An Anonymous Post Accused the Alexander Brothers of Sexual Assault Years Before They Were Charged

Real Estate|A Blog, an Anonymous Writer and Twin Brothers Accused of Sexual Assault

About 15 years before Oren and Alon Alexander would be charged with sex trafficking, an anonymous blog post appeared. It asked a shocking question: “Does anyone know what ever happened to Oren and Alon Alexander, the two twins who raped that girl in that party back in 2003?”

The post — which later disappeared from the internet — included graphic, specific details of a sexual assault, describing a victim running barefoot from a party before being treated at two different hospitals.

Published on Dec. 12, 2009, the blog post was made to look like a newspaper article. The New York Times could not identify who wrote the post and could not verify that the incident occurred. But the post tarnished the image that the twins had been cultivating as socialites and young men beginning their careers. Oren Alexander had just started working at Douglas Elliman, one of the largest real estate brokerages in the country, and Alon Alexander had joined his family’s private security services company.

As soon as the post was published, the brothers took an aggressive, multipronged approach to try to identify the person who wrote it and to scrub it from the internet.

Their dogged efforts — including legal action in two different courts and combative correspondence with the mystery writer — offer a window into the brothers’ past. These actions foreshadowed what federal prosecutors have called a pattern of intimidation that Oren, Alon and their older brother, Tal Alexander, would use for decades to silence women who accused them of rape or sexual assault.

Susan Necheles, a lawyer for Oren Alexander, and Joel Denaro, a lawyer representing both Oren and Alon Alexander, declined to comment on the blog post. Though the post does not mention Tal Alexander, his lawyer, Deanna Paul, referred to it as libel. In an emailed statement, she said anyone facing such a post “should take legal or judicial steps to address it. Repeated false media attacks are obviously dangerous.”