Scarring and hazy memories: new victims of Alexander brothers come forward
Maria S. never planned on telling anyone but her therapist what happened to her – but that was before she saw the man who assaulted her 10 years ago on the news last week.
On Thursday afternoon, the 38-year-old Miami resident walked into the Miami Beach Police Department and told detectives that Oren Alexander raped her at the Versace mansion in 2014.
Over the past six months, Oren, Alon and Tal Alexander – three wealthy Miami brothers best known for selling high-end real estate – have been accused of being serial rapists, drugging and abusing dozens of women at parties and in their multimillion dollar condos in Florida and New York. Along with criminal proceedings and civil lawsuits in both states, they were also indicted on federal sex trafficking charges.
The Alexander Brothers’ attorney, Joel Denaro, preparing for a 2 p.m. hearing in federal court, chose not to comment on the new allegations. Oren and Alon pleaded not guilty to three counts of sexual battery in the Miami-Dade court, and Denaro has said that the brothers’ prior intimate relationships were consensual.
Forty women had come forward with “credible” accusations against them, according to the prosecutor and lead FBI agent in the federal case.
“Where there is smoke there is fire and the Defendant’s apartment or his waterfront property at this point is completely ablaze,” federal prosecutor Lauren Astigarraga said of the overwhelming number of victims with similar stories in the federal case, during Tal’s detention hearing last week.
Since the brothers’ arrests, Astigarraga said a “new wave of potential victims” are making claims against the wealthy brothers. Miami Beach Police confirmed Thursday that there is an ongoing investigation and that they are pursuing all leads.
Other women who have spoken to the Miami Herald are reading the news stories and trying to piece together hazy memories, deciding whether to file complaints.
One woman in New York told the Herald that the Alexander twins took turns raping her after their birthday party, two years before Maria’s assault.
On Thursday, as Maria S. walked into the Miami Beach police station, she felt nervous.
“It has been hard having to relive the situation these last couple of days,” she said.
Maria was in her twenties when she received a Facebook message at midnight from Oren Alexander in April 2014. She had never met him, but they had friends in common.
Alexander wanted to meet her and she was flattered. He invited her to Zuma, a popular up-scale Japanese restaurant in the Brickell area, for dinner a few days later.
But when she arrived at the swanky restaurant she was surprised to see about 10 other women there. She sat next to him and they had normal conversations, she said. He then invited her to a “private party” without disclosing the location, and drove her and two others in a black SUV to the Versace mansion in South Beach.
As they walked in, security guards said no phones were allowed, and confiscated Maria’s and others’. She thought maybe celebrities would be there, and it was a privacy issue, she told the Herald. At one point while they were by the pool, Alon came out fully nude, jumped in and asked the girls to join him, Maria S. said. No one did.
Later, Oren took her up to the watch tower to “show her around” the mansion. Instead, she said, he raped her.
“I couldn’t push him off because he was way stronger than me,” she said. “When I screamed, he covered my mouth with his hand.”
Afterwards, Oren gave her “a little smirk” — the same smirk she saw last week in photos of Oren from the Miami-Dade courtroom, she said. She left the party and never told anyone except her therapist. “I felt like a piece of garbage.”
Now, she hopes by reporting what happened to her, other survivors will know they’re not alone and help put the three brothers behind bars.
“They think they’re so powerful because of their money… like they think they’re untouchable,” she said. “That’s not right.”
After the interview with detectives, Maria said she felt a sense of relief.
“It feels like I can talk about this now,” she said. “This was something hidden... It was something heavy in my chest.”
Maria said Miami Beach police told her that because of the statute of limitations on sexual assault, they couldn’t go forward with her case alone. But they told her that law enforcement is broadening its investigation based on Maria’s testimony and the allegations of other women now coming forward.
Another woman, whose first name is Jane, contacted the Herald just a few days after the brothers’ arrest and said she felt “incredibly guilty” for not reporting the Alexander twins after they took turns raping her at their apartment in Chinatown, Manhattan. Like the federal prosecutor in the FBI case, she cited the “sheer enormity” of alleged victims.
Oren and Alon raped her after she attended their birthday party in 2012, she said. A friend who knew them in high school invited her, and she’d seen the Alexanders previously while “partying” in the city.
She noted that the twins were “handsome” and “smart.” There was an “allure of hanging out with them,” she said, but “it all sounds really backwards now.”
Jane told a reporter over the phone on Tuesday that she doesn’t remember much after she got on their party bus that night, and believes she was drugged through a spiked drink or laced marijuana. It was an “all consuming, can’t move your body drugged,” she said. At some point, she remembers being in the Alexanders’ apartment in Manhattan, where the two men sexually assaulted her.
“I was incapable of moving … I know that I was thrown on a bed,” Jane said. “From what I remember it was Oren and Alon kind of switching out.”
The federal investigation found that many of the alleged victims of the Alexanders also experienced “an inability to move,” “difficulty speaking,” and “gaps in their memories.” The brothers drugged women using cocaine, mushrooms, and the “date rape” drug, according to Astigarraga, the federal prosecutor.
Jane initially did not remember exactly where the alleged assault occurred. Reporters sent her a list of addresses where the brothers lived in New York, and she found the two-bedroom apartment on Baxter street. She sent back a photo of the floor plan to reporters, with the master bedroom circled, and said it had “flooded” her with memories.
But, she has no plans to report the incident now to the police. “This was a long time ago, I don’t need to get involved.”
“I hope they get what they deserve for the pain that they’ve caused so many people.”
This story was originally published December 20, 2024 at 3:15 PM.
