The former real estate kingpins Oren and Tal Alexander, along with their brother, Alon Alexander, have been held without bail for 13 months on charges of running a sex-trafficking conspiracy.
But despite spending the last year locked in Brooklyn’s most notorious jail, the brothers have built a well-funded publicity machine to discredit the female accusers in their trial, which is set to begin on Tuesday.
Their defense team has argued that the three men had consensual sex with the women, and that they now feel jilted and are seeking revenge. The brothers have denied all the charges against them.
Their lawyers, including some who defended the music mogul Sean Combs in his own sex-trafficking case, have faced private complaints from federal prosecutors about statements they have made regarding the case. The brothers’ public relations team, which has included representatives for Harvey Weinstein, Johnny Depp and the actor Justin Baldoni, has not been subject to the same criticism.
Some of the most notable sexual assault and trafficking trials of the last decade, including those of Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Combs, have involved attempts to shame and attack their accusers outside the courtroom, but the brothers’ efforts seem particularly brazen. They appear to include an anonymously run website, now shuttered, that promoted a conspiracy aimed at discrediting their accusers.
“This is the oldest game in town, and it just reinforces the patriarchy. Go back to Mary Magdalene,” said Ann Olivarius, a leading women’s rights lawyer who has represented many high-profile sexual assault victims and has been closely following the case. “It’s worked and it’s kept women quiet.”
The supercharged public campaign, which has sought to shame the women, also reflects a shift in the nation’s politics. Nearly 10 years after the start of #MeToo, which brought down Matt Lauer, Bill Cosby and other powerful men, the movement has lost momentum, with public figures arguing that it went too far.
In June, the Alexander brothers retained a high-stakes public relations strategist, Juda Engelmayer, whose clients have included Mr. Weinstein and Anna Sorokin, the fake heiress who also goes by Anna Delvey.
“People are going to walk into the courtroom thinking they already know everything about this story,” Mr. Engelmayer said in an interview. “You have to be unabashed and get the job done because it’s not a game.”
Mr. Engelmayer sends regular, unsolicited emails to reporters, breaking down developments in the case and assailing coverage that he views as unfair.
He calls up journalists and influencers “to try to put our narrative out there,” he said. Mr. Engelmayer was instrumental in encouraging The Daily Mail, one of England’s most popular newspapers, to publish compromising photographs and text messages from one of the accusers this past summer.
“I sat down with them and explained the narrative,” Mr. Engelmayer told The New York Times.
The headline on the Daily Mail article, which ran in July 2025, claimed that “raunchy nude-filled sexts threaten to blow the case wide open.” The woman in the article’s photographs, Kate Whiteman, was found dead near Sydney a few months after it ran, and a police investigation — which is now closed — was opened when authorities had questions about the cause of death.
After The Times reported on Ms. Whiteman’s death, the local coroner’s office received calls from people working for the brothers’ defense team. The office later told reporters that the death was “non-suspicious.”
Mr. Engelmayer declined to state exactly how much he charged for his services, but said he was asking for between $10,000 and $20,000 a month for the Alexander case.
Mr. Engelmayer is the brothers’ most recent public relations hire, but the campaign reaches back much further. The first accusations against them came to light six months before the men were arrested in December 2024, in a pair of civil lawsuits uncovered by The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication.
Just before that story broke, The Real Deal reached out to Oren Alexander for comment. He immediately shifted into crisis mode, according to two people who worked with him at Official, the luxury brokerage that he and Tal Alexander co-founded in 2022. Oren Alexander then contacted TAG PR, a public relations firm started by the crisis communications expert Melissa Nathan, perhaps best known for saying while she worked with Mr. Baldoni that she could “bury anyone.”
Text messages and screenshots reviewed by The Times show that TAG held calls and sent emails to Oren and Tal Alexander and at least two other executives at Official. The focus of the communications was an effort to discredit Ms. Whiteman with a story that suggested her lawyer had fired her after reviewing the case; in fact, she had switched representation because her first lawyer had wanted her to accept a confidential settlement and she wished for her case to proceed.
At some point during the summer of 2024, the brothers stopped working with TAG. Within weeks, as dozens of other women came forward, a mysterious website suddenly appeared.
The site, alexanderbrothersextorted.com, purported to expose a conspiracy meant to take down the brothers. It featured photographs of women who had accused the men of rape, as well as mug shots of people described as crime bosses and leaders in an extortion ring.
While the website grew, the brothers focused on digging up dirt on Evan Torgan, a personal injury lawyer who had brought the first two lawsuits against them, according to Everett Stern, a businessman who runs a private intelligence firm, Tactical Rabbit. Mr. Stern told The Times that after meeting with the brothers in September 2024, he grew fearful of their tactics and alerted the F.B.I.
The brothers never made an explicit threat, but “I felt there could be a risk to Torgan,” Mr. Stern said. “They were saying Evan Torgan was organizing all these women, he was this bad guy. You have to err on the side of caution.”
The Times reviewed emails he shared with the F.B.I.
Mr. Torgan declined a request for comment.
Mr. Engelmayer, when asked for comment on Saturday on the brothers’ various public relations efforts, said lawyers were unable to travel over the weekend to prison to speak to the men in person.
“The Alexanders are incarcerated, and given both their detention and the blizzard, their attorneys had no opportunity to review these claims with them prior to publication,” he said.
Later in 2024, alexanderbrothersextorted.com described allegations from Tracy Tutor, a reality television star who told The Times that she believed she may have been drugged by Oren Alexander, as attempts to “heighten her fame” and “cover up her infidelity.” The site called Ms. Whiteman “a sex worker with a history of financial troubles, evictions, defaults, and was even sued by American Express.”
Citing both the snow and issues of timing, Mr. Engelmayer also declined to respond to a question about whether or not the men had personally created the website.
The site went dark sometime in early 2025, shortly after the brothers were arrested. By that point, they had hired three teams of lawyers, who made similar attacks on the accusers, both in and out of court.
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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