Brothers Tal and Oren Alexander — once among the nation’s top luxury real estate brokers — along with a third brother, are set to stand trial in Manhattan this week over allegations that the trio operated a long-running sex-trafficking scheme.
Jury selection in the federal criminal trial is scheduled to kick off Tuesday in the same 26th-floor courtroom where last year Sean “Diddy” Combs was cleared of the top sex trafficking and racketeering counts against him and convicted of lesser prostitution-related charges.
The case against the Alexander brothers marks the Department of Justice’s latest high-profile sex-trafficking prosecution to reach trial since the Combs case. In the aftermath of the hip-hop mogul’s trial, an attorney for Tal Alexander hailed the Combs verdict as both “refreshing” and “heartening” to Business Insider.
Tal, Oren, and Oren’s twin, Alon Alexander, who was an executive at his family’s private security firm, have vehemently denied the sex crimes charges against them, as well as all other allegations. They’ve been locked up at a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn since their December 2024 arrest in Miami.
The FBI began investigating the Alexander brothers after The Real Deal first reported in June of that year that two women had filed civil lawsuits against Oren and Alon Alexander, accusing them of rape. Those lawsuits sparked a wave of additional allegations against the brothers.
Attorneys for the three brothers did not respond to requests for comment by Business Insider for this story.
“The brothers were young adults navigating social situations that may not have been perfect,” a spokesperson for the Alexanders, Juda Engelmayer, told Business Insider, “but that is not criminal conduct and bears no resemblance to trafficking.”
If convicted at trial, the three brothers, who are 38 and 39, could face up to life behind bars.
A decade-plus-long scheme
Manhattan federal prosecutors, in court papers, have accused the Alexander brothers of working together and with others to drug, sexually assault, and rape dozens of women over more than a decade in posh locales like the Hamptons, Miami, and Manhattan.
Prosecutors have said in court filings that several attacks happened at Hamptons mansions, while another was aboard a Bahamian-flagged cruise ship.
The Alexander brothers face 12 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion, according to a superseding indictment filed last week. The indictment ties the charges to eight accusers, including two who were minors.
The superseding indictment also accuses Oren Alexander of recording himself and another person “engaging in sexual activity with a incapacitated 17-year-old girl in Manhattan.”
The government’s case rests on allegations that the Alexanders used their wealth and prominent positions “to create and facilitate opportunities to rape and sexually assault female victims” in a scheme that ran from roughly 2008 to 2021.
Oren and Tal Alexander began their real estate careers at Douglas Elliman before launching their own brokerage, Official, in 2022.
Prosecutors said the Alexanders sometimes planned sexual assaults in advance, luring victims to locations with the “promise of luxury experiences, travel, and accommodations.” Other times, the Alexander brothers chose their victims by chance, prosecutors allege.
Prosecutors said that ahead of the sex attacks, the brothers “shared photographs of women and girls to select those they found sufficiently attractive to invite.”
“The defendants and other men attending the trips pooled financial resources in order to pay for flights and other travel expenses for the women and girls,” prosecutors have said in court papers.
It will ultimately be up to the jury to decide whether the brothers are guilty of the sex trafficking charges they face.
Defense argues government overreach
Defense attorneys for the brothers have argued in court documents that the government overreached by bringing federal sex trafficking charges because the statute requires a “commercial sex act” that the indictment failed to allege.
“The Government alleges, as the ‘thing of value,’ that Defendants ‘lured’ their victims with ‘promises of luxury experiences, travel, and accommodations.’ But that is not enough to establish a ‘commercial sex act,'” defense attorneys for Tal Alexander wrote in a June motion to dismiss, which the other brothers joined.
The lawyers wrote that the accusers did not provide sex “on account of” those promises “as the statute requires.” They added that the travel and accommodations “did not represent compensation for the sex acts.”
The defense lawyers argued that the government’s effort to frame the brothers’ alleged conduct as federal sex trafficking “rests on a dangerously overbroad theory—one that would, if accepted, convert nearly any accusation of date rape into a federal sex trafficking offense.”
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