Three Florida brothers who exploited the wealth and influence of their family’s luxury real estate business to drug and rape dozens of women were each sentenced to 30 years in prison in New York on Tuesday for sex trafficking.
Twins Oren and Alon Alexander, 39, and Tal Alexander, 40, were convicted in March on multiple charges after a five-week trial heard details of years of sexual assaults committed in Miami, New York and other high-end locations including the Hamptons; Aspen, Colorado, and on a Caribbean cruise.
A dozen of their victims spoke at the brothers’ sentencing hearing in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Several of the women gave testimony on Tuesday using pseudonyms, and told of how the assaults by the brothers had destroyed their lives and their ability to trust other people.
“I carry a quiet funeral in me for the person I might have become had this not happened to me,” said one woman, who described being raped by Tal Alexander in August 2014, and said the attack changed the way she approached relationships.
“Every second that Tal raped me in that shower felt like an eternity of terror.”
Another told the court that she was raped at a property in the Hamptons after she was drugged and led into a bedroom.
“What looked like a beautiful place became for me a mansion of horror, a mansion of dark secrets,” she said.
The three brothers, dressed in tan prison suits, sat impassively as they listened to the women speak. During their trial, their lawyers conceded that the brothers were “womanizers”, and said they apologized that they were “insensitive toward the feelings of certain women at certain times”, but maintained all the sexual encounters were consensual.
The brothers moved from Florida to New York in 2008. Oren and Tal Alexander were star representatives at real estate firm Douglas Elliman, before forming their own brokerage, Official, which made hundreds of millions of dollars selling condos to wealthy and celebrity clientele.
Alon Alexander ran their family’s private security company, and was also deeply involved in their opulent lifestyle of superyachts, private jets, exotic overseas trips and parties at waterfront mansions in Miami and elsewhere.
Their easy access to money and women, prosecutors said, allowed them to exploit their victims and lure them to parties or on luxury trips, during which the Alexanders would drug and rape them, either together or in the company of others.
“They acted to exert maximum domination over their victims,” the attorneys said in a sentencing submission to the court ahead of Tuesday’s hearing.
“The defendants felt empowered to take whatever they wanted from any woman or girl who agreed to get on a plane, go to a party or sit at their table at a nightclub. The defendants made no effort to have consensual sex with the victims; they did not want that. Instead, they slipped drugs into drinks and forced themselves on to their victims.
“The drugs they used not only rendered a victim immobile, but also impacted her ability to remember every detail of her assault. The defendants’ pattern of mocking and humiliating their victims served the defendants’ goal of maximally dehumanizing these women, and it also shamed the victims into silence.”
Dozens of other women came forward after the allegations against the Alexanders were revealed in a bombshell article published by real estate news outlet the Real Deal in June 2024.
At least 70 women were raped or sexually assaulted by the men, prosecutors said in an earlier court filing that described them as “serial rapists”.
US district court judge Valerie Caproni said she believed the brothers should not be incarcerated at the same prison because they were a bad influence on each other. The brothers’ lawyers argued Tuesday that they should be able to serve their sentences together.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
