A Manhattan jury was urged Thursday to reject efforts by the multimillionaire Alexander brothers to denigrate women they’re accused of drugging and trafficking for sex and hold them accountable once and for all for “decades of rapes and lies.”
In the government’s rebuttal before the Manhattan Federal Court jury got the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Espinosa said Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander had engaged in classic victim blaming and shaming in their bids for verdicts of not guilty.
“It’s not rape if she had a crush on you first … It’s not rape if you made sure she can’t remember every detail,” Espinosa said, mocking the brothers’ defense.
“Members of the jury, the victims are not on trial here, the defendants are. See the defendants’ arguments for what they are: a continuation of what they’ve been doing since 2008 — hiding and shifting the blame for their reprehensible actions.”
The prosecutor said the wealthy brothers’ attempts to portray themselves as “passive actors” and victims of a conspiracy “where everyone else is a liar or confused,” was part and parcel of a pattern of deflection dating back to the Miami men’s teenage years.
“The defendants never thought these women would tell anyone about what they did, that they would ever have the strength to report what happened to them. The defendants didn’t count on all 11 of them coming forward in an avalanche of evidence,” she said.
“That ends today with you. Now it’s time to hold them accountable.”
Manhattan Federal Court Judge Valerie Caproni charged the jury for just under two hours after Espinosa’s rebuttal, with the panel expected to begin their deliberations in the afternoon.
Twins Oren and Alon, 38, and older brother Tal, 39, have pleaded not guilty to all charges and could spend the rest of their lives in prison if convicted in the case.
Before their arrests, Tal and Oren were among the country’s highest-paid real estate brokers, selling some of the most expensive properties in the world. Alon worked for the Israeli-American family’s private security firm.
Several women who took the stand accused the brothers of recruiting them to date rape and otherwise humiliate sexually at luxurious locations across the U.S. and beyond in a sex trafficking conspiracy allegedly dating back to 2008.
Prosecutors included allegations from 11 women in the case, and during pretrial hearings, said they’d interviews as many as 60. All three siblings are accused of sex crimes involving minors in the 10-count indictment.
Last week, the feds dropped two counts in the case, saying a victim was too scared to keep cooperating after a since-fired investigator for Marc Agnifilo’s law firm started poking around about her life and young family. The investigator “represented herself as an employee of an insurance company to (the victim’s) neighbors and was, among other things, asking questions about (the victim’s) minor children,” prosecutors said in court filings.
Agnifilo’s firm also represents Luigi Mangione, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and, as of last week, Harvey Weinstein.
During closing arguments Wednesday, lawyers for the brothers at times sought to frame victims as broken-hearted or otherwise scorned, saying their clients may not have been perfect gentlemen, but that their playboy lifestyle wasn’t criminal.
“The government wants you to believe that Tal and his brothers, that they were essentially running a criminal enterprise, as if they were the mob having meetings in a social club in the back room planning federal crimes. These three brothers are not mobsters,” Deanna Paul said.
“They’re not the Gambinos. They’re three brothers who went to college and lived in different cities across the country. They lived separate lives. And yes, sometimes they acted like entitled assholes. But that’s not a federal crime.”
Agnifilo suggested the brothers had been targeted because of jealousy over their success.
“There’s a whole spectrum of how guys are with women. Some are modest … They’re not on the modest side of the spectrum, they are on the opposite side of the spectrum, and I think there are a lot of hurt feelings,” attorney Marc Agnilifo said.
“I think they hurt a lot of people’s feelings while they were simultaneously — and I don’t mean to … sound braggy — while they were ascending professionally. And I think people had strong feelings about it.”
The Alexander brothers, who also face a litany of civil suits, have been incarcerated at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since their December 2024 arrests.
