More than 20 years ago, a 13-year-old girl was invited to a house party. She had celebrated her bat mitzvah just a few months earlier.
She snuck out of her house with some friends from her middle school in Miami. They drank some of their parents’ wine and then got into a taxi for a ride to a house in Bal Harbor, an affluent village north of Miami Beach.
There, she said in an interview with The New York Times this week, she was attacked by five boys, including a high school student named Tal Alexander. Miami-Dade police confirmed that the woman, now 36, spoke to them about the allegations in 2024.
Tal Alexander, now 39, is standing in federal court in Manhattan on charges that he and his twin brothers Oren and Alon Alexander, both 38, led a sweeping sex trafficking conspiracy dating back to 2008. But the alleged attack on the 13-year-old girl, as well as a recently filed court document, suggest a pattern of allegations that predates anything the men have been accused of – with victims so young they were still in middle school.
Deanna Paul, an attorney for Tal Alexander, called the new claim “categorically false.” In an emailed statement, she added: “Tal is focused on fighting the charges currently litigated in federal court and not on releasing new claims during the trial.”
Prosecutors said the Alexander brothers began engaging in sexual violence, including gang rape, while they were in high school in Miami. “Each of the victims the government interviewed from this time reported hearing the people involved – including Tal Alexander – talking about the assaults at school, boasting about attacking their victims ‘by train’ and saying they wanted to ‘do it again,'” prosecutors wrote after the brothers’ arrest in December 2024.
The men have all pleaded not guilty.
The federal charges against the brothers involve six adult victims and two underage girls, one described as 17 years old at the time and the other as under 18 years old.
But the possibility that accusers who were younger than they said they were attacked might testify has been the subject of a heated debate between prosecutors and the Alexanders’ lawyers that has taken place largely out of public view.
According to a heavily redacted government court filing, prosecutors earlier this month asked Judge Valerie E. Caproni to allow testimony from two women about acts that appear to have taken place in 2002, when the brothers and the victims were all young teenagers.
The brothers’ lawyers protested vigorously, calling the planned testimony “horrible” and arguing it was “far more prejudicial and inflammatory” than the other allegations the jury would hear at trial. Judge Caproni banned the testimony.
The Miami girl who was 13 when she said Tal Alexander attacked her is not part of the trial, but she has been following him closely in the news.
The woman requested that her name be withheld to protect her privacy. The attack, which began after five boys dragged her into a bedroom and stripped her of her clothes, “affected my whole life,” she said.
In November 2024, she said she contacted Miami Dade police, who told her they were investigating the brothers, and she told them her memories of the attack.
She was in eighth grade.
It was late 2002 or early 2003; She said she remembered the school year, but not the exact date. She can no longer remember many things, which is why she says she hasn’t contacted us for 20 years. Tal Alexander was 16 years old at the time.
For two decades, she held on to the searing memory: She walked into the house in Bal Harbor, she said, and got a shot of vodka. She had drunk alcohol before and said in the Times interview that she was “pretty sure she was drugged” because her body was weakened and her memory was blurred in a way she had never experienced before.
After that, she said, all she had were impressions: being dragged down the hallway, feeling her clothes being taken off, and lying there weak and helpless as the boys caressed her body. She knew she was being penetrated by something, but wasn’t sure if it was a penis. She remembers seeing a flashing red light and thinking to herself, “Am I being filmed?”
The boy who lived in the house where the alleged assault occurred was a friend of the Alexanders, she said. His home was near the mansion where Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander grew up.
In June 2024, more than 20 years later, after Tal and Oren Alexander had become two of the most successful real estate agents in Manhattan and Miami, a headline appeared in The Real Deal, a real estate trade publication: Two women had filed lawsuits accusing Oren and Alon Alexander of rape. Accusations from nearly two dozen other women soon followed; Many of them also accused Tal Alexander.
Media coverage of the attacks was quick and rapid. Dozens of other women came forward with allegations, including in the Times. The Miami woman said she read the accusers’ accounts and was struck that many of them sounded similar to what she had held on to for so many years.
“It took me a really long time to come to terms with it,” she said. “That experience has haunted my entire life.”