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

Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander surrounded themselves with beautiful women. Young and wealthy, they enjoyed sex and the pursuit of it. They flirted at nightclubs and on dating apps, and partied with potential hookups in the Hamptons, Aspen and other ritzy locales.The brothers – two of them high-end real estate brokers known as “the A Team”, the other a private security executive – were certainly womanizers, their lawyer told jurors. But they aren’t the drink-spiking rapists and sex traffickers that federal prosecutors allege.A jury in Manhattan federal court started deliberating on Thursday in a case that could put twins Oren and Alon, 38, and Tal, 39, in prison for the rest of their lives.In marathon closing arguments on Tuesday and Wednesday, defense lawyers urged the jury to carefully scrutinize the evidence and set aside the emotional heft of nearly a dozen women who testified that one or more of the Alexander brothers sexually assaulted them. The brothers have pleaded not guilty.Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Oren Alexander, said the brothers’ playboy lifestyle and unsentimental pursuit of sex “hurt a lot of people’s feelings”, leaving some women heartbroken and upset. That’s the real reason they’re on trial, he argued.“Not because they’re rapists. Not because they drug women. But because they have a certain combination of characteristics that have made lots of people angry with them,” said Agnifilo, one of three defense lawyers to deliver a closing argument.“They’re reaching out. Why? Because they are pursuing women. They’re pursuing women across the board,” he added. “That’s what the evidence shows. They’re not drugging them, they’re not raping them, but they’re certainly pursuing them.”Also on Thursday, Tracy Tutor, a star of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles on Bravo, became the latest woman to sue over alleged sexual misconduct by the brothers. She alleges Oren Alexander drugged and assaulted her in a restaurant bathroom while she was in New York City for a real estate event.Jason Goldman, a lawyer representing Oren Alexander in civil litigation, said Tutor and her attorneys “have timed the filing of this salacious and demonstrably false lawsuit for maximum media impact”. Her allegations, he said, are more than a decade old and have already been aired publicly.Agnifilo, fresh off winning acquittals on the most serious charges at hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex-trafficking trial last summer, brought his everyman courtroom demeanor to his closing argument in the Alexander brothers case.“It takes courage to acquit. It does,” he told the jury of six men and six women. “And I want you guys to know that that’s what you should do here. You should have that courage.”Deanna Paul, a lawyer for Tal Alexander, argued that prosecutors had failed to provide adequate evidence to support the charges.“You can’t build a house if you don’t have any bricks,” she said.Agnifilo and Paul both attacked the prosecution’s efforts to tie the brothers to a blog that the government said encouraged drugging women and raping them.Agnifilo acknowledged the blog was “horrific” but said there was no evidence that the Alexander brothers wrote any of the posts that prosecutors cited. The government was using them to make the brothers look bad, he argued.“Are they tasteless? They’re beyond tasteless. They’re shocking. They’re awful,” Agnifilo said. “I submit to you it does not help you. It doesn’t help you make your decision. It doesn’t.”“There is zero proof that any of the Alexander brothers ever wrote any of those blog posts, and there is not one shred of evidence that Tal even knew it existed,” Paul said.“The government is trying to tie Tal to words that he didn’t write, on a blog he didn’t know existed, to prove a conspiracy that he was not a part of,” she added.In a rebuttal argument on Thursday, assistant US 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 justifications for rape under a post titled “It’s not rape if … ”She said the blog post reflected how the brothers justified rapes for over a decade after 2008 by concluding that it was not rape if women were left too scared or humiliated to report it to authorities, or if the woman had a crush on one of the brothers first, or if they couldn’t remember every detail of the night, or if drugs left them with memory gaps and unable to fight back.She said the defense arguments were “all nonsense”.“This is not a close case,” Espinosa said, urging guilty verdicts.She said the brothers hadn’t counted on 11 women “coming forward in an avalanche of evidence”.Espinosa noted how defense lawyers highlighted isolated snippets of testimony “trying to get you to avoid the bigger picture”.“Defendants’ arguments are meant to confuse and distract you,” she said. “That bigger picture is more important.”