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Luxury real estate agents Tal and Oren Alexander and their brother Alon were convicted Monday of sex trafficking for using their vast wealth to drug and rape numerous women they lured into their twisted orbit.
The property hotshots — who catered to celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and helped sell a record-smashing $240 million Midtown penthouse — were found guilty Monday after 20 hours of deliberations in Manhattan federal court.
Jurors, over the course of a monthlong trial, heard nightmarish testimony from nearly a dozen women who described being drugged, raped or groped by the three brothers after meeting them on dating apps and at glitzy parties between 2008 and 2021.
The disturbing trial evidence also detailed the siblings sexually assaulting women at gaudy Hamptons mansions, inside New York City apartments, on a ski trip in Aspen, Colorado and during a Caribbean cruise.
Tal, 37, Oren, 36, and Oren’s twin Alon, a top executive at their family’s powerful private security company, each face a minimum of 15 years in prison and up to life behind bars for conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and other sex crimes raps.
Oren and Tal co-founded the luxe real estate firm Official in 2022 after rising the ranks at brokerage giant Douglas Elliman.
The brothers boasted deep connections in Miami and Hamptons real estate circles, and once helped close the sale of a $15 million Miami Beach condo to Kardashian and West, and the whopping Manhattan penthouse sale to hedge fund titan Ken Griffin.
But their empire started crumbling in June 2024 when accuser Kate Whiteman filed a lawsuit accusing Alon and Oren of raping her in a Hamptons castle dubbed “the Playboy Mansion of the East Coast.”
Whiteman’s suit opened the floodgates to other allegations against all three brothers and a sparked a probe that led to the trio being arrested in December of that year and sent to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center without bail.
While she was not a planned witness at the federal criminal trial, the jury of six women and six men heard from 11 other alleged victims.
One of the accusers, an Ukrainian model using the alias “Bela Koval,” recalled being “paralyzed” by a drugged drink as Oren raped her inside a $13 million Sag Harbor mansion where the brothers hosted parties.
“It was like my whole body was tranquilized,” Koval testified.
A Nevada nurse using the alias “Maya Miller” described Tal violently raping her as she wept in the shower inside the same Hamptons party house, where he’d flown her and a friend for a long weekend in 2014.
“What he did to me, it was pure control,” she told jurors, dabbing tears from her eyes.
Another accuser testified that Alon raped her inside a Manhattan apartment after she met him at an exclusive NBA Finals watch party hosted by actor Zac Efron, who was friendly with the brothers.
Jurors also watched graphic video that Oren allegedly shot of himself having sex with an incapacitated 17-year-old — who testified that she had no memory of the episode.
Yet another victim testified that Tal and Alon raped her inside of a Southampton party house when she was just 16 years old.
The trial revealed crude online messages the brothers sent to each other during their alleged reign of sexual terror — including Oren telling his siblings that the “boys need to hunt” because “we are running out of prey” and Alon writing in a text that Oren “took down a 17-year-old.”
All three brothers pleaded not guilty and did not testify.
Their lawyers tried to poke holes in the accusers’ accounts of the assaults, and argued that their stories, as alarming as they sounded, did not add up to sex trafficking under federal law.
“The government wants you to be so horrified by some of the testimony that you forget what they have to prove,” Deanna Paul, a lawyer for Tal Alexander, said in her closing statement.
“Yes, sometimes they acted like entitled assholes,” Paul said. “That’s not a federal crime.”
Days before the start of the trial, Whiteman, an Australia native, was found dead near Sydney. Local police concluded that she did not die as a result of criminal activity.
Whiteman’s death followed a months-long effort by the Alexanders to discredit her, including by posting semi-nude photos and explicit texts she sent the brothers after the alleged rape in public legal filings.
English (US)