Everyone in Real Estate Knew About the Alexander Brothers

Photo: Alexander Team/Facebook

A half-naked woman was lying on the table, and guests were invited to drip hot wax onto her body. Nearby, waiters passed tuna-tartare cones as a pair of burlesque dancers wearing dog collars and fishnets performed acrobatics. It was a summer night in 2015, and Oren and Alon Alexander were celebrating their 28th birthday in a $50 million townhouse on the Upper East Side.

A pair of real-life Gossip Girl characters, “the Alexander brothers,” as they were known in their Manhattan circle, were perfectly coiffed, perpetually suited up, and, like the party, sexy in a cheesy kind of way. There were Carnevale-style masks on the bar. The event featured a step-and-repeat and a hashtag. It was the twins’ birthday, but everyone knew the Alexander brothers included Tal, who was older than his siblings by less than a year. Oren and Tal sold luxury real estate together, including the very townhouse where the party was being held. Their boss, Douglas Elliman chairman Howard Lorber, was in attendance; so was Million Dollar Listing’s Fredrik Eklund, Billionaires’ Row developer Rotem Rosen, and a whole lot of models. As the twins blew out the candles on their cake, their family and friends and the brokers and models cheered.

“Even then, everybody knew,” one real-estate agent who worked with Oren and Tal says. But they didn’t know, not really. There were whispers and rumors about the brothers — but there had been whispers and rumors about the brothers since they were teenagers. Nine years after the party at the townhouse, they would be publicly accused of assaulting 16 women, sometimes as a pack. “Obviously,” the agent says, “now we know it was so much worse.”

Tal Alexander (blue suit, middle) and guests at 150 Charles Terrace for an Alexander Team event in 2016. The Alexander brothers frequently posted pictures like this to buttress their reputation as top-tier agents.
Photo: Alexander Team/Facebook

Bal Harbour, where Shlomy and Orly Alexander settled after emigrating from Israel in the 1970s, and where Oren, Alon and Tal grew up alongside their brother, Niv, is an affluent enclave on the north end of Miami Beach. The neighborhood sits on a spit of land between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean and is home to just over 3,000 people and one designer mall. In 2000, the family built a waterfront Mediterranean-style mansion on Bal Bay Drive with a pool in the back overlooking the bay.

The new home was a testament to the success of their family business, Kent Security, which Shlomy and Orly founded in the early 1980s and later ran with Orly’s brother, Gil Neuman. By the time the boys were teenagers, Kent was one of the largest security contractors in South Florida, supplying guards for gated communities, parties at the Versace mansion, and Miami City Hall. The family ran the place aggressively. Kent picked fights with competitors and clients, sparred with employees over wages, and fended off lawsuits brought by former employees who accused the company of discrimination. “Success is all that matters to them. Step on anybody you have to step on. Screw them before they screw you,” says a former Kent employee, one of more than 70 people interviewed for this story who know the Alexander family or have worked with the brothers professionally.

Shlomy and Neuman liked to refer to their Friday-night Shabbat dinners as boardroom meetings. The Alexander boys absorbed the lessons. They paid particularly close attention to their father, who, despite having an office at Kent headquarters, wasn’t heavily involved. His ambitions were bigger than the rent-a-cop industry. In the early ’90s, he tried to open a nightclub in a former synagogue in the heart of South Beach, but it closed within a year. Eventually, he decided he wanted to be a developer and started a modest homebuilding business. Shlomy was handsome and cocky. While some were turned off by his tendency to be the loudest person in the room, others saw it as brash magnetism. “He’s an appealing character. He’s got charisma,” says Joe Imbesi, a longtime Bal Harbour resident. As for the boys: “Our daughters, who were a little bit younger, were forbidden to even talk to them.”

As teenage twins with dark hair and chiseled jocks’ jawlines, Alon and Oren were well-known members of the circle of rich kids at Michael M. Krop Senior, their large public high school in North Miami. Tal, a tennis star, was slightly shorter and one grade older. All of them spoke with a slight lisp. Had the Alexanders attended a private school like Miami Country Day School or Ransom Everglades, no one would have looked twice when they parked their Range Rover in the school lot. But at Krop, the Alexanders were big men on campus. They went clubbing in South Beach and threw the senior-prom after-party — when the twins were only sophomores, Oren later bragged. Still, they compared themselves with envy to their friends who did go to the private schools: “We were raised differently than our peers,” Oren told an interviewer in 2022. “We were never given money. Being around that affluent lifestyle, you needed money. We were introduced to this lifestyle, but we weren’t given the means to live the lifestyle.”

The boys had a reputation as bullies. “If you had anything less than the lifestyle that they did, they took pleasure in making those people feel inadequate or belittled,” says a former classmate. Once, after Tal had an argument with a former tennis teammate, he started calling the high-schooler’s house to threaten him — telling him that he was going to put a bounty on his head and cut his car’s brake lines, according to a police report. They also had another reputation. Imbesi wasn’t the only one who told his daughters to stay away from the brothers. The girls at Krop and the nearby private schools in Miami were routinely warned — by their brothers, by their friends, and even, one Bal Harbour resident says, by police officers — to be careful at parties with the Alexanders. If they ended up at one, they were told, they should never put down their drinks. It was all rumors and speculation, until it wasn’t. Before the twins graduated, a recording began circulating at the school. It allegedly showed the pair with a female classmate. “She was so fucked up, and they took turns on her,” says a former student. “I specifically remember that they bragged about ‘running a train’ on her. They used that phrase.”

At least four women have now come forward with accusations of assault by Oren, Alon, or Tal, or all three brothers at once, when they were in high school. In the summer of 2004, Oren and Alon allegedly locked a girl in a bedroom at a party, where Oren assaulted her, according to the New York Times. The victim said she reported the assault to police but chose not to file charges. Another woman, backed up by two friends, told The Wall Street Journal that the three brothers had tried to assault her at a home around 2003, when she was a student at Miami Country Day School. They held down her arms and legs, but she got away. She remembered seeing a camcorder. In 2003, Alon and Oren were interviewed by police after a 14-year-old Krop freshman was allegedly gang-raped by a group of boys who called it “running a train.” A Krop guidance counselor had alerted the authorities.

But nothing happened to the brothers. There was a sense among their Krop classmates and acquaintances in South Florida’s tight-knit Jewish community that the Alexanders were untouchable. “People were called in to guidance counselors,” says the person who said a girl she knew was assaulted and recorded by the brothers. “It had to get to the teachers. Did everyone just forget about this? I remember being pissed. Really, really upset. Thinking, like, What the fuck is going on? ”

Stories that the brothers had assaulted girls even reached people who worked at Kent. One former employee said Neuman, the boys’ uncle, once asked him to act as an armed guard during an exchange between a lawyer and two teenagers at a Denny’s on Biscayne Boulevard. “There was a story going around about a girl being raped at a party by one of the brothers, and I kind of put two and two together in my head,” the employee says. “It stuck with me. Was I doing something horrible and gross?”

The twins graduated from Krop in 2005 and split up. Oren headed to the University of Colorado Boulder, and Alon went off to the University of Maryland. Tal was already at Hofstra. The twins’ senior yearbook includes a page with the prompt “What was your most memorable moment at Krop?” Oren’s answer: “Riding my first ‘choo-choo’ train.”

After college, Oren came to New York; Alon soon followed. (There was at least one accusation during Oren’s college years. A freshman girl filed a police report in 2005, saying he had assaulted her in her dorm room.) The twins joined Tal, who had recently started his own brokerage, called Luxury Living, which focused on downtown rentals. Like his father, Oren had hoped to work in development, but building in New York had slowed and he had trouble breaking into the world of Dursts, Speyers, and Zeckendorfs. What he did have was an in with Prudential Douglas Elliman’s chairman, Howard Lorber. Earlier that year, Lorber, who had served as the chairman of Nathan’s Famous before investing in Elliman, had toured the job site of an extravagant spec home being built on Indian Creek Island, a private retreat a mile from Bal Harbour. There, Lorber had met the developer of the house, Shlomy Alexander, and his son Oren.

Oren managed to leverage that single introduction into a job at Elliman. He would later claim Lorber had “personally recruited” him. The job wasn’t as glamorous as he might have imagined — Oren spent his first months at Elliman slinging rentals, just like any other green agent. In 2009, he nabbed his first big deal when high-powered Miami trial attorney Jim Ferraro tapped the 21-year-old agent to be his broker on an $8.2 million penthouse. Oren celebrated with a celebrity-chef-catered dinner and a swaggy write-up in the Observer. “That’s part of my style,” he told the reporter, claiming he had “jetted” with Ferraro to Miami, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard as part of an effort to court the attorney. He neglected to mention that Ferraro was his friend’s dad.

Fortunately for the brothers, in 2010, as the rest of the country slipped further into the Great Recession, New York real estate was starting to bounce back. The new decade ushered in a wave of luxury development and an accompanying phenomenon: the rise of the celebrity broker. That year, Bravo decided to export its L.A.-based reality-TV show Million Dollar Listing to the East Coast, and a handful of good-looking, hungry agents competed to be the show’s new stars. Oren — handsome, overconfident — was an obvious contender. He auditioned for Million Dollar Listing as a jet-setter playboy type. “I had him come up to one of his properties in a fancy car and get out and go on dates and stuff like that,” says Angela Weingrad, the casting director who made test reels for the show’s producers. “He really wanted to be on the show.” He made the final six or seven but was not ultimately cast. (Yes, he was good-looking, she says, but he lacked charisma.)

Instead, Bravo chose Lorber’s son Michael, former porn actor Fredrik Eklund, and former soap actor Ryan Serhant. The sole woman was Jessica Cohen, a top-ranking broker at Elliman. In October, weeks after signing her official contract, Cohen met Oren, Tal, and Alon at Michael Lorber’s birthday party at the Core Club on East 55th Street. “I was nervous because I had been chosen and I heard Oren was upset about it,” Cohen says. Her last memory of the night is being handed a drink by the brothers, then boarding a private bus with them to the after-party. Cohen regained awareness almost five hours later in the hospital, having blacked out. A bystander had found her alone in the street, covered in vomit. Later, using photos taken that evening, she was able to see she had been with the brothers and at one point had passed out on Tal. “I originally wondered if what happened to me was because I was chosen for the cast. Now, I’m not so sure,” Cohen says. Later, Oren would say he wasn’t particularly interested in reality TV. In fact, it was he who had once turned down a show — it wasn’t “in line” with the Alexander brand.

Despite the splashy Ferraro deal, Oren had continued to score mostly small-time sales — condos and apartments under $2 million. Occasionally, he teamed up with Tal, who was still working in rentals. But Oren had also begun hustling for the enormous spec house on Indian Creek Island that Lorber had toured. Shlomy had been developing the home since 2008, and in 2010, they listed it at last: for an outrageous $60 million. Oren became the property’s promoter. He got Alex Rodriguez to come by for a tour, then quickly leaked it to the New York Post. He hosted a private party at the house during Art Basel, and got the place photographed for a Wall Street Journal story on the risk and reward of building trophy homes without a guaranteed buyer. It worked: In August 2012, an unnamed Russian buyer purchased the house for $47 million in Miami’s biggest-ever sale. The Alexanders made out on almost every side of the deal. Oren brought Tal in as a co-agent, and they got commissions from both the seller — their father — and the buyer. Even Neuman got a cut as an investor. Shlomy could finally call himself a big-time developer (for at least one deal). His sons were lauded as 20-something savants. It didn’t matter that it sold for $13 million below its original asking price. “When you list something for a record price like that, you create the hype,” Oren boasted in an article. “My PR Man all day!!!” Orly commented on Oren’s Facebook post with the story.

Just before the deal closed, Douglas Elliman had officially green-lit Oren and Tal to create a new team under the firm’s umbrella: the Alexander Group. The brothers called it the “A-Team.” Alon was on his way as well: He had recently graduated from law school and was running a branch of Kent, the family firm, in New York. To celebrate all of this good fortune, they hosted a party at one of their agents’ parents’ homes in Bridgehampton. Elliman CEO Dottie Herman came; so did Lorber. The party also marked a new era for Elliman — it had recently dropped “Prudential” and was expanding from its suburban Long Island roots into flashier markets. The Alexanders had a new logo, emblazoned on polo shirts and beach towels. Girls in bikinis held them up for photos.

After the A-Team launched, things sped up. In 2014, Oren and Tal listed Liam Gallagher’s Essex House condo and showed a West Village townhouse to Lindsay Lohan. Where did these guys come from? some of their peers began to wonder. If people were becoming aware of their existence, it was because they were making sure of it — aggressively marketing themselves as a sort of cross between the Winklevoss twins and the Property Brothers. They worked the press, getting themselves on various hot-men lists and into stories related, and not so related, to real estate (“So many passengers get upgraded to first class 1723454181 and usually you are sitting next to somebody horrible,” Oren said in a Post article about flying semi-private). They knew how to package themselves. For a Details story called “Meet the New Rock Stars of Real Estate,” Tal, dressed in a charcoal linen Armani suit, took the interview at Balthazar, where he greeted several tables, then informed the writer he would be showing over $40 million in property that very day. Discussing his method for success: “You have to be in Saint-Tropez in July. Aspen in the winter. Hong Kong for Art Basel, Cannes for the film festival, Monaco for the Grand Prix.”

This wasn’t a problem for Tal, or Oren. They were friendly with members of the billionaire Falic family (owner of “duty free” chains), the billionaire Arison family (owner of Carnival cruises), the Chetrit family (real-estate magnates), and the billionaire Nakash family (founder of Jordache jeans). “My clients go to those absurdly expensive and elite places that no one can get into; I have my in,” Oren said in an article he wrote for the Post titled “The Ultimate Young Gun.” “While my nights are late, and some may call me a party boy, it’s all about closing deals.”

It didn’t hurt that the brothers were handsome and young — and that Oren and Alon were twins — all of which meant they were constantly surrounded by attractive young women. This all worked very well for a specific clientele: divorcés, bachelors, men who were otherwise looking for a good time. “Their clients were rich older wealthy guys who were doing resets in their life,” a fellow broker says. “If there was a guy who’d just minted some money, these guys would be on him like white on rice. They would go out; they’d get introduced to him. Courtside at a Miami Heat game, then hustle afterward to a nightclub, to a house party, to a boat party. And then they’d be like, ‘Oh well, you should buy an apartment.’ ” One client was Marc Leder, a private-equity playboy, famously divorced (his wife had cheated with the tennis pro), whom the A-Team helped purchase two Noho apartments worth $30 million. In 2014, Oren started working on sales for the residences at the Faena House in Miami Beach. Soon after, he and Tal were on sales at the Renzo Piano–designed 565 Broome Street. Some people in the industry attributed the coveted new business to the Alexanders’ relationship with Lorber. “I would put the Alexanders at the top of the list of people who had just a very close personal relationship with Howard,” a former Elliman employee says. “If they wanted something, they would go straight to him.”

Or they’d just go out and take it. “New York real estate is filled with unethical people,” a broker who worked on the A-Team says. “And they are the most unethical business people I’ve ever dealt with.” Oren and Tal seemed to employ the Kent playbook in their brokerage: They wanted their cut and then some. “Anytime you brought a deal into that office, everyone had their scalpels out,” the broker says. “They were vicious. They are just hyperaggressive.”

They poached clients, according to other brokers, and inflated numbers, according to a publicist who worked with them. Playing dirty enabled the Alexanders to break more records and broadcast higher sales. They worked with Kim and Kanye, then Jared and Ivanka. In 2019, the A-Team claimed to have smashed its biggest record yet with a $240 million condo in 220 Central Park South, bought by hedge-funder Ken Griffin.

No one understood how Tal and Oren got Griffin’s business, and rumors began to swirl. Someone said they’d bought his contact from a former FBI agent they knew. In reality, according to a person with knowledge of the deal, Tal greased an employee from Griffin’s office to get the boss’s number, then called him incessantly. When that didn’t work, he lied and said he was the exclusive broker for the building. Griffin eventually found out about the deception and was so displeased that Lorber had to intervene and take over the deal. He was also unhappy that the brothers had publicized the sale —  the most expensive residential home in the country at the time — as soon as they possibly could. “Ken specifically told them not to use him to further their careers,” this person says.

It was worth it. After the Griffin deal, Oren and Tal were influencer-celebrities in their own right. In March 2020, the three brothers attended a private client reception with caviar and vodka at 432 Park Avenue, the newest supertall in their roster.

At almost every milestone of the brothers’ decade of success, there is now an allegation of assault, whether by Oren, or Tal, or Oren and Alon, or Tal and Alon and Oren. (Niv, who married Carnival heiress Cassie Arison, has not been named in any lawsuit or accusation.) In 2010, soon after Oren’s failed audition for Million Dollar Listing, a woman named Rebecca Mandel alleges Alon drugged her at a club, then tricked her into coming back to his and Oren’s apartment, where the twins raped her together, according to a lawsuit. A gallerist named Lindsey Acree told the New York Times that Tal pinned her down in a sauna in the Hamptons in the summer of 2011. In May 2012, just before they sold Indian Creek, a woman named Kate Whiteman says Oren and Alon dragged her by the hand out of a nightclub in Southampton and back to the home where they were staying: a 15,000-square-foot property called Sir Ivan’s Castle, well known for its sex parties. Then, according to a lawsuit, they raped her in an upstairs bedroom. Only a few months later, a woman named Angelica Parker alleges in a lawsuit that Tal and Alon raped her simultaneously while Oren watched. In 2015, soon after they formed the A-Team, a woman named Renée Willett says Oren assaulted her in his apartment, according to another lawsuit. Two years after that, the Times reports, a woman named Samantha Murphy alleges Oren held her down in his apartment and assaulted her as she screamed.

“There were no words needed or directions said,” remembers one victim, who alleges she was raped by more than one of the brothers at once. “It was very routine for them.” Two women who knew Alon and Oren in different eras of their lives say they heard the twins would secretly switch places during sex. One former friend of Oren’s heard about this alleged predilection directly from him. He was describing a bedroom in their Soho apartment — it had a bathroom with a door that enabled them to surreptitiously exchange places without the woman seeing. “He thought it was super-sexy,” the friend says. “He thought it was a power play.”

People in the industry cautioned one another about the brothers, much the way their peers had in Miami. Once again, women were warned not to put their drinks down around the Alexander brothers. Whispers of their actions reached the highest rungs at Elliman, according to multiple people who worked for the company. More than one person says Oren and Tal showed their colleagues images of naked women at the office, sometimes images they were in themselves and sometimes not far from the eyes of managers. In 2009, an anonymous blog post was published that described an alleged high-school assault by Oren and Alon. At a party in North Miami Beach, it read, the twins enticed a victim with alcohol and Xanax before forcing her into a room and raping her. “One of them threatened to kill her in the event she told anyone,” the post read. It also described criminal charges against the twins, of which there is no public record. According to multiple people who worked at Elliman at the time, the post made its way to the executive suite. The Alexanders told colleagues it wasn’t true, that they had been the victims of a shakedown when they were young. The brothers sued to have it taken down, ultimately succeeding in 2013, but it was still live around the time Elliman broker Jessica Cohen met the brothers at Michael Lorber’s birthday party. She says that when CEO Dottie Herman found out she had been hospitalized after spending a night out with the Alexanders, Herman directed Cohen to read the blog. A spokesperson for Douglas Elliman said that the company never received any complaints of sexual assault or harassment concerning the Alexanders and that executives, including Herman, were unaware of the blog post. (They also denied the Alexander brothers were “close to Mr. Lorber.”)

In 2014, an Elliman broker reportedly found Oren in a bathroom with another company agent, and Million Dollar Listing star, Tracy Tutor. She later told the Times she had blacked out after sharing a drink with him at a cocktail party. Later, when a former A-Team member interviewed at a rival brokerage, the higher-ups asked about the Alexanders’ rumored history of sexual assault. “It was a rock-bottom moment in my career,” the agent says. Some people thought the Me Too movement might bring down Oren and Tal, at least, given their high profile. But their rising gross commissionable income, the metric brokers use in the industry to tally their profits, seemed to make them Teflon. Oren even felt safe enough to opine on a 2019 industry panel about the men who had lost everything for “stupid mistakes.” “It’s so important to really make the right decisions, not just in your business but in your personal life, too,” he said, weeks after closing the Griffin deal. “That’s something I really don’t take lightly. You gotta behave.” The next year, the A-Team members were Elliman’s highest-grossing salesmen.

In quick succession, the Alexander brothers got married. Starting with Alon in 2020, they had a series of intimate family weddings in South Florida with Instagrammable details like rose-covered chuppahs and embossed drinkable coconuts. Alon married Shani Zigron, an Israeli model signed to Elite; Oren’s 2023 wedding to Brazilian model and influencer Kamila Hansen was covered in Vogue; and Tal wed venture capitalist Arielle Kogut that same fall. The billionaire lifestyle they projected on Instagram was still somewhat smoke and mirrors — Tal and Arielle lived in the city at 432 Park, for example, a supertall with a private restaurant and a Michelin-starred chef, as renters, not owners. But the Alexanders made millions during the pandemic. They benefited enormously from Miami’s real-estate boom. Oren and Tal had even outgrown their mentor, Lorber. In 2022, they struck out with a new firm called Official, partnering with other Elliman defectors Andrew Wachtfogel and Richard Jordan as well as Nicole Oge, a former Elliman marketing director. Official, with its sleek, minimalist black-and-white branding, was meant to be the city’s first ultra-ultraluxury brokerage, available only to the one percent. In 2023, after their first full year, Oren and Tal closed out with $260 million in sales.

Did this newly settled trio behave any differently? “He just reached around and grabbed my boobs,” says a 23-year-old woman, referring to Oren. She was at an omakase dinner held in 2021 at another Alexander property, a mansion on Miami Beach’s Flamingo Drive; a friend had invited her. “He did it right in front of his wife — I guess girlfriend at the time,” she says. “I guess she didn’t care.” The woman returned for another sushi dinner at the house a few weeks later. This time, the friend who had invited her told her she should sit by Tal. “Tal kept buzzing around me after the dinner about this stupid tour of the house,” she remembers. She declined several times, but at a certain point, it was easier to relent. When she got upstairs, there was no pretense. Tal dragged her to his bedroom, she says. He pushed her on the bed, pinned her down with his body, and started kissing her. She protested that she had a boyfriend, and he continued. She tried telling Tal she was on her period. When he said he didn’t believe her, she told him she was wearing a tampon. He violently ripped up her dress, as if to check. As he leaned back, she pushed him off and ran down the stairs. Tal asked her to get a drink after the incident, according to direct messages, but she didn’t respond. In 2024, she ran into Tal at Carbone Beach. He reintroduced himself. “I had barely made an impression on him,” she says.

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.