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 all could now receive up to life in prison when the judge, Valerie E. Caproni, sentences them on Aug. 6.
The verdict comes more than a month after the trial began in Federal District Court, where the jury heard weeks of emotional and often graphic testimony from 11 women who had accused the brothers of rape or sexual assault. The jurors deliberated for about 21 hours over three days.
“It was a rough day,” one juror, declining to give his name, told a reporter outside the courthouse after the verdict. “I’m numb, to say the least.”
The jurors listened to more than 30 witnesses and in one case watched a video of one of the Alexander brothers assaulting a 17-year-old girl. The jurors’ names were withheld by Judge Caproni because of the sensitive nature of the case.
The government had told the jury that the defendants masqueraded as party boys when they actually were predators.
“They used a consistent playbook to lure, isolate and rape their victims,” a prosecutor, Andrew Jones, said in a closing argument, “and not only did they commit these crimes without remorse, they did it with callousness, with a perverse sense of pride.”
In some cases, the brothers — Tal, 39, and Oren and Alon, twins who are 38 — used drugs to incapacitate and rape their victims, the prosecution said.
During the five weeks of trial, lawyers for all three Alexander brothers sought to undermine the credibility of the victims, raising questions about their sexual histories and drug use.
The defense lawyers argued that the brothers were playboys and womanizers but not criminals. They cast the victims 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.
After the verdict, Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, commended the victims who had come forward and testified at the trial.
Mr. Clayton said the jury had seen the Alexanders’ conduct “for what it was — calculated, brutal sexual abuse that, unimaginably, the defendants celebrated.”
The verdict seals a spectacular fall from grace for the Alexander brothers, one that has been chronicled by tabloids and real estate publications since allegations first surfaced against them nearly two years ago.
Tal and Oren Alexander had been among the top-earning real estate brokers in the country, advertising a life on social media that was as high-flying as the penthouses they peddled. Alon Alexander, who worked as an executive for his family’s security business, was their faithful sidekick. All three were known womanizers who reveled in the party circuits of Miami and Manhattan, but whispers they had assaulted women had followed them since high school.
The Alexander family faced the charges as a united front. The brothers’ Israeli parents, Orly and Shlomi Alexander, offered their $40 million Miami home as collateral in early bond hearings for the brothers. Bail was denied, and the men have since been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The parents moved temporarily to New York for the duration of the trial, with Orly Alexander appearing some mornings at the courthouse in a fur coat, bundled up against the bitter cold. Extended family members and friends sat with them each day during the proceedings, sometimes filling three entire rows in the courtroom.
They sat through weeks of difficult testimony, such as when prosecutors showed the jury a video of Oren Alexander raping an incapacitated 17-year-old girl in 2009. Although courtroom spectators were not able to see the video, Mr. Jones, the prosecutor, 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.
That victim, who testified under a pseudonym, said she had no memory of the events shown in the video or of ever meeting Oren Alexander. Twenty-one additional witnesses took the stand for the prosecution as well.
None of the three brothers testified at the trial.
When the trial opened in January, the brothers were together facing 12 charges. But late in the trial, prosecutors dropped two counts, telling Judge Caproni they had been forced to do so after one victim 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 woman’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.
The first public 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.
On Monday, as the 12 jurors marched into the courtroom to deliver the verdict, not one of them looked at the defendants. Some minutes later, as the brothers were led out of the courtroom after the verdict was delivered, Tal Alexander, the oldest of the three, turned to look at his parents and said, “Stay strong.”
Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Oren Alexander, said the defense lawyers for all three brothers were disappointed with the verdict and suggested they were planning to appeal.
“We believe in our clients’ innocence,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “We’re going to keep fighting.”
The indictment charged the men with participating in a conspiracy to sexually traffic women from 2008 to 2021, although prosecutors had said in court papers that evidence showed they had raped and sexually assaulted dozens of victims over more than two decades.
On Monday, after they learned of the verdict, many of those victims and their lawyers said they were crying with relief.
Lindsey Acree, who testified during the trial about being raped by Tal Alexander in the Hamptons in 2011, said the verdict would encourage other women to speak up after sexual assault.
“Use your voice,” she said. “You will be believed — today the jury confirmed that.”
Olivia Bensimon and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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