‘Case Is Far From Over,’ Alexander Brothers Say After Judge Sentences Them to 30 Years in Prison for Multiple Rapes

Defense attorneys for celebrity realtors Tal and Oren Alexander and their brother Alon, say they will appeal their convictions after each received a 30-year prison sentence on Tuesday for “monstrous” sex crimes spanning more than two decades. In March, a jury found the three brothers guilty of sex trafficking and aggravated sexual abuse, including the sexual exploitation and trafficking of a minor. Many of the victims sat in the packed courtroom at a federal Manhattan court Tuesday as U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni described the defendant’s conduct as “monstrous,” “shameful and degenerate.” “It wasn’t enough to rape them, the defendats also wanted to humiliate them,” Judge Caproni said after hearing impact statements from victims.Before their arrest in December 2024, Tal and Oren were among the top-selling real estate brokers in Manhattan’s and Miami’s luxury home markets. In 2019, the brothers represented buyer Ken Griffin in his $238 million purchase of a Manhattan apartment, which at the time was the most expensive home purchase in America. Their client list included celebrities and billionaires such as Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Tommy Hilfiger, and Steve Madden.Their jet-setting life came to a halt in June 2024, when the real-estate trade publication The Real Deal reported on two civil lawsuits accusing Oren and Alon of rape. Exposés in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal followed, leading to federal and Florida prosecutors charging the brothers with sex crimes. Over 70 women, eleven of whom testified during the trial, accused the real estate duo and brother Alon, an executive at the family’s private security firm, of first drugging and then brutally assaulting and raping them. Prosecutors said the brother’s pattern of assaults dated back to their high school years in Florida, in the early 2000s. The brothers met the women on dating apps or at fancy parties and lured their quarry to Miami nightclubs, New York City luxury apartments, or Hamptons mansions. “I never imagined my first time to the Hamptons would become a nightmare,” Ukrainian model Bela Koval said in her statement on Tuesday. Ms. Koval, who uses an alias, had told jurors how Oren first drugged her, making her body feel paralyzed, and then raped her inside a $13 million Sag Harbor abode. “What looked like a beautiful place became for me a mansion of horror, a mansion of dark secrets,” Ms. Koval said.Eleven women stepped up to the lectern on Tuesday and told their gut-wrenching stories. One woman said she could not trust men anymore, stating “I’m scared of men, all the time;” another said she was afraid to be touched. Brooklyn artist Lindsay Acree broke down in tears. “Our moms must have read different parenting books,” she told the judge. “I just don’t get it,” she added. “I don’t understand the cruelty, the hatred towards women.” Meanwhile, the three brothers sat at their defense tables, dressed in beige prison garb and kept their heads lowered. Since their arrests at Miami and transport to New York, they have been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center at Brooklyn. Defense attorneys had tried to secure their release by offering an unprecedented $115 million bond package and privately funded armed security guards that would watch their clients under strict home confinement. Judge Caproni firmly rejected the offer, stating that allowing wealthy defendants to build their own private jails created an unfair, two-tiered legal system.Citing the extraordinary magnitude of the crimes, federal prosecutors asked the judge to sentence each brother to life. “They spent years designing, executing, and perfecting their playbook of luring victims with promises of luxury, drugging victims so they could not resist, and then forcibly raping them,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing brief. After the lunch break, the defense attorneys and defendants addressed the judge, in vain, to convince her to grant the statutory mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. “It almost feels like an atomic bomb has been dropped on my life and destroyed everything in its wake,” Tal, 40, the oldest of three brothers, told the judge. He said the case had destroyed his business and broke up his marriage. Fighting tears, he asked her to have “mercy” on him and said it was difficult “to find words to express genuine regret without confessing to something that I did not do.”Tal’s wife, Arielle Alexander, whom he married in 2023, filed for divorce shortly after his arrest and has since distanced herself from the family’s joint defense. She gave birth to their son in December 2024. Tal’s defense attorney Deanna Paul raised the argument that sending parents to prison also punishes their children. “When a judge sentences a parent, the child serves a part of that sentence,” Ms. Paul said and opened up about her own experience. In 1993, her father was convicted of banking and securities fraud and sentenced to 11 years behind bars. “The difference between 15 and 30 and 50 years will shape the life of Tal’s boy,” Ms. Paul said. The three brothers have maintained their innocence and argued that all sexual encounters were all consensual. “I never, not once in my life drugged a woman, or had sex with a woman who had been secretly drugged,” Alon, 39, told the judge. He described text messages he had sent to women, which were shown during trial, as “deeply embarrassing,” and admitted that they were degrading toward women. But he justified his behavior as a result of the “hook-up” culture he saw growing up in the 1990s and listening to the Howard Stern Show. Alon’s wife, the high-profile Israeli fashion model, Shani Zigron, who used to walk the runway for designers like Givenchy, Versace, and Jean Paul Gaultier, shares two young daughters with the now convicted Alon. She wrote a letter, which was read aloud to the court, in which she said that her husband took care of her during her two pregnancies. If he had ever abused women, the letter went on, she would have left him, “I would never allow my daughters to walk around a man who was abusing women.” “I was with Alon as his girlfriend, then as his wife, and eventually as the mother of his children,” Ms. Zigron wrote. “That’s not what I saw, and I was paying close attention.” Denying his guilt, Alon’s twin Oren told the judge, “I was partying too much and sleeping with too many women in those years.” But, he insisted, he and his brothers “never drugged or raped anyone. We have never trafficked anyone for sex, and we never conspired to hurt anyone.” A video presented in trial proved otherwise. It showed Oren sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl, identified in court as Amelia Rosen, while she lay limp, unresponsive, and incapacitated on his bed. His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, who successfully defended the music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs in his sex trafficking case, referred to the video as “not good,” insisting his client’s behavior may have been immoral but not criminal. “Let’s agree, in their 20s the brothers were sexually aggressive,” Mr. Agnifilo said. The twins Oren and Alon both took and passed lie detector tests when they were first charged that Oren said was exculpatory. The judge was not impressed. “Liars can pass lie detector tests,” Judge Caproni responded. “Mazel tov that you passed it. But that doesn’t sway the testimony that I heard.” The brothers had each argued that marriage and raising children had made them better men. The judge was not moved that marriage had “suddenly transformed” them. “Rape is not about the availability of sex,” she said. “Rape has always been about power.” She sentenced the three men to 30 years each, giving them an extra 20 years for other charges, but ordered the sentences to run concurrently. Judge Caproni compared the brothers to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because they “appeared” to be good “when they chose to do so.” They love their children, they love wives and parents, while at the same time being “sadistic sexual predators,” the judge said. “The shame is misplaced,” the judge said, explaining that the victims had expressed shame about publicly speaking about their assault. It was not the victims who should feel shame but the defendants, the judge said. “I hope you learn to feel ashamed,” she added. The media spokesman for the Alexander brothers and their family, Juda Engelmayer, told The New York Sun in a statement Tuesday evening, “Thirty years is an extraordinarily severe sentence, and the Alexander family is devastated by today’s outcome.” “This case is far from over,” Mr. Engelmayer continued. “Serious questions remain about the fairness of the proceedings, and the brothers will continue fighting to ensure their convictions receive a full and fair review.”Mr. Englemayer emphasized that the “brothers acknowledged before the Court that they had behaved in ways they deeply regret, particularly in their treatment of women, but they also maintained, as they have throughout this case, that they did not commit the crimes they were convicted of.” “Maintaining one’s innocence should not be mistaken for a lack of remorse,” Mr. Engelmayer said.Manhattan US Attorney Jamie McDonald, who sat in the first row during the hearing, said in a statement afterwards, “Today’s sentence makes clear that this craven, sinister conduct is extraordinarily serious and will be met with serious punishment.”“The defendants preyed on women and young girls, using drugs and violence to incapacitate them so they could rape them,” Mr. McDonald said. “The defendants did this for years — inflicting unspeakable harm on so many young women. And, for years, the defendants used their careers and social status to conceal the danger they posed.” The Alexander brothers still face dozens of civil lawsuits in addition to the federal sentencing. Oren and Tal also face criminal state charges in Florida, involving three sexual assaults that occurred between 2016 and 2021.

‘Case Is Far From Over,’ Alexander Brothers Say After Judge Sentences Them to 30 Years in Prison for Multiple Rapes

‘Case Is Far From Over,’ Alexander Brothers Say After Judge Sentences Them to 30 Years in Prison for Multiple Rapes

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