Three brothers, including two who were among the country’s most prominent real estate brokers, were convicted in Manhattan on Monday of engaging in a yearslong conspiracy to traffic women and girls for sex.
The brothers — Tal and Oren Alexander, who regularly closed multimillion-dollar real estate deals in New York and elsewhere, and Alon Alexander, a security executive — were found guilty on every count they each faced, and could now all face life in prison when they are sentenced on Aug. 6.
The verdict comes more than a month after the trial began in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where the jury heard weeks of emotional and often graphic testimony from 11 women who had accused the Alexander brothers of rape or sexual assault. Jurors deliberated for 21 hours.
In some cases, the brothers — Tal, 39, and Oren and Alon, twins who are 38 — used drugs to incapacitate their victims before raping them.
In one case, prosecutors showed the jury a video of Oren Alexander raping an incapacitated 17-year-old girl in 2009 in a Manhattan apartment he shared with his brothers. Although courtroom spectators were not able to see the video, Andrew Jones, one of the prosecutors, described it in his summation — how Oren Alexander set up the front-facing camera on his laptop, adjusted its angle and then got into bed with the drugged girl.
“When you saw him pick up her limp legs and climb on top of her lifeless body, you knew what you were seeing,” Mr. Jones said.
The victim, who testified under a pseudonym, said she had no memory of the events shown in the video or of ever meeting Oren Alexander.
In court, none of the three brothers testified at the trial.
Their lawyers, summing up their cases to the jury, argued that the brothers were “playboys” and “womanizers” but not criminals. They cast the dozens of accusers as a bloc of scorned women, all motivated by shame, regret and greed. Their incomplete recollections, the lawyers said, were due not to drugs slipped to them by the brothers, but to their own voluntary consumption of alcohol and narcotics. Their accounts of being assaulted, the lawyers argued, were influenced by media reports and cash-hungry civil lawyers, who had whipped up a conspiracy.
They were not successful in persuading the jury.
The verdict seals a spectacular fall from grace for the Alexander brothers, one that has been breathlessly chronicled by tabloids and real estate publications since allegations first surfaced against them nearly two years ago.
When the trial opened in January, the brothers were together facing 12 charges. But late in the trial, prosecutors dropped two counts, telling the judge they had been forced to do so after one accuser became so frightened by the defense team’s tactics that she refused to testify. Prosecutors said in a memo to the judge that a private investigator hired by the defense had pretended to be an insurance agent, visited the juror’s neighborhood and asked questions about her children.
The conduct “crossed ethical lines,” prosecutors said. It also followed a pattern of shame and intimidation tactics employed by the brothers since the first accusations against them were made public in the summer of 2024.
In the end, they faced 10 counts, and were found guilty on every one of them.
Those accusations — two civil lawsuits first reported on by The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication — prompted an avalanche of litigation against the brothers. By the time federal charges were filed in December 2024, with all three men arrested in predawn raids in Miami, prosecutors would say they had interviewed 60 women while preparing their case.
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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