NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Two luxurious actual property brokers and their brother are scheduled to go on trial in New York Metropolis on intercourse trafficking costs Tuesday, simply days after their attorneys renewed their request to a New York decide to toss out costs that they sexually abused dozens of ladies over the course of a dozen years.
Jury choice was anticipated to final about two days, with opening statements scheduled for subsequent Monday for a trial projected to final till early March.
In papers filed in Manhattan federal court docket on Saturday, protection attorneys complained that prosecutors have unfairly handled their shoppers by rewriting the indictment as just lately as final week and by just lately including costs the protection has not had time to research.
The most recent iteration of the indictment was filed Thursday, the third time in two months that prosecutors have up to date an indictment that accuses Oren, Tal and Alon Alexander of showering girls with free journey and luxurious lodging earlier than drugging and raping them in trip locations like New York’s Hamptons.
Oren and Tal Alexander have been luxurious actual property moguls for over a decade earlier than co-founding an actual property agency, Official, which specialised in high-end properties in Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Oren and Alon Alexander are 38-year-old twins whereas Tal Alexander is 39. Alon, who went to regulation faculty, was an govt at his household’s safety agency.
Protection attorneys acknowledge that the boys had intercourse with girls however say the ladies have been keen contributors. The brothers have been held with out bail since their December 2024 arrest in Miami, the place they lived. All three have repeatedly pleaded not responsible to all costs.
Prosecutors say the brothers sometimes met their victims on courting apps, by social occasions, at bars and nightclubs, and typically by occasion promoters earlier than offering medicine, together with cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms, or drugging their drinks earlier than sexually assaulting them.
Protection attorneys urged Choose Valerie E. Caproni to drop some costs from consideration at this month’s trial if she would not toss them out totally, together with a conspiracy depend during which the outline of the cost was largely shriveled.
“The protection shouldn’t be pressured to trial on a conspiracy depend that was modified on the final minute,” the attorneys wrote.
Caproni has proven some sympathy for the protection protest of Eleventh-hour modifications to the indictment. On Friday, she denied a Jan. 12 request by the federal government to name a witness at trial to assist a conspiracy cost, saying the request got here nicely after an Oct. 17 deadline to inform the protection of proof within the case.
Caproni additionally has dominated that Alon Alexander couldn’t use his 2019 engagement and later marriage as proof that he had stop the alleged conspiracy to sexually assault girls.
The attorneys additionally objected to forcing Oren Alexander to go to trial on quick discover on a sexual-exploitation-of-a-minor cost that may carry a compulsory minimal 15 years jail time period if he was convicted.
Prosecutors allege that Oren Alexander in April 2009 persuaded or coerced an incapacitated feminine who was 17 years and 10 months outdated to have interaction in sexually express conduct that may very well be filmed. The protection attorneys say her beginning certificates cannot be authenticated as a result of it was issued by a former Soviet Republic that’s now in a battle zone.
The protection attorneys additionally attacked the premise of the federal government’s intercourse trafficking costs, saying that prosecutors have taken the unprecedented place that something of worth given to girls to get them to a location the place a intercourse act happens could make it business intercourse punishable underneath a intercourse trafficking statute.
“The reality is this isn’t merely a novel idea; it’s a wholly new offense, one not created by Congress and one not remotely contemplated underneath the Intercourse Trafficking statute,” they wrote.
In the meantime, The New York Occasions reported final week {that a} 45-year-old Australian lady who had accused Oren and Alon Alexander of sexual assault was discovered lifeless close to Sydney late final yr. The newspaper mentioned a spokesperson for the New South Wales coroner’s workplace mentioned the dying was deemed to be “non-suspicious.”
