While she and her high school friends took a trip to Colorado, twin brothers Alon and Oren Alexander drugged them in a club, then raped her in a hotel room, a witness, whose name amNY Law is not publishing because she is a purported victim him of sexually assault, told the jury in a Manhattan courtroom at the brothers’ sex trafficking trial Monday.
At the twins’ trial — where they stand accused, alongside their older brother, Tal Alexander, of 12 counts of sex trafficking and assault — the woman said she met Alon and Oren Alexander in January 2017 at a nightclub with two friends. They were celebrating their senior year in high school.
At the packed club, Alon Alexander pulled them out of the crowd to their table, the woman testified, and, upon learning the witness was 17 years old, told her: “That’s hot.”
He then pulled up her turtleneck sweater to expose her abdomen without her consent, she said, asking her whether she had a six-pack. He made her two drinks at the table, which the woman said she believes were drugged —she testified that her head “felt heavy,” and that later in the night it was as though her body was “severed” from her brain, a feeling she’d never experienced upon drinking alcohol before.
After a little over an hour at the club, Alon and Oren Alexander asked the girls to go back to their residence for an afterparty, telling them there’d be “lots” of other people, the woman told the jury. However, upon arriving at their destination, all the woman and her friends found was a dark, empty hotel room.
That’s where Alon Alexander shoved his fingers inside her pants, then into her vagina, the woman said, before instructing her to move to the bathroom, where he raped her.
“I could feel his nails scraping inside of me. I could feel myself tearing,” she said, sobbing. “I was really scared, because I really wanted him to stop.”
After Alon Alexander attacked her, the woman said she saw blood on the ground underneath her. That scared her, she said, and in her shaken state, she immediately started cleaning it up and apologizing to him for bleeding. He told her she should “never apologize” for that.
“I was so scared,” she said, crying. “He just did what he wanted.”
When she walked out of the bathroom, she saw one of her friends passed out on a bed (drugged, the woman believes) and Oren Alexander on top of her other friend on the second bed.
That friend subsequently ran out of the room, saying, “This is really bad and I don’t want to be here,” the woman told the jury. Later, she told the witness she had to use her fingers to prevent Oren Alexander from inserting his penis into her and that she was terrified of the men.
After the woman’s testimony, government prosecutors read a message from Alon to Oren Alexander, sent after the woman said she was raped, which read: “I took down a 17-year-old.”
The witness, who has filed a civil suit against Alon and Oren Alexander, said her suit wasn’t about the money when asked about it on the stand.
“[The money] would not impact my life because my father is a billionaire,” the woman said. “I don’t need their money. I just don’t want them to have it.”
“When I was 17, they took something from me that I really didn’t want to give,” she continued, through tears. “Now I want to take something from them that I know they don’t want to give.”
The witness almost didn’t take the stand Monday, as the Alexander’s defense attorneys suggested the trial should be paused because one of the jurors was hospitalized with the flu and couldn’t appear in court.
U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni denied that request, instead bringing in an alternate juror to replace him for the rest of the trial
Following the witness’s testimony, her younger brother testified Monday, telling the court his sister told him about the 2017 Colorado assault about a month after she said it happened.
