Luxury real estate brothers face trial Tuesday in sex trafficking case

NEW YORK (AP) — Two luxury real estate brokers and their brother are scheduled to go on trial in New York City on sex trafficking charges Tuesday, just days after their lawyers renewed their request to a New York judge to toss out charges that they sexually abused dozens of women over the course of a dozen years.

Jury selection was expected to last about two days, with opening statements scheduled for next Monday for a trial projected to last until early March.

In papers filed in Manhattan federal court on Saturday, defense lawyers complained that prosecutors have unfairly treated their clients by rewriting the indictment as recently as last week and by recently adding charges the defense has not had time to investigate.

The latest iteration of the indictment was filed Thursday, the third time in two months that prosecutors have updated an indictment that accuses Oren, Tal and Alon Alexander of showering women with free travel and luxury accommodations before drugging and raping them in vacation destinations like New York’s Hamptons.

Oren and Tal Alexander were luxury real estate moguls for over a decade before co-founding a real estate firm, Official, which specialized in high-end properties in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Oren and Alon Alexander are 38-year-old twins while Tal Alexander is 39. Alon, who went to law school, was an executive at his family’s security firm.

Defense lawyers acknowledge that the men had sex with women but say the women were willing participants. The brothers have been held without bail since their December 2024 arrest in Miami, where they lived. All three have repeatedly pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Prosecutors say the brothers typically met their victims on dating apps, through social events, at bars and nightclubs, and sometimes through party promoters before providing drugs, including cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms, or drugging their drinks before sexually assaulting them.

Defense lawyers urged Judge Valerie E. Caproni to drop some charges from consideration at this month’s trial if she doesn’t toss them out entirely, including a conspiracy count in which the description of the charge was largely reduced in size.

“The defense should not be forced to trial on a conspiracy count that was changed at the last minute,” the lawyers wrote.

Caproni has shown some sympathy for the defense protest of 11th-hour changes to the indictment. On Friday, she denied a Jan. 12 request by the government to call a witness at trial to support a conspiracy charge, saying the request came well after an Oct. 17 deadline to notify the defense of evidence in the case.

Caproni also has ruled that Alon Alexander could not use his 2019 engagement and later marriage as proof that he had quit the alleged conspiracy to sexually attack women.

The lawyers also objected to forcing Oren Alexander to go to trial on short notice on a sexual-exploitation-of-a-minor charge that would carry a mandatory minimum 15 years prison term if he was convicted.

Prosecutors allege that Oren Alexander in April 2009 persuaded or coerced an incapacitated female who was 17 years and 10 months old to engage in sexually explicit conduct that could be filmed. The defense lawyers say her birth certificate can’t be authenticated because it was issued by a former Soviet Republic that is now in a war zone.

The defense lawyers also attacked the premise of the government’s sex trafficking charges, saying that prosecutors have taken the unprecedented position that anything of value given to women to get them to a location where a sex act occurs can make it commercial sex punishable under a sex trafficking statute.

“The truth is this is not merely a novel theory; it is an entirely new offense, one not created by Congress and one not remotely contemplated under the Sex Trafficking statute,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported last week that a 45-year-old Australian woman who had accused Oren and Alon Alexander of sexual assault was found dead near Sydney late last year. The newspaper said a spokesperson for the New South Wales coroner’s office said the death was deemed to be “non-suspicious.”