More than 20 years ago, a 13-year-old girl was invited to a house party. She had just celebrated her bat mitzvah a few months earlier.
She sneaked out of her house with a few friends from her Miami middle school. They drank some of her parents’ wine and then piled into a taxi to go to a house in Bal Harbour, a wealthy village in north Miami Beach.
It was there, she told The New York Times in an interview this week, that she was assaulted by five boys, including a high school student named Tal Alexander. The Miami-Dade police confirmed that the woman, now 36, spoke to them about the allegations in 2024.
Tal Alexander is now 39 and on trial in Manhattan federal court on charges that he and his twin brothers Oren and Alon Alexander, both 38, led a sweeping sex-trafficking conspiracy dating back to 2008. But the alleged assault of the 13-year-old girl, as well as a recently filed court document, point to a pattern of accusations that predate anything the men have been charged with — with victims so young that they were still in junior high school.
Deanna Paul, a lawyer for Tal Alexander, called the new allegation “categorically false.” In an emailed statement, she added, “Tal is focused on the fighting the charges currently being tried in federal court, not mid-trial publication of new claims.”
Prosecutors have said that the Alexander brothers began engaging in acts of sexual violence, including gang rape, while they were still in high school in Miami. “Each of the victims that the government has interviewed from this period reported hearing that individuals involved — including Tal Alexander — talked about the assaults at school, boasting about ‘running train’ on their victims and saying that they wanted to ‘do it again,’” the prosecutors wrote after the brothers were arrested in December 2024.
The men have all pleaded not guilty.
The federal charges against the brothers involve six adult victims and two underage girls, one who was described as 17 at the time and the other only as being under 18.
But the possibility that accusers might testify who were even younger when they said they were assaulted has been the subject of a heated debate between prosecutors and the Alexanders’ lawyers that has unfolded largely out of public view.
Earlier this month, according to a heavily redacted government court filing, prosecutors asked Judge Valerie E. Caproni to admit testimony from two women about acts that appear to have occurred in 2002, when the brothers and the victims were all young teenagers.
Lawyers for the brothers objected strenuously, describing the proposed testimony as “horrific,” and arguing it would be “far more prejudicial and inflammatory” than the other allegations the jury would hear at the trial. Judge Caproni barred the testimony.
The girl from Miami who was 13 when she said Tal Alexander assaulted her is not part of the trial, but she has been closely following it in the news.
The woman asked that her name be withheld in order to protect her privacy. The assault, she said, which began after five boys dragged her to a bedroom and removed her clothes, “affected my entire life.”
In November 2024, she said she got in contact with the Miami Dade police, who told her they were investigating the brothers, and she reported her memories of the assault to them.
She was in eighth grade.
It was late 2002 or early 2003; she said she remembered the school year, but not the exact date. She can’t remember a lot of things, which is why she said she said she didn’t come forward for 20 years. Tal Alexander was 16 at the time.
For two decades, she held on to the burning memory: She entered the Bal Harbour house, she said, and was given a shot of vodka. She had drunk alcohol before and said in the interview with The Times that she was “pretty sure she was drugged” by the drink because her body went weak and her memory turned hazy in a way she had never experienced.
After that, she said, she has only flashes: being dragged down the hall, feeling her clothes being pulled off and lying, weak and helpless, while the boys fondled her body. She knew that she was penetrated by something but was unsure if it was a penis. She remembers seeing a blinking red light and thinking to herself: “Am I being filmed?”
The boy who lived in the house where the alleged assault occurred, she said, was a friend of the Alexanders. His home was near the mansion where Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander grew up.
In June 2024, more than 20 years later, after Tal and Oren Alexander had become two of the most successful real estate brokers in Manhattan and Miami, a headline appeared in The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication: Two women had filed lawsuits accusing Oren and Alon Alexander of rape. Allegations from nearly two dozen more women soon followed; many of them accused Tal Alexander, as well.
Media coverage of the assaults came swift and fast. Dozens of other women came forward with allegations, including in The Times. The woman from Miami said she read the accounts of the accusers and was stunned that many sounded similar to what she had held on to for so many years.
“It took me a really long time to come to terms with it,” she said. “That experience has haunted my entire life.”
Debra Kamin is an investigative reporter for The Times who covers wealth and power in New York.
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