Everyone Knew About the A-Team
August 23, 2024 at 07:30PMThe Alexander brothers became real-estate elites in New York City and Miami, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars and fashioning themselves as jet-setting playboys. All the while, according to lawsuits, social media, and other sources, they were allegedly raping and assaulting women. Why didn’t anyone stop them?
In March, two alleged victims, Whiteman and Mandel, filed civil suits against Oren and Alon. The Real Deal, an industry news outlet, found the filings while combing court dockets for real-estate suits and published a story. “They really thought it was all going to blow over,” a broker who knew the brothers says. The twins mounted a lobbying effort, again saying it was a shakedown, that the women were lying. Which might have been effective until the Instagram comments began. Dozens of commenters on the Real Deal’s posts started adding their own experiences or what they had heard about the brothers. “I’ve waited 22 years for this moment, since I was 15 years old,” one woman wrote.
Oren stepped down first. Then on June 18, Parker, who alleged she had been assaulted by Alon and Tal while Oren watched, filed another lawsuit—motivated, her lawyer says, by the impression that Tal seemed to be escaping scrutiny. A few days later, Tal stepped down too. Evan Torgan, Whiteman’s lawyer, says his firm received a flood of calls from women who said they too had been assaulted by the Alexanders. He now puts the number at 40. The FBI is reportedly probing allegations against the siblings going as far back as high school. “The Alexander brothers have never had intimate relations unless they were consensual. They are confronting these false claims in court and will be vindicated in the end,” says Joel Denaro, an attorney speaking on behalf of Tal, Oren, and Alon.
Afterward, people in the industry couldn’t stop talking about how long it had all taken to come out. It was so blatant. So known. But of course it did. Luxury real estate, especially the highest of the high end where Oren and Tal worked, is a very small world, a kind of glamorous rats’ nest. If one person spoke out against the brothers, they could endanger their own carefully constructed relationships. The Alexanders built their business on peacocking, hyping up the whole industry as they ascended. If their peers thought their behavior was atrocious, that their style was too aggressive, that something was seriously wrong—even for real estate, where someone is always behaving badly—they were happy to get their cut anyway.
The rumor for a while was that the Alexander brothers had fled to Israel. This wasn’t true. Instead, Oren and Tal have been fighting—aggressive, as always—to keep their business. A person close to them says they have threatened to sue their former colleagues, many of whom are longtime friends, who want them to sever ties. They haven’t let any of this get in the way of their summer vacations. Tal’s been in the Hamptons. Oren’s in the south of France.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/23/everyone-knew-about-the-a-team/
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