 million. But Oren’s personal brand was spiraling, with knock-on effects. Official listed a $55 million property in Golden Beach on June 13. Then the seller decided to switch agents. Oren canceled on a real estate journalist from London who was supposed to tour the $800 million Dolce & Gabbana tower in Brickell, where apartments started at $3.5 million. Official soon lost that business too. Oren spent $25,000 to put a crisis communications firm on retainer and in short order publicly stepped back from Official—which he announced on Instagram, naturally.

Oren told people he wanted to hire a social media forensic investigator to uncover what he was sure was a concerted effort by his competitors to take him down. He considered hiring defamation lawyers to sue The Real Deal and said he spoke to more than half a dozen lawyers about representation—including a former prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, where his federal case will be prosecuted—as well as someone from BlackCube (the Israeli intelligence firm that Harvey Weinstein hired to investigate Ronan Farrow during his dogged reporting for The New Yorker). Oren even told people he planned to hold a party for his supporters once the cases were eventually dismissed. But by then female employees across Official were expressing concerns, and in a message shared with his Official colleagues, Tal called his brother’s actions, as described in the first two lawsuits, “reprehensible.”

“What happens is you become so fucking magical that you just become, in your mind, invincible,” said one of Miami’s top brokers, using “nuke” to describe the Alexanders’ reputational collapse. “Sometimes the wicked-ass comes back to fucking haunt you.” Tal told people his wife, Arielle, would start some days in tears, though Tal insisted to anyone who would listen that his brothers had done nothing wrong. He was still worried national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times would pick up the story. Which they did.

A trickle became a torrent as more women filed lawsuits over the summer. Official’s agents across the country—from the Hamptons to Aspen, Los Angeles to Miami—began evaluating their options, worried about the firm’s survival. One client after another dropped the firm, whose death “was swift,” says Giem, the California broker. “It practically happened overnight, and that was one of the most promising brokerages that had ever been conceived and put together in the history of brokerage in this country,” he says. “They had all the right people, they were targeting all the right geographies, and had hired all the right agents.” Tal and Oren, the top two earners, were no longer on the books but still hoped to control its assets even as the company’s other founders fought to keep it alive without them, while supporting the workforce. None of this stopped Oren from holidaying in southern France and Ibiza with Kamila and their friends, while Tal spent tens of thousands a month on a Hamptons rental, working out at Barry’s Boot Camp and eating soft-serve ice cream with Arielle, who, like Kamila, was pregnant by then. (In a statement to VF, Kamila Hansen, Oren’s wife, said it was “unfortunate that in today’s world, a man can be falsely accused, and people are quick to believe it without question,” declaring that “These accusations are completely false.”)

One woman who says Oren raped her remembers watching his seemingly inescapable rise in Miami in the years after her encounter, with marketing campaigns and magazines linking his name to $30 million homes. “He’s got all the friends, and he’s got the boats and the houses and the hot Brazilian model girlfriend. And it’s like, Wow, God is really blessing this guy,” she thought. “It made me feel like the world was unfair.” Following her own experience she says she learned of several other accounts, and then the pair of civil suits became public last year. “I guess karma does eventually win.”

At some point last year, the FBI began monitoring the brothers’ phone calls and obtaining access to accounts for their iClouds, social media, and dating apps. These contained explicit photos and videos—some of which Oren had made depicting the twins’ sexual activity, prosecutors said, “with at least one identified victim.” Further evidence showed them arranging travel and drugs for young women, as well as discussing group sex. One group chat discussed “imports” of the women and the costs of their flights to Tulum, as well as mentions of “G,” which investigators believed was a reference to GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, a well-known date rape drug.

It was still dark on December 11, 2024, when the FBI and Miami Beach SWAT teams gathered for a 5 a.m. briefing in the parking lot of a Miami Beach golf course. Not long after, dozens of figures in tactical gear and others in blue-and-yellow federal windbreakers appeared at Oren’s and Alon’s homes, ready to begin their raids. The brothers were roused from their beds, their hands placed in zip ties by Miami Beach police officers, their properties searched by FBI teams, who seized cell phones, cameras, computers, and external hard drives. Tal had flown down to Miami the night before, apparently unaware of the impending storm when he’d arrived with Arielle. The pair slept at his parents’ place in Bal Harbour, inside a gated community guarded by his father’s security business. As his brothers’ homes were raided, investigators from the Florida state attorney’s office, which had opened its own case, took up position outside the Alexander parents’ house, stopping Shlomy as he left the house. They asked him to call Tal outside. Once cuffed, Tal was driven in a Bal Harbour police cruiser to the makeshift command post at the same golf course parking lot, where his cuffs were swapped and the FBI took custody. All three brothers were charged by the feds with sex trafficking offenses, while Alon and Oren were charged with state crimes, including against Jane Doe.

Over the next several weeks, the brothers made substantial offers to the government for bond, including more than $115 million in one hearing. One of the defense attorneys, Milton Williams, said the proposal meant their family members were “willing to give up basically everything that they have” if the defendants were to attempt to flee while on bail. A spokesperson for all three brothers told VF that they would have run if they wanted to. Alon’s wife has been photographed arriving at a bail hearing in Florida, and both parents have been in court frequently, but otherwise, says a friend, “nobody’s associating with the twins right now.”

“Some victims said ‘no’ or ‘stop’; others screamed,” reads a letter from federal prosecutors to judges. “But the defendants did not stop. They ignored their victims’ distress, their obvious unwillingness to engage in sexual activity.” Prosecutors argue the three brothers still represent a real and present danger to their communities and noted that government investigators learned from phone taps that Oren had spoken to another US citizen under separate criminal scrutiny who had fled to Israel. In mid January a federal judge in New York denied bail for Alon, Oren, and Tal.

Even with the brothers behind bars, for now, many women remain afraid to talk. “He basically knows literally all my information down to my Social Security,” according to one woman. “They are evil people,” she wrote to VF. “Sorry, just can’t risk my safety.” For those victims who are willing to talk, the arrests have been a mixed blessing. “It’s a little late,” says one of the high school accusers. “They were able to really enjoy life, and enjoy all the stuff that they were doing. But better now than never. They deserve it.”

For Jane Doe, ever since that life-altering afternoon in Miami Beach, she has unraveled, say family and friends. Jane initially decided not to report the incident to police, believing the Alexanders were too powerful, and frightened they might react with further violence. After she moved to Miami for work months later, Alon had walked past her in a coffee shop, betraying no hint of recognition, she says. A coworker watched as she suffered a panic attack.

She was shopping with her mom at a Target in June last year when one of her sisters texted a link to a news report about the civil suits. Another wave of panic consumed her. Despite sometimes numbing depression, her difficulties trusting men, and the other emotional scars from her painful secret, years of therapy have helped her work toward the conclusion that she’s done nothing wrong.

“It took a while to realize that it wouldn’t have mattered who they would have done this to—they’ve done it obviously to multiple people,” she says now. “I understand that it wasn’t my fault.”