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A longtime Douglas Elliman agent in the Hamptons took the stand on Wednesday in the Alexander brothers’ sex trafficking triel, becoming the first witness to do so on behalf of the defense.
Raphael Avigdor appeared in court after he was subpoenaed by the prosecutors to testify about his role in arranging the 2009 summer lease for a Hamptons house where at least two women allege attacks by the brothers and other men. But the defense also claimed him as a witness, meaning he remained on the stand after cross-examination for a line of questioning that focused on his relationship with Oren, Tal and Alon Alexander.
“Do you want to be here testifying today?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Jones asked at the beginning of his questioning.
“I really don’t,” Avigdor told the jury.
Avigdor, who said he has been an agent primarily working in the Hamptons market for 24 years, worked with Oren to secure a lease for the summer of 2009. Prosecutors showed an email where Avigdor directs a member of his team to assist Oren, Tal and another man in finding a house with at least six bedrooms on a large acreage “buffered as much as possible ‘cause they are young guys and they want to party.”
Avigdor ended up brokering a $40,000 lease for a five-bedroom home in Water Mill between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend. The lease was originally in the name of Oren and Mathew Lipman, a party promoter, but the final contract identified Lipman and Ilya “Mike” Kanevsky, also a promoter, as the tenants.
Lipman and Kanevsky were previously mentioned by a woman testifying under the pseudonym Isa Brooks, who said Lipman invited her to stay at the Hamptons home for a weekend that summer. She was 16 years old at the time.
Emails showed that in the first two nights of their lease, Avigdor told Oren and Lipman he received complaints from neighbors about noise and reckless driving. He said this was a “serious matter” and said he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with his neighbors, nor bring “negative feelings” toward his firm, then known as Prudential Douglas Elliman.
“What I do suggest is that you immediately tone down your behavior,” Avigdor wrote to Oren and Lipman in an email shown to the jury.
“You portrayed to me that despite your age that you were responsible people, that you had girlfriends — you all had girlfriends, and that you would behave within the codes of the community.”
Teny Geragos, an attorney for Oren, opened her cross-examination by asking Avigdor to characterize his relationship with the brothers. Avigdor said he cared about them and considered them friends, telling the jury he later arranged another lease for Oren and secured a referral client as a result of their relationship.
He also attended a party to celebrate Oren’s first big sale, the $8.2 million trade of a penthouse at the Park Imperial to Miami attorney Jim Ferraro that closed in July 2009. (Ferraro would later briefly represent Oren and Alon in the summer of 2024, denying allegations in civil lawsuits by two women claiming they were raped by the twin brothers.)
Following his cross-examination, Avigdor became a witness for the defense, describing his memory of Oren and Tal’s rising careers at Elliman.
“I watched Oren rise like a star to the top echelons of the company,” he said. “From the time he started, he was on a success track.”
Tal, Avigdor said, “was also a success story.”
The house has been a backdrop for accounts by two women who accused Tal, Alon and other men of raping women at the property over Memorial Day weekend 2009.
One woman, Avishan Bodjnoud, described seeing and hearing Tal and Alon attack another woman in an outdoor Jacuzzi. Bodjnoud said she later wrote “Rapists!” in eyeliner on a door in the house, in the hope it could be used as evidence one day. A photo of her handwritten message was shown to the jury during her Feb. 12 testimony.
The other woman was Brooks, who testified she was raped by Tal, Alon and two other men on the same weekend. She told the jury she remembers telling them to stop, but not being able to lift her head or get away.
After the assault, Brooks recalled seeing another woman with multiple men on top of her and Alon’s twin, Oren, slamming a bedroom door in another woman’s face.
After Avigdor’s testimony on Wednesday, prosecutors called Julia Ramsey Baldwin as a witness to testify about Lindsey Acree’s allegation she was drugged and raped by Tal and another man on Memorial Day weekend in 2011. Baldwin, who was Acree’s close friend and roommate at the time, is an outcry witness, or a person to whom a victim discloses an allegation, for the prosecution.
She told the jury she was not with Acree that weekend, but described Acree telling her that “the most fucked up thing of her life happened,” before saying she had been raped. Baldwin said she forwarded a June 2024 article to Acree, in which The Real Deal first reported about rape allegations against the brothers, which prompted Acree to come forward with her allegations in a New York Times article the following month.
Acree, identified as “Victim 1” in the indictment, also filed a civil lawsuit against Tal, his brother Oren and a John Doe.
What we’re watching
- It’s the fourth week of the Alexanders’ sex trafficking trial, and the case could be coming to an end by mid-March. Prosecutors now plan to rest their case early next week, passing the baton to the defense.
- The defense asked Caproni to order prosecutors to secure a new search warrant for Said Abulafia’s iCloud account. Abulafia is a friend of the Alexanders who lives in Israel. The defense’s request is tied to a video of Ava Wells, who testified earlier this week that she was raped by Alon in Tel Aviv in 2016.
- Prosecutors revealed communications between the Alexander brothers and other men about securing women for trips and parties, including weekends in the Hamptons and Aspen. We’ll have more on this soon.