NEW YORK – Three brothers, two of them real estate agents who catered to the jet-set crowd, teamed up over a 12-year stretch to drug and rape women and girls, a prosecutor told a New York jury Tuesday in an opening statement that was disputed by defense lawyers who say the government is criminalizing consensual sex.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Madison Smyser said Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander from 2008 to 2021 “masqueraded as party boys when really they were predators,” a description supported by the monthlong trial's first witness, a woman who testified under a pseudonym.
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The woman said she was 20, an anthropology major in college, when she met two of the brothers in 2012. She accompanied a friend who had recently met Tal Alexander, and who invited her to watch the last game of the NBA Finals at actor Zac Efron’s Manhattan apartment.
After the game at an afterparty at a Manhattan nightclub, the woman said she was given a drink and remembered little afterward until she woke up naked on a bed in an apartment with a naked Alon Alexander standing over her. She said she repeatedly tried to get up and was pushed back each time by him, prompting her to say: “I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“Haha, you already did,” she recalled him saying as he “laughed in my face.”
She said he then overpowered her on the bed and, as she repeatedly said no, raped her, "ignoring what I was saying, prompting her to cry. When Tal Alexander entered the room briefly, she recalled, she was struck by how “super nonchalant” the brother was, never apologizing for entering the room.
She said she fled the room when Alon Alexander fell asleep. The woman remained composed through much of her testimony, though she got choked up several times and briefly cried as she recalled reaching out several years after the attack to friends she had told about the experience so she could be reminded that others “loved me and held it in some way inside of them.”
Smyser said in her opening statement that the witness's rape was consistent with how the brothers used “whatever means necessary” including luxury accommodations, flights, drugs, alcohol and sometimes brute force to lure women into situations where they could be raped.
Attorney Teny Geragos, representing Oren Alexander, urged the jury to reject the government's “monstrous story.”
She said the brothers, who got out of college in 2008, were successful, ambitious and sometimes arrogant as they pursued women in nightclubs, bars, restaurants and online in what is known as “hookup culture,” hoping to have as much sex as possible.
“You may find this behavior immoral, but it is not criminal,” Geragos said. She discredited the women who will testify, saying some of them were hoping to enrich themselves with lawsuits against the brothers and spoke of themselves as victims only after feeling regret that they had done illegal drugs or had sex outside of relationships with their boyfriends.
Attorney Deanna Paul, representing Tal Alexander, warned jurors that the subject matter of the case was disturbing and will seem like an R-rated movie, especially after prosecutors portrayed the brothers as “monsters.”
“In their early 20s, Tal and his brothers were party boys. They were womanizers. They slept with many, many women,” she said.
She urged jurors to reject the criminal charges against the brothers if they conclude that the accusers' testimony was unreliable.
An indictment alleges that the men conspired to entice women to join them at vacation destinations such as New York's Hamptons by providing flights and luxury hotel rooms and inviting them to entertainment events and parties before sexually abusing them and sometimes raping them.
The brothers have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers say prosecutors are unjustly criminalizing consensual sex.
In court papers, defense lawyers have said that among witnesses they had identified, they’d been able to locate evidence “that undermines nearly every aspect of the alleged victims’ narratives.”
Oren and Tal Alexander were real estate dealers who specialized in high-end properties in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Their brother, Alon, graduated from New York Law School before running the family's private security firm. Tal is 39 years old while Alon and Oren, who are twins, are 38.
The brothers have been held without bail since their December 2024 arrest in Miami, where they lived.