New York sex-trafficking case against high-end real estate broker brothers goes to jury | New York

Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander surrounded themselves with beautiful women. The young and rich enjoyed sex and the pursuit of it. They flirted in nightclubs and on dating apps and partied with potential dates in the Hamptons, Aspen and other swanky locales.

The brothers, two of whom were high-profile real estate brokers known as the “A Team” and the other a private security executive, were clearly womanizers, their lawyers told jurors. But these are not alcohol-fueled rapists and sex traffickers as federal prosecutors allege.

A jury in Manhattan federal court began deliberating Thursday in a case that could send twin brothers Oren and Alon, 38, and Tal, 39, to prison for the rest of their lives.

In marathon closing arguments on Tuesday and Wednesday, defense attorneys urged the jury to carefully examine the evidence and set aside the emotional weight of nearly a dozen women who testified that one or more of the Alexander brothers sexually assaulted them. The brothers did not accept the accusations.

Oren Alexander’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said the brothers’ playboy lifestyle and callous pursuit of sex “hurt a lot of people’s feelings” and left some women heartbroken and upset. He argued that this was the main reason for their prosecution.

“Not because they are rapists. Not because they drug women. But because they have a certain combination of characteristics that makes a lot of people angry at them,” said Agnifilo, one of three defense attorneys who made his closing argument.

“They are reaching out to them. Why? Because they are after women. They are after women in every field,” he added. “The evidence shows that. They’re not drugging them, they’re not raping them, but they’re definitely stalking them.”

Also Thursday, Tracy Tutor, star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, became the latest woman to file a lawsuit against the brothers over sexual harassment allegations. She alleges that Oren Alexander drugged and assaulted her in a restaurant restroom while she was in New York for a real estate event.

Jason Goldman, an attorney representing Oren Alexander in the civil case, said Tutor and his attorneys “timed the filing of this salacious and patently false lawsuit for maximum media impact.” He said her allegations were more than a decade old and had already been made public.

Agnifilo, who was acquitted last summer of the most serious charges in the sex trafficking case of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, brought his casual courtroom demeanor to his closing argument in the Alexander brothers trial.

“It takes courage to be acquitted. It is so,” he told the jury of six men and six women. “And I want you to know that this is what you have to do here. You have to have that courage.”

Tal Alexander’s attorney, Deanna Paul, argued that prosecutors failed to present enough evidence to support the charges.

“If you don’t have bricks, you can’t build a house,” he said.

Agnifilo and Paul attacked the prosecution’s efforts to link the brothers to a blog that the government said encouraged drugging and raping women.

Agnifilo acknowledged the blog was “terrible” but said there was no evidence the Alexander brothers wrote the posts cited by prosecutors. He argued that the government used these to make the brothers look bad.

“They’re tasteless? They’re beyond tasteless. They’re shocking. They’re awful,” Agnifilo said. “I believe it doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help you decide. It doesn’t.”

“There is zero evidence that any of the Alexander brothers wrote any of these blog posts, and not a single piece of evidence that Tal was aware of its existence,” Paul said.

“The government is trying to link Tal to words he did not write on a blog he did not know existed, in order to prove a conspiracy that Tal was not a part of,” he added.

In a rebuttal Thursday, assistant U.S. attorney Elizabeth Espinosa noted that the blog was found on a computer hard drive in Tal Alexander’s apartment and followed the defendants’ “playbook and goals,” including their justification for rape, under a post titled “If it’s not rape…”

He said the blog post reflects how brothers justified rape for a decade after 2008 by concluding that it wasn’t rape if women were too scared or humiliated to report it to authorities, or if the woman fell in love with one of the brothers first, or if they couldn’t remember every detail of the night, or if the drugs left them with memory gaps and they were unable to fight back.

He said the defense arguments were “complete nonsense.”

“This is not a close case,” Espinosa said and called for guilty verdicts.

He said the brothers did not trust that the 11 women would “come forward with an avalanche of evidence.”

Espinosa noted how defense attorneys emphasized isolated pieces of testimony “trying to make you avoid the big picture.”

“The defendants’ allegations are meant to confuse and distract you,” he said. “The big picture is more important.”