Kate Whiteman, the first of over 60 women to accuse luxury real estate broker twins Alon and Oren Alexander of rape, was found dead near Sydney, Australia, late last year.
The New York Times first reported Thursday that the New South Wales Coroner’s Office is investigating Whiteman’s cause of death after doubts over whether she died of natural causes. She was 45.
The coroner’s office has not responded to questions from amNewYork Law about what those concerns were or what prompted them.
Whiteman, who is Australian, filed a lawsuit against the brothers alleging that, as she was leaving a nightclub during a 2012 Memorial Day trip to the Hamptons, Alon Alexander forcibly pulled her into a black SUV that Oren Alexander was already inside of, quickly closed the door and sped off.
Then, the 2024 suit says, the brothers, whom she first met in 2008 and whose texts she routinely ignored or declined, drove her to a remote location while refusing to tell her where they were going. There, they forced her into a garage, then into a bedroom, demanded she strip her clothes, locked up her phone, pinned her down and raped her.
Her suit, first reported by real estate publication The Real Deal, is attributed with bringing to light the brothers’ conduct — reportedly an open secret within the real estate industry — and setting off a chain of dozens of lawsuits from other women who said they’d experienced similar things at the Alexanders’ hands over the years.
Attorneys for Alon and Oren Alexander did not respond to a request for comment. The twins, along with their older brother Tal Alexander, have been indicted on 12 counts that include sex trafficking, raping and drugging dozens of women for over a decade, allegedly using their wealth and influence as luxury real estate agents to entice women to travel, go on dates and go to parties with them.
The brothers pleaded not guilty to all allegations against them. They have been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn without bail since their arrest in December 2024 and have sought to spin the civil and criminal cases against them as a conspiracy by the women to extort them for money, something the women and their attorneys have denied.
A spokesperson at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment on Whiteman’s death. Whiteman’s civil attorney, Evan Torger, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Alexanders’ criminal trial is set to start in Manhattan federal court on Jan. 26.
