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 realestate 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.”
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