NEW YORK — Three brothers convicted of exploiting their wealthy lifestyle to drug and rape dozens of women were each sentenced Tuesday to 30 years in prison after one victim described his attack as an “eternity of terror” and the judge called their behavior shameful, degenerate and monstrous.
Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander — known collectively as the Alexander brothers — stared as U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni announced their sentences, which were less than the life sentences sought by federal prosecutors. Some of the 11 women who spoke at the hearing cried in the gallery of the Manhattan courtroom.
“Your conduct was monstrous,” Caproni told the men, likening them to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as she reconciled their relationships. Conviction for sex trafficking in March with their claims that being fathers and husbands changed them from the ways of partying and feminizing their youth.
“It is difficult for me to believe that the defendants changed places like that,” the judge said. She added: “It’s hard to imagine that marriage could take them from sexual predators to model men. »
AP AUDIO:3 Alexander brothers each receive 30 years in prison for sex trafficking after women speak out about rape
AP correspondent Julie Walker reports that the three Alexander brothers are each sentenced to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking, after women testified they were raped.
Many women in the packed courtroom appeared disappointed by the sentences, which will get the Alexanders out of prison at the age when most Americans retire.
The brothers, jailed without bail since their arrests in 2024, must also each pay at least $300,000 in fines. Oren Alexander was ordered to pay an additional $50,000 for producing child pornography by recording a video that prosecutors said showed him raping a 17-year-old girl.
While the brothers – twins Oren and Alon, 39, and Tal Alexander, 40 – expressed regret for the way they treated and viewed women, they all denied drugging and raping anyone.
“It’s entirely a lie and you all know it,” Caproni told them, adding that she hoped one day they would be “deeply ashamed of themselves.”
For some of the women who spoke in court, no amount of delay will repair the damage they claim to have suffered. Suffocated, they described how the attacks robbed them of their innocence and left them haunted by nightmares and fearful men.
“It took one night, just a few hours, one invitation to completely destroy the girl I once was,” said one woman, using a pseudonym to protect her identity, as she stood at a lectern just feet from the brothers.
The brothers speak for themselves
None of the brothers testified during their trial, but each spoke before being sentenced.
Oren Alexander said he and his brothers came of age during the height of hookup culture and Howard Stern’s hypersexualized radio show. As a father, he said he regrets many things he said at the time about women. However, he insisted they never broke the law.
“My brothers and I have never drugged or raped anyone. We have never sex trafficked anyone and we have never conspired to hurt anyone,” Oren Alexander said, reading from prepared remarks.
Choking up, Tal Alexander asked Caproni to “understand how difficult it is to stay here” and to express “real regrets for something I didn’t do.”
“Over the last two years, I lost everything I loved, everything I worked for,” Tal Alexander said. “I feel like an atomic bomb has been dropped on my life and destroyed everything in its path.”
Alon Alexander said he, too, has moved on and recognized that having a wife and daughter doesn’t excuse the posts he wrote that degraded women or the times he bragged about sex to others.
“The party life you heard about and saw in the courtroom ended long before the FBI arrived at your door,” Alon Alexander said. “Six years before my arrest, I was building a different life. »
The three brothers emphasized their Jewish faith. Oren Alexander, wearing a yarmulke, said that even with the minimum sentence of 15 years requested by the defense, he would miss his son’s bar mitzvah.
They asked Caproni to assign them to the same prison. Tal Alexander said it would ease the burden on their parents, both in their 70s, who hope to visit them every weekend.
The judge said she would leave that decision to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. She agreed to recommend that they be locked up near Miami, where they grew up and have family, but suggested that if it were up to her, they would be sent to different prisons.
“I believe they have and will continue to have a bad influence on each other,” Caproni said.
Victims describe lasting fear
The accusers who spoke in court — and another whose statement was read by a prosecutor — were among at least 70 women who prosecutors say were assaulted by one or more of the brothers over the past two decades in upscale locations including the Hamptons and Aspen, Colorado.
Lindsey Acree, an artist and gallerist, testified that she was raped by Tal Alexander and another man at a Hamptons home in 2011 after having a drink that she said left her paralyzed. Abandoning her prepared remarks, she told Caproni that a life sentence would not provide justice for the women whose lives had been irreparably harmed.
“It wasted my time. It wasted your time. It wasted the time of everyone in this room,” Acree told the judge. Turning to the brothers, she said, “Why? For you. Because you did some really bad things.”
“The most important thing is why? Why did you do that?” » asked Acre. “I don’t understand cruelty. I don’t understand hatred towards women.”
Another woman who testified that Tal Alexander raped her in August 2014 said she carried “within me a quiet funeral for the person I could have become if this had not happened to me.”
“Every second that Tal raped me in that shower seemed like an eternity of terror,” said the woman, who used a pseudonym.
Another woman speaking about her rape in the Hamptons said: “What seemed like a beautiful place became for me a mansion of horror, a mansion of dark secrets. »
Stars of the New York real estate scene
Oren and Tal Alexander were once nicknamed the “A Team” in real estate for their ultra high end sales and a celebrity clientele. After breaking sales records at industrial powerhouse Douglas Elliman, they started their own company. Alon Alexander ran their family’s private security business.
The brothers envisioned an exclusive lifestyle of yachts, private jets and waterfront mansions in Miami, but prosecutors said they began sexually assaulting women as early as 2001 or 2002, when they were in high school, and over time developed a pattern of drugging and raping women whom they enticed to join them on luxury getaways.
In remarks before the sentence was announced, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Espinosa told the judge that the brothers’ “callousness, recklessness and cruelty” warranted a life sentence, especially since all of their victims would be serving life sentences.
“Women overcame all the forces that told them it was their fault, that they should keep quiet, that no one would believe them,” Espinosa said. “Despite this pain, a large number of women came forward and 11 women testified at the trial. »
Speaking to Caproni, Lexi Zettle said Tal Alexander was once “a prince in my eyes” who said “you’re my daughter” and dangled a “fairytale” romance until he began pressuring her to sleep with men he did business with.
“They treated me like a rag doll, like I was a disposable object,” Zettle said. The Alexander brothers, she said, “are not the A team and they are not above the law.”
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