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Memorial Day weekend in the Hamptons. A military parade snakes down Main Street. In Sag Harbour, a four-gun salute rings out, mourning the dead of the US armed forces. At the Dune Club, the playground of New York’s young and famous, nautical-themed waiters serve $1000 bottles of vodka between whitewashed walls drowning in mid-2000s yacht-club chic.
Australian Kate Whiteman is there. Like many expats her age, Whiteman had grown to love the New York lifestyle. The 31-year-old enjoyed dinners at two of the city’s institutions, Nello and Scarpetta, and a gig working at one of New York’s top photography houses.
Inside the nightclub, twins Alon and Oren Alexander are gearing up for a banner year. Oren is preparing to sell a $US47 million Miami mansion. Alon is just about to finish his degree at New York Law School. Tall, handsome, arrogant and rich, they gloated about their sexual exploits and lured women with free concerts and luxury parties.
Whiteman, a bubbly, determined young professional from the Gold Coast, travelled to the Hamptons with her friend Suzanne from New York. It was meant to be a weekend by the beach. Instead, it set off a trail of destruction that ran from the steel skyline of Manhattan to a struggling town in country NSW.
Whiteman first met the Alexander brothers in New York in 2008. Known as Katie to her close friends, Whiteman was exploring a city that had captivated generations of young Australians. In her spare time, she helped find homes for rescue dogs. The brothers were in a hurry to make their mark on the booming US property market and expand their family’s lucrative security business.
Oren and his older brother Tal made their name buying and selling homes for the mega-rich: Tommy Hilfiger, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Liam Gallagher, Ivanka and Jared Trump, while Oren’s twin, Alon, ran the security empire that his parents started.
They texted grandiose plans to women and pulled them into their orbit, including Whiteman, who told them she would be in the Hamptons with a friend for Memorial Day weekend in March 2012.
“We were sharing a hotel room,” said her friend Suzanne, who asked to be identified only by her first name, fearing for her safety and career.
“I was worried and trying to get in touch with her. We went to a club, and it was packed and impossible to get a taxi out of there. She wasn’t answering her phone.”
Little did Suzanne know that before she had left Dune, Whiteman had already been bundled into a black SUV waiting for the twins outside.
Framed by mansions, cabanas and heated swimming pools, Deerfield Road winds for eight kilometres from Southampton. The neighbourhood’s list of residents reads like the casting call for a Hollywood script: Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Brooke Shields.
But Whiteman had no idea where she was going until she saw the turrets, archways and the moat of one of America’s few faux-medieval fortresses: Sir Ivan’s Castle.
Inside the castle, Oren and Alon allegedly forced Whiteman to change into a sarong and put her phone in a locker.
“[Then] they both surrounded her on either side, gave each other this really weird look as if to say, let’s do it; Alon quickly bent down and pulled her knees forward so she fell backwards,” Suzanne said.
“Alon then spread her legs and forced himself on her. I remember her saying they both took turns having sex with her, swapping places and raping her.”
That night, Whiteman’s life changed irrevocably. But on the morning after, in her hotel room with Suzanne, all Whiteman could do was cry and hug her dog, Oli.
“She sat crouched on the ground clinging to her dog, shaking with tears streaming down her face,” Suzanne said in a September 2022 email to Whiteman’s former attorney.
“I kept asking her what was wrong; I thought she had been drugged originally. She just sat there taking really deep breaths, staring blankly at the floor.
“I remember her telling me that the twins then raped her in the worst way possible, and she was completely distraught and terrified.”
The twins Whiteman encountered on that humid night in the Hamptons, along with their older brother Tal, would go on to become three of the most heinous sex traffickers since Jeffrey Epstein in a case that has rocked America and now threatens to engulf the White House.
Whiteman did not live to see her day in court, but dozens of other victims did. Last month, the Alexander brothers were sentenced to 30 years in jail for crimes described by Judge Valerie Caproni as monstrous.
“These defendants trafficked, raped, drugged, and sexually assaulted many women and girls,” she said. “Your crimes wreaked havoc on their lives.”
Sir Ivan’s Castle has gargoyles on its roof, a Versailles-themed interior and a dungeon.
Named after its owner, Ivan Wilzig, in homage to himself, the 20,000-square-metre fantasy palace would become the centre of the Alexander brothers’ crimes as they drugged women and destroyed lives.
Carlemi Dominguez remembers it in haunting detail. Before she went to the Hamptons, the dental assistant played volleyball tournaments in Hawaii and travelled around Asia. Then she saw the 10-foot gates to the castle that would upend her life.
“The first thing you see is the gates,” she said. “They’re huge. Then you see the knights, the pool, the gym, sauna, a jacuzzi indoors, a jacuzzi outdoors.
“And beautiful people, like, beautiful people.”
Then she remembers other men joking about Whiteman’s rape as if it were any other Saturday.
“[They] just grabbed this girl from this club, put her in their truck, and just took turns.”
“The way they described it was horrific. And how they just brought her back to the castle, and just pretty much did what they wanted to do with her.
“It sounded like she was being tossed like a rag doll. Just spun around by different men.”
Dominguez is not just a witness. She is also an alleged victim who has filed her own claim against the Alexander brothers.
“I took a sip of champagne, and that was it,” she told this masthead and 60 Minutes.
Beneath Sir Ivan’s Castle is a dungeon. Inside the dungeon is a chamber.
“I just remember seeing one of the twins on top of me,” said Dominguez. “I didn’t feel anything, but I saw him, and I could hear laughter in the back.
“And I remember I was trying to see where I was. I’m like, wait, this is the secret room.”
Like many of the Alexander brothers’ victims, Dominguez only remembers flashes: a cup of water being thrown at her, struggling to escape through the castle by holding on to the walls and ending up in a dark bedroom.
“Until I found out I was pregnant. And then that’s when I was like, ‘What the f--k happened?’”
For more than a decade, she locked her trauma away in the deepest, darkest recesses of her mind. The 40-year-old’s life imploded.
“Sometimes I feel like a lost child, yet I’m a f----g adult who has to move on. It’s not that easy,” she said. “I couldn’t even tell the psychiatrist or therapist what was really happening to me.”
None of it made sense until March 2024. After years of compiling evidence from her home in Australia and failed mediations, Kate Whiteman filed her complaint against the Alexander brothers in the New York Supreme Court.
“The worst part was when I saw it on paper,” said Dominguez. “It broke me. She was the first person to say something.”
Over the next two years, dozens more victims came forward. They echoed the claims made in Whiteman’s civil complaint. From New York to Aspen to Tel Aviv, they recounted the moment their future was taken from them.
Eventually, the volume of evidence became so overwhelming that the FBI got involved. By October, more than 70 women would tell the FBI that they had been raped, drugged, assaulted and trafficked by the Alexander brothers.
In Aspen, teenager Maylen Gehret was out with friends after the Winter X Games when she felt limp. Then Alon locked her in a bathroom, forced her to unlock her phone, followed himself on Instagram and messaged “hey babe” from her account after he raped her.
Multiple women described being terrified that the Alexander brothers were going to hurt or kill them. Their only goal in that moment became to survive.
Once they did, some weren’t sure they wanted to be alive.
“I carry a quiet funeral inside me for the person I might have become if this never happened to me,” said Maya Miller, a pseudonym given to one of 11 victims of the Alexander brothers interviewed by the FBI.
“What happened to me was not a misunderstanding. There was no confusion. Tal Alexander raped me.”
After a five-week trial and a unanimous jury verdict, the brothers were sentenced to 30 years in jail on October 27.
Judge Caproni described them as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – brothers who presented as loving family men but committed horrific sexual crimes.
“Those women described men who were as far as one can get from gentlemen,” Caproni said. “They described sadistic, misogynistic sexual predators.”
In their sentencing statements, the brothers showed little remorse. Their lawyers argued that they grew up with “hook up culture” and that some of that behaviour “may have offended people’s feelings”.
“I stand here facing life in prison for something I did not do,” Tal told the court. “It feels like an atomic bomb has been dropped on my life.”
The Brooklyn prison the three Alexander brothers have shared for the past two years is a far cry from their former life.
Such was the sudden ignominy of their new surroundings and the wealth they had grown accustomed to, Tal told the court he would offer a $US115 million ($169 million) bond to be held in self-funded confinement with private security guards while he awaited his verdict.
Instead, they were shackled next to UnitedHealthcare CEO murderer Luigi Mangione and Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Their downfall began just as they reached the zenith of their powers. In 2021, they joined Douglas Elliman ’s exclusive “Billion Dollar Club” after hitting $US1.8 billion in residential sales across Manhattan, South Florida and the Hamptons.
But they were also becoming increasingly aware of the risks they were taking as they escalated what prosecutors described as “a sweeping enterprise of sexual violence”.
“Start to think about [what] reputation you want out there,” Oren wrote to Tal on WhatsApp in 2021. “We are on top of the game, and only thing [that] can bring us down is some Hoe complaining.”
For years the twins and Tal had acted with impunity. They scoured social media for women, promising free concerts and glamorous weekends away in Las Vegas, Mexico, the Hamptons and Miami.
“Going to start collecting for the pot to fly bitches down,” one of their friends wrote in a WhatsApp message in 2016. “There should be a fee per bang and after bang,” responded Alon.
“We need fun girls with good attitude.”
“Are all girls getting shipped out on Sunday?” Oren asked a week later.
The WhatsApp group, named “The Lions of Tulum”, wanted cocaine, mushrooms and GHB. They didn’t want ecstasy, one of their friends said in the group because it makes “the girls wanna chase the f----g party” rather than have sex with them.
“I don’t want anyone being upset if they don’t run a 10-man-train.”
The train was a reference to multiple men having sex with one woman. It was not the first time it had been used.
Oren boasted about it in his high school yearbook . In 2003 , he said his most memorable moment in high school was “riding my first ‘choo-choo’ train”.
That same year, Alon and Oren allegedly raped a girl at a high school party in Miami after she had taken Xanax.
In a report to Miami police, the victim alleged she had been sexually battered by the brothers.
It was this case that Whiteman latched onto as she started her hunt for answers about what happened to her more than a decade later.
The seeds of the Alexander brothers’ downfall were not sown in FBI rooms. Whiteman planted them online from her home in Australia.
Under the username Resident_716, Whiteman left little breadcrumbs on Reddit forums, hoping to draw together other survivors.
“Oren & Alon Alexander R trial,” she wrote on Reddit in 2021, linking to a blog post about a trial that never went ahead over the Miami high school rape allegations, years before she filed her civil claim.
The posts were replicated across Reddit forums focusing on New York state, New York City, Florida, and Miami.
Between comments about trying to find foster homes for dogs in other Reddit forums (“Please go and adopt him and give him lots of cuddles”), Whiteman found women who had been through what she had been through.
One of them was Gheret, the 17-year-old who said she had been raped at the Winter X Games in Aspen.
Another was Rebecca Mandel, who became the second woman to lodge a civil claim against the brothers.
“The thing about this whole Reddit chain, which was fascinating to me, is the women were so cautious; they didn’t want their names out there,” said Whiteman’s attorney, Evan Torgan.
Torgan is a hard-boiled New York lawyer who, until he was at the centre of one of the biggest sex-trafficking cases in US history, largely specialised in personal injury claims.
“Everybody had these fake names, they had these fake handles, and even when they were talking to each other in the beginning, they didn’t even reveal who they were or what their phone numbers were,” he said.
Piece by piece, Whiteman became convinced she was not the only victim of the Alexander brothers. The stories were too similar: young women on a night out who became incapacitated and were then raped by at least one or more of the brothers.
“There were three people who didn’t know each other, who were from different parts of the world with a very, very similar story,” said Torgan.
At the same time, rumours about the brothers’ exploits persisted as their success grew.
Katherine Kallergis spent a decade covering the Miami mansion beat for The Real Deal , a US industry publication that covers the ins and outs of high-end real estate.
“I always would ask people who I spoke to, ‘Do you have any more information? Do you know who? Do you know when’?” she said. “And I never got any concrete details, but there were always whispers of, ‘Don’t leave your drink unattended around them’ or ‘I wouldn’t let my daughter go over to their house’.”
The brothers’ ruthless commercial drive meant that in the cut-throat world of US celebrity real estate agents, they also frequently put competitors offside.
“[There was] a lot of speculation,” said Kallergis. “And they had a lot of enemies.”
In June 2024, Kallergis searched Florida’s court records to see whether any complaints against the brothers had been filed. Nothing turned up. Then she asked her colleague Sheridan Wall to check if anything had been filed in New York.
“She found these two lawsuits that had been sitting in the court docket for a few months,” said Kallergis.
“And they alleged that Oren and his twin brother Alon had drugged and raped women. That’s when we knew we had a story.”
The first complaint she found was from Kate Whiteman.
Like Dominguez, Lindsey Acree saw Whiteman’s claims for the first time in The Real Deal.
“It brought everything back,” said Acree. “It just took it out of the storage locker. And it was such a moment. I wasn’t even thinking. I’d immediately seen the article, called my mum, and I was like, ‘Hey, mum, remember that bad thing that happened to me? Well, it happened to somebody else, too’.
“That did happen. That wasn’t a nightmare, and that was Kate.”
One year before Whiteman was driven into Sir Ivan’s Castle, Acree was a 25-year-old on holiday with friends in the Hamptons. It was Memorial Day 2011.
“I was in a hot tub with Tal,” she said. “I had one or two sips of wine, and then it was like I entered some sort of twilight zone.”
Dominguez calls them flashes. Acree describes them as a flip-book: The hot tub, the sauna, the gym, then being dressed up like a doll.
“And then the thing that is very clear in my mind is the way that they looked at each other and then Tal leaving the room and coming back with a tripod and a camcorder,” she said.
“Now I have to put away dealing with the emotional aspect that there’s a tape out there somewhere of me dressed in costumes being raped by two or more men.”
Acree was not the only one to have had their rape filmed by the brothers. During the criminal trial, the jury saw footage of a 17-year-old being raped while almost unconscious.
“[That’s] the one that really sunk them,” said Torgan. “To videotape that and to manoeuvre the camera to make sure that it’s captured in its entirety to keep for whatever reason and to send to your friends, it’s not just alarming, it’s utter stupidity, really.”
Alon went even further, boasting about raping a teenager in messages.
“You were bragging about raping a 17-year-old girl,” Judge Caproni said in her sentencing.
“To be clear, as a 29- or 30-year-old man, you drugged and raped a 17-year-old. I mention that event not because it was the worst incident that I heard about in this case but because it’s a really good example of how shameful and degenerate your conduct was.”
The brothers stored video of their assaults on hard drives and USB sticks until the FBI raided their properties in December 2024.
“It was just about humiliation,” said Acree. “I mean, there were scenes; there were costumes. It was evil, honestly, like demented. And I’ve had a really, really hard time grasping the concept that people, for no reason whatsoever, just want to harm other people, want to humiliate women.”
“When I found out about the number of women that had been assaulted, I genuinely was like, ‘How did they make time for all of this’?”
In July 2024, Acree followed Whiteman, Mandel and Gheret in putting her name to her allegations.
“Thank you for being so brave,” Whiteman wrote to Acree in an email after her claims first appeared.
“I felt like there was really solidarity,” said Acree. “There was a sense of her coming forward gave me the encouragement to come forward. Then it just snowballed after that.”
Lawyer Lili Timmermann, who represents Acree and Dominguez, said that without Whiteman lodging her civil claim, her clients would never have come forward.
“It took one incredibly brave and prescient woman to break this whole thing open,” she said.
“And the thing that gives me goosebumps now is that women end up never doing this for themselves. They do it for other women.”
But once they identified themselves, Whiteman and Acree were not prepared for the relentless smear campaign launched by the Alexander brothers’ supporters.
“The war that they’ve waged on us was like a comic book villain,” said Acree, likening the experience to the Salem witch trials. “They came after all my friends.
“They masked themselves as journalists, and I know they have masked themselves as many other things and threatened people’s families.”
According to Acree’s filing in the US Southern District Court, one “investigator” went as far as to contact her college boyfriend who now lives in Tasmania. Another victim reported her children being targeted. Other people hired by the brothers posed as insurance company employees to compile dirt files on victims.
Everett Stern, who runs crisis communication firm Tactical Rabbit, was so disturbed by their approach that he refused to represent the brothers.
“These women did their part,” Stern wrote on X after the sentence was handed down. “They spoke, and they were hunted for it.”
In December 2024, a website accusing the victims of extorting the Alexander brothers was set up.
Torgan, Whiteman’s lawyer, was accused of being a conspiracy leader; Amir Korangy, the editor of The Real Deal (who the brothers lodged a $US500 million defamation claim against), a co-conspirator; Whiteman of being a money-hungry victim who had overstayed her US visa; and other survivors of being drug dealers, adulterers and fraudsters.
The brothers claimed Whiteman’s account was “shockingly false” and designed to “concoct a specific narrative” that had become “a road map for an onslaught of copycat accusations to follow”.
Before publicly filing her claim in early 2024, Whiteman had pursued a multi-million-dollar settlement, but mediation fell through.
“I’m sure they wished that they had treated Kate Whiteman a hell of a lot better when she went to mediation before she ever hired me,” said Torgan. “They had their chance long before I ever heard of them.”
Once Whiteman’s case became public, the attacks on her escalated.
The New York Times reported the text for the website was written by the same network behind smear campaigns that targeted Hollywood actors in sexual harassment and workplace disputes.
The brothers also hired Juda Engelmayer, a consultant whose previous clients include disgraced Hollywood sex abuser Harvey Weinstein, and paid influencers to write positive articles about them.
Then they zeroed in on Whiteman. The first victim to file her case was also the most exposed.
They built a motion to dismiss her suit based on messages and photos that Whiteman had sent to Oren after she was allegedly raped. The messages included Whiteman making plans with Oren in the Hamptons a year later, comments about a “heated relationship” and explicit photos.
Victims of sexual assault often send messages to perpetrators after the alleged attacks occur.
“That’s a typical thing where women try to regain the control of their life that they lost, by talking to the person who assaulted them,” said Torgan.
Whiteman knew the messages could become public.
“The thing about brave people is they’re scared out of their minds … but they do it anyway,” said Torgan. “She never wavered.”
The Real Deal chose not to publish the messages after they were provided by the Alexander brothers’ team, arguing they did not disprove that Kate was raped.
But on July 15, 2025, The Daily Mail published a story: “EXCLUSIVE: ‘Raunchy’ messages and lingerie photos sent by Hamptons rape accuser.”
“She knew that they attached these pictures that nobody would want their mother or father to see,” said Torgan.
“It was a double shot of violence because violence No.1 was the rape, and violence No.2 was what they presented to her in terms of what they said were her texts and photographs that they said that she provided them.”
The New York Supreme Court later rejected the motion to dismiss that contained the messages.
Engelmayer, the Alexander brothers’ spokesman, said the brothers had a right to defend themselves.
“Due process is a fundamental right, and an accusation is not proof,” he said.
“The brothers disputed her civil allegations, and materials from that case, including messages and photographs, were used to challenge her account. I understand why her supporters viewed the resulting coverage as harmful, but mounting a legal defence is a right, particularly for people who maintain their innocence.”
Cowra is a small Australian town, five hours southwest of Sydney. It has a few thousand people, a couple of pubs, and just about everyone knows each other’s name.
Steve, a local teacher, has been drinking at The Australian Hotel almost every day for the past 30 years.
“If you don’t know each other, you know somebody’s brother or cousin or sister or someone,” said Steve. “I drink here every day; I’ve never seen her here, put it that way.”
Throughout Cowra, the mystery deepens. First at the mayor’s office, then at local coffee shops, the funeral home, and every pub in town.
How did a woman who brought down one of the largest sex-trafficking schemes in US history die without anyone knowing what she achieved?
“If I upset people that powerful, I’d be hiding too,” Steve said .
The only clue neighbours had about who lived next to them was the online shopping deliveries that occasionally piled up at Whiteman’s door.
Then, in October last year, they heard the sirens.
“I remember the police and ambulance,” one neighbour who asked not to be identified said. “There were all these police cars and ambulances there, but we didn’t know what happened.”
Whiteman died alone in a townhouse three blocks back from Cowra’s main street in October last year.
Isolated and unable to speak to other victims while the Alexander brothers’ criminal trial was underway, Whiteman had struggled with her mental health. NSW Police did not treat her death as suspicious.
The 45-year-old had stayed her civil claim while the criminal prosecution went ahead, allowing dozens of other victims to get the justice that she never received.
The girl from the Gold Coast who loved her dogs and once dreamed of making it in New York died six months before the Alexander brothers were found guilty and almost a year before they were sentenced to three decades in prison.
In the weeks after the Daily Mail published the explicit messages, Torgan tried repeatedly to contact her.
“I never heard from her again,” he said. “The one thing that I am very gratified for is that Kate knew that she was responsible for all these women coming forward. She knew that. And she was reminded of that every day by a lot of the women who were in touch with her.
“None of this would have happened [without Kate]. No criminal trials, no prosecution, no civil lawsuits, no vindication, no justice for any of the victims.”
Even as their lives took them to opposite sides of the world, Whiteman and Suzanne would send each other WhatsApp messages. Despite her very public court case, Whiteman became increasingly private.
“Every time I asked her questions about her life, she wouldn’t answer much. Everything was about New York,” said Suzanne.
“Cowra just seems like an odd place for her to end up.”
Suzanne’s last message to her old friend still sits in her inbox. A single hollow tick marks it as unread.
“Katie’s spiral, her downfall, was all because of this, because of these guys,” she said.
In a statement, Whiteman’s family asked for privacy.
“This last year has taken a toll on us. It seems our hearts will ache forever,” the family said.
“There are no words to describe our feelings on the loss of our daughter. Tragically, Kate only lived half her life and half of that was devastated by what happened.
“Let’s hope the sentences deter other men from thinking they can get away with doing what they like to women. Society needs to change; attitudes need revising. Kate will live forever in our hearts. May she rest in peace.”
For the victims left behind, their torment may not be over. The brothers have lodged their notice of appeal. If that fails, they have personal connections that go to the top of the White House.
Oren and Tal represented Jared and Ivanka Trump in their purchase of a $US24 million waterfront mansion in Miami. They were also hosted by Ivanka’s father, US President Donald Trump, at a White House Hanukkah party in 2020.
Liz Oyer, the former United States Pardon Attorney, said pardons have become “completely corrupted” during Donald Trump’s second presidency.
“Pardons are being granted on the basis of political connections and wealth,” she said in an interview with this masthead and 60 Minutes from Washington.
“There is a tremendous amount of money changing hands. People are paying millions of dollars to try to get pardons.”
The pardon economy has surged under Oyer’s replacement, Ed Martin, who describes his rationale for pardons as “no MAGA left behind”, and White House “pardon tsar” Alice Johnson, a former cocaine trafficker.
Trump has pardoned hundreds of offenders in his second term, including felons who have been convicted of fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and drug trafficking.
He has vowed to escalate that even further as he enters his final two years in office.
“I intend to issue tremendous numbers of pardons,” he told 60 Minutes America this week.
The brothers have already used their wealth and connections to put themselves in front of the president.
Months before their sentence was handed down, they hired pardon specialist Alan Dershowitz, who served as an adviser to Trump in his first term and helped negotiate Jeffrey Epstein’s controversial plea deal in 2008.
The deal helped Epstein avoid sex-trafficking charges, years after he had abused dozens of victims, including whistleblower Virginia Giuffre.
Oyer said Dershowitz was well-placed to lobby Trump. “He was one of the most successful brokers of clemency during Trump’s first presidency.” There is no suggestion Dershowitz has engaged in corrupt conduct.
But even for Trump, granting a pardon for sex trafficking would be unprecedented.
“It would send an absolutely horrible message,” said Oyer.
Acree, who sat through days of brutal cross-examination in front of her rapist in the New York federal court, said nothing would surprise her.
“We had a [UFC] fight on the White House lawn,” she said. “Anything can happen.”
It has taken Acree 15 years to pull together the pieces of the life she left behind in the Hamptons. She just wishes she could tell Whiteman one more time that she saved dozens of women’s lives.
“I hope you’re up there with Virginia and all the ladies who were burnt at the stake,” she said. “I hope you see you have changed the world.”
Watch Eryk Bagshaw’s story on Kate Whiteman and the Alexander brothers on 60 Minutes at 7pm on Sunday.
