NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Two luxury real estate brokers and their brother are scheduled to go on trial in New York Metropolis on intercourse trafficking expenses Tuesday, simply days after their legal professionals renewed their request to a New York decide to toss out expenses that they sexually abused dozens of girls 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 legal professionals complained that prosecutors have unfairly handled their purchasers by rewriting the indictment as lately as final week and by lately including expenses the protection has not had time to analyze.
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 ladies 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 legislation faculty, was an government at his household’s safety agency.
Protection legal professionals acknowledge that the lads had intercourse with ladies however say the ladies have been prepared 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 guilty to all expenses.
Prosecutors say the brothers usually met their victims on relationship apps, via social occasions, at bars and nightclubs, and generally via get together promoters earlier than offering medication, together with cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms, or drugging their drinks earlier than sexually assaulting them.
Protection legal professionals urged Choose Valerie E. Caproni to drop some expenses from consideration at this month’s trial if she would not toss them out totally, together with a conspiracy rely during which the outline of the cost was largely shriveled.
“The protection shouldn’t be pressured to trial on a conspiracy rely that was modified on the final minute,” the legal professionals 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 effectively after an Oct. 17 deadline to inform the protection of proof within the case.
Caproni also has ruled that Alon Alexander couldn’t use his 2019 engagement and later marriage as proof that he had give up the alleged conspiracy to sexually assault ladies.
The legal professionals 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 previous to have interaction in sexually express conduct that could possibly be filmed. The protection legal professionals say her start certificates cannot be authenticated as a result of it was issued by a former Soviet Republic that’s now in a struggle zone.
The protection legal professionals additionally attacked the premise of the federal government’s intercourse trafficking expenses, saying that prosecutors have taken the unprecedented place that something of worth given to ladies to get them to a location the place a intercourse act happens could make it industrial intercourse punishable below a intercourse trafficking statute.
“The reality is this isn’t merely a novel idea; it’s a completely new offense, one not created by Congress and one not remotely contemplated below the Intercourse Trafficking statute,” they wrote.
In the meantime, The New York Instances reported final week {that a} 45-year-old Australian girl who had accused Oren and Alon Alexander of sexual assault was discovered lifeless close to Sydney late final 12 months. The newspaper stated a spokesperson for the New South Wales coroner’s workplace stated the loss of life was deemed to be “non-suspicious.”
