A trio of brothers with deep South Florida roots have tumbled from the top of the ultra high-end real estate industry into the depths of a scandal, facing disturbing allegations of drugging and sexually assaulting women.
In separate civil suits filed in New York state court, four women have made a host of sordid complaints against one or more of the Alexander brothers: Oren and Tal, two jet-setting real estate superstars who have brokered some of the country’s most expensive residential deals from Miami to Manhattan over the last decade; and a third brother, Alon, who is Oren’s twin but works for the family’s private security company.
Since the first suits were filed in the spring, an attorney representing two of those women told the Miami Herald an additional 40 women — including a dozen from the Miami area — have come forward with allegations against one or more of the brothers.
Some of those alleged incidents date back two decades, when the brothers attended Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High School in North Miami Beach. Evan Torgan, a New York personal injury lawyer, said it’s possible some of those could produce additional lawsuits.
“People from back as early as 2004 have reported to me that it happened to them,” he said. “The most recent was 2021.”
Joel Denaro, a Miami attorney for the Alexander brothers, denied the allegations in the four lawsuits and scoffed at Torgan’s claim of a surge of new allegations.
“There are not 40 additional women as Mr. Torgan claims,” Denaro said. “That’s a shell argument. Like the ‘Wizard of Oz,’ pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Still, some people with lengthy ties to the brothers in Miami-Dade weren’t all that surprised to hear about the legal troubles, saying the brothers had notorious reputations dating as far back as their days at Krop. They were popular there, and Tal was a tennis star.
One former childhood friend, who like most people who spoke to the Herald asked not to be identified, claimed to have seen sex videos the brothers took involving girls who, like themselves at the time, were high school teenagers.
“At the end of the day, these kids, ever since I can remember, they’ve been assholes,” he said. “I’ve seen the videos.”
One woman said she felt compelled to go public: Samantha Murphy, who hasn’t filed a lawsuit, told the Herald that Oren Alexander raped her in his South Beach apartment in 2017. After a night out with friends, Murphy, then 26, said the two went back to his apartment and Oren ripped her dress off without her consent. She recalls crying and telling him to stop but he didn’t.
“I think it’s important to know if there are any other girls out there who haven’t come forward, that they’re not alone,” said Murphy, 33, a former model who is now married to Patrick Murphy, a former U.S. House representative from Palm Beach Gardens. “I also think it’s important that in society today we still encourage men to be aggressive and women to be passive and that’s a problem.”
A precipitous fall
The lawsuits, and resulting national media scrutiny, have already been costly for Oren and Tal Alexander, who stepped away from Official, the boutique New York City-based real estate firm they founded more than two years ago. They’ve returned to South Florida, the company’s future in doubt.
Alon continues to work for Kent Security, a private security firm built by his father Schlomy Alexander, which offers crisis management, guards and video technology.
It has been a precipitous fall for 37-year-old twins Alon and Oren and their year-older brother Tal, particularly for the latter two, whose success in the high-end real estate markets of Miami, Aspen and Manhattan was legendary.
They got kick-started in the business with their father, who also dealt in luxury properties. In 2012, Schlomy Alexander helped one of his sons sell a home in Indian Creek Village for $47 million — at the time, the most expensive private home ever sold in Miami-Dade. Since then, the brothers have brokered some record-breaking deals that made them celebrities beyond the world of real estate.
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By 2019, Tal and Oren made international headlines, handling a $240 million condo sale in midtown Manhattan to billionaire Citadel Chief Executive Officer Ken Griffin, who has since moved his firm’s headquarters to Miami. It remains the most expensive private residence sold in U.S. history.
Joining with luxury real estate industry giant Douglas Elliman, they claimed sales of over $1.8 billion in 2021. They’ve sold properties involving shoe magnate Steve Madden, designer Tommy Hilfiger and “Hamilton” producer Sander Jacobs.
Good-looking and charismatic, the Alexanders seemed to be regulars at the hottest clubs, wherever they traveled. They were regularly highlighted on celebrity Page Six of the New York Post. In magazine pictures, online sites and social-media feeds, they always seemed to be surrounded by beautiful women and regularly jetting between New York City, Miami, Aspen and Martha’s Vineyard. They posted pictures of themselves riding camels in Qatar. In 2014, Gotham Magazine named the twins some of the most eligible and hottest bachelors in New York City.
A Miami Herald article in 2019 told of how the brothers’ Instagram accounts were overflowing with pictures of them cavorting in the Bahamas, Cambodia and Hawaii and visiting Art Basel fairs in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires.
Lawsuits put careers under scrutiny
Today, the media and industry attention has turned anything but gushing.
Since the online industry magazine the Real Deal first reported about the lawsuits in June, both the The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have investigated allegations against the brothers. Combined, the two newspapers reported finding 12 women who claim to have been victimized by one or more of the brothers.
The first two civil lawsuits were filed in March in New York state court. They were followed by similar allegations made in a pair of additional lawsuits filed through the summer. All are seeking jury trials and tens of millions in damages.
None of the brothers has been charged with any crimes in connection with the sexual assault allegations that were made in the civil lawsuits. But The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the FBI was investigating the brothers along with the New York Police Department. The Miami Herald confirmed that report, but found no evidence the brothers were being investigated by any local or federal agency in South Florida.
Up until 2021, Oren and Tal worked at one of the nation’s top luxury real estate firms, Douglas Elliman. They often shuttled between New York and Miami. They left that company to form their own, a smaller New York City firm that they named Official. Since the lawsuits, Oren and Tal have stepped away from Official. All three brothers are now living in the Miami area.
In a statement to the Miami Herald this week, Elliman spokesman Stephen Larkin said his company never received any complaints about Oren or Tal Alexander while they were there and management wasn’t aware of any claims. He said, about a decade prior to the lawsuits, a broker told a senior executive she blacked out at a social event, but she never named anyone and insisted on confidentiality.
“Had any such claims been received, those complaints would have been thoroughly investigated consistent with our policies and procedures,” Larkin wrote in his statement to the Herald.
Sordid allegations in lawsuits
The allegations in the four lawsuits filed in New York state court are sordid: Three women say they suspect the brothers spiked their drinks before sexually assaulting them. One claims a private security guard helped capture her as she tried to escape from a room — in a castle.
Former British marketing executive Kate Whiteman was at the Dune nightclub in Southampton with friends during Memorial Day weekend in 2012 when she claims that Alon grabbed her hand and led her outside to a black SUV. She got in. Oren, she says, was waiting inside. The SUV sped off.
When it stopped, Whiteman says in the March complaint, she was five miles away at opulent Sir Ivan’s Castle in Water Mill, an estate owned by billionaire Ivan Wilzig, who made a fortune in oil and banking. Wilzig has since banned the brothers from his estate, Page Six reported.
There, Whiteman claims, she was hurried into a room in a garage, the door locked behind her, and ordered to change into a sarong. She ran toward the house, but was grabbed by a security guard who dragged her back to the garage, she said in the suit. After being taken to a large bedroom upstairs, Whiteman claims she was “sexually assaulted, abused, raped, pinned, groped, harassed, battered and fondled” by Alon and Oren.
Also filed in March was a lawsuit by a woman named Rebecca Mandel. She claims that in 2010 she bumped into Oren and Alon at a club called SL in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Mandel, who said she knew the brothers from previous social events, was 18 at the time. She said that after Alon bought her the only drink she had that evening, “the night became hazy.”
Mandel claims to recall being told they were going to a party and jumping into a cab with the brothers. But when she got to the apartment, there was no noise, no party. She said she willingly entered the apartment, but once inside, Alon held her down as Oren raped her. Then the brothers switched positions, she said, and the assault continued.
A third lawsuit filed in June lists all three brothers, Oren, Alon and Tal, as defendants. Angelica Parker said while she and a friend were visiting the brothers in one of their Manhattan apartments in 2012, they were offered ecstasy and given drinks. Parker said her friend took off and hid in a stairwell after being groped by Alon. Then, she said, Alon and Tal raped her as Oren watched.
Tal’s legal team responded to the lawsuit by calling Parker a “professional plaintiff” according to a story in the online news site the Daily Beast. A year before she filed her lawsuit against the Alexanders, when she was known as Angelia Cecora, she filed a civil legal action against superstar boxer Oscar De La Hoya. She claimed the boxer battered her and held her against her will one night at a Ritz-Carlton hotel. A judge dismissed the case, finding it “without merit.”
In June, a spokesman for Tal told The Wall Street Journal that it was “expected that shakedown artists are going to line up given the allegations against Tal’s brothers.”
And finally last month a woman named Renee Willett claimed in yet another civil lawsuit in New York that she met Oren Alexander on a dating app and agreed to meet at his Manhattan apartment. There, she said, she was “drugged and forcibly raped.”
She said she was too ashamed to contact police after the alleged December 2016 rape and decided to file the lawsuit after reading about the previous ones. Willett said she met Oren Alexander on the app about a year before the alleged rape and agreed to meet with him only after discovering they had mutual friends.
None of the brothers would comment, but Denaro, their Miami attorney, said any intimate relations the Alexander brothers have engaged in — including beyond the specific lawsuits — have always been “consensual.” He showed the Miami Herald what his clients say are texts and direct messages from two of the women who filed the lawsuits, claiming they prove the brothers’ innocence because they were sent after the alleged rapes.
In one text allegedly from one of the women suing the brothers, Oren Alexander is asked if he would like to join her at a fundraiser for Israel that her parents are hosting. In another, a woman asks one of the brothers to come over, teasing him with racy, intimate sexual details. Denaro said the direct messages and texts have been verified as real by a forensics expert hired by the brothers.
“The sexually suggestive, inviting texts were sent days, weeks and months after the consensual contact,” said Denaro. “These text messages are compelling and tell a different story.”
Torgan said he’s not surprised the Alexanders would resort to “character assassination.”
Despite the Alexanders’ “disparagement” of his clients, Torgan said they are not backing down. “They weren’t assaulted by strangers, but by people they knew. Post-traumatic communication is typical of people who were violated by trusted individuals as they try to regain some modicum of control and self-empowerment over an unbearable situation.”
An open ‘secret’ in Miami
The allegations sounded familiar to more than a half-dozen people who spoke to the Herald, and several others who reportedly spoke with other major news outlets.
One person, who did business with the Alexander brothers in South Florida and claims to know several alleged victims, told the Herald that reports of the brothers sexually assaulting women have been an “open secret” in the Miami area and real estate industry for a long time.
The recent lawsuits “seem very consistent with the first- and second-hand accounts I’ve heard for over a decade,” said the real estate industry professional.
Another real estate industry executive, who was reached by the Herald, worked with the brothers and claims to know as many as a half-dozen alleged victims, said high school classmates were warned to keep a distance from the Alexanders.
“Everyone was aware to stay away from them,” said the real estate veteran. “The problem is that Oren and Alon are good-looking guys.”
Their comments echoed ones in other media reports. The New York Times wrote that dozens of former classmates and real estate industry workers said they knew of “drugging and violent sexual assault by the brothers, dating back at least 20 years to when the men were high school students.”
A woman named Abigail Hofeldt, who spoke to the Herald, said she was about 15 when she and a friend slipped out of her friend’s home one night and were driven to an empty home by the Alexander brothers and their friends. Hofeldt said she managed to escape as the brothers were pinning her down with her arms and legs apart. One of them had climbed on top of her, she said.
Hofeldt said when she got up, she noticed someone outside a window with a Camcorder-like device, videotaping the encounter. Hofeldt, who at the time attended Miami Country Day School near Miami Shores, told the Herald she managed to get away.
By the early 2000s when that incident was alleged to have taken place, the brothers had finished studying at a private Hebrew school in the Bal Harbour area and moved on to Krop, where Tal excelled at tennis. He continued his athletic career in 2005 at Long Island’s Hofstra University. A year later, his twin younger brothers were off to the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado.
Another person who claims to have worked with the Alexanders told the Herald the brothers continued to “prey” on women after high school.
“They preyed on models who came here [New York and Miami] with dreams and no money,” said the real estate industry veteran.
Murphy, the former model, said she remains scarred by her experience with one brother, Oren, that she said happened in 2017. Up until that night, she said the two had no relationship, they hadn’t kissed or held hands. She said when they got back to his apartment after a night out with friends, she put on virtual reality goggles and he suddenly ripped her dress off against her will. She suspects, though she can’t prove, that she was drugged at some point.
“I would not have fallen asleep in bed with someone who raped me,” she said.
As for Murphy’s claim, Denaro said Oren has never had sex with anyone against their will.
“The Alexander brothers have never had intimate relations unless they were consensual,” the attorney said.
Murphy said she didn’t go to police after the incident with Oren because she was deeply confused and, at the time, didn’t even know what date rape was.
“I blamed myself for being vulnerable,” she said. “[Contacting police] wasn’t an option, because I didn’t want to be a victim.”