Are Tal and Oren Alexander — once among the nation’s top luxury real estate brokers — serial predators who, together with a third brother, drugged and sexually assaulted dozens of women and girls over more than a decade?
Or are they simply womanizers whose party-fueled lifestyle involved lots of consensual sex?
That’s a pivotal question a six-man, six-woman jury will have to consider over the course of Tal, Oren, and Oren’s twin, Alon Alexander’s sex-trafficking trial that’s unfolding over the next several weeks in a Manhattan federal courtroom.
Opening arguments in the criminal case began on January 27, with the Alexanders’ defense team and the US government presenting dramatically different, dueling portrayals of the sibling trio.
A conviction could send Tal Alexander, 39, and his 38-year-old twin brothers to prison for life and mark an extraordinary downfall for the real estate agent siblings whose high-profile clients included Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, financier Leon Black, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
Here are some of the most striking moments from the Alexander brothers’ trial so far:
Rape accuser describes desperately screaming out ‘no’
An accuser using the pseudonym “Katie Moore,” who was the first government witness to testify, broke down in tears as she told the jury she was drugged and raped by Alon Alexander in 2012 when she was 20 years old.
Moore said that she woke up naked with Alon Alexander standing over her, also naked, at the Manhattan apartment he shared with Tal Alexander, in the hours after an NBA Finals viewing party at the nearby penthouse of actor Zac Efron.
“I was shocked, and I had no idea how I got there,” Moore testified, adding that she tried two or three times to get out of the bed, but “Alon kept pushing me back down.”
“I don’t want to have sex with you!” she recalled telling Alon Alexander, who she said laughed and told her, “But you already did.”
He continued to assault her as she desperately screamed out “no” over and over, Moore said.
At some point, Moore testified, Tal Alexander walked in, and as the two brothers were talking, Alon Alexander “was raping” her.
She said she left while Alon Alexander was asleep. Within hours, she discovered she was bruised on the right side of her body, including “a hand print.”
Oren Alexander allegedly bragged he ‘took down’ a minor
During opening statements, Assistant US Attorney Madison Reddick Smyser told the jury that the Alexander brothers “celebrated their crimes.”
“For example,” the prosecutor said, “after Oren and Alon sexually assaulted three high school girls in a hotel room, Oren texted a friend that he took down a 17-year-old.”
Smyser said the Alexander brothers used “power, wealth, and access to lure women and girls to them” at upscale locales like the Hamptons, Miami, and Manhattan.
Prosecutors said the brothers texted about what could ‘bring them down’
Smyser, the Manhattan federal prosecutor, told jurors that the Alexander brothers texted each other about their conquests, at one point saying that “the only thing that could bring them down is if some ‘hoe’ complained.”
The prosecutor said the Alexander brothers “used whatever means necessary” — including drugging victims and using “brute force” — to carry out sex attacks.
They “carried out their rapes in different ways,” said Smyser. “They physically held victims down” and put drugs like GHB and Xanax in their drinks, getting the women so intoxicated that, in one instance, their victim could not stand up, she said.
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