This week, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released an incisive accounting of how Trump’s Department of Justice has managed to avoid – nothing to see here – investigating ANY of the men in the Epstein files accused of sexual assault and rape, including Trump himself. It is the most damning official document yet published, not only linking Trump to Epstein’s crimes against women and girls but accusing Trump himself of rape.

The House Judiciary Democrats’ report makes clear what we at the Freakshow – and anyone even casually familiar with the files – already know:

The record shows that Epstein and Trump, working with other predators like Paolo Zampolli and John Casablancas, exploited the thin veneer of professionalism offered by the 1990s modeling industry to lure victims into their orbit. The evidence, much of it still hiding behind redactions in DOJ vaults, shows that Trump lied about kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club and strongly suggests that Epstein introduced Trump to his wife Melania. The evidence demonstrates that Trump has lied about the nature and extent of his relationship with Epstein dozens of times—incriminating behavior for someone who supposedly has nothing to hide.

Whether the report turns out to be a blueprint for future investigations if and when Democrats control the committees, or does nothing more than gin up pre-midterm attention on the Trump-Epstein connection, remains to be seen.

But its release coincides neatly with the sentencing of Tal Alexander and his year-younger twin brothers Oren and Alon for sex trafficking. They are the only people in America, other than Ghislaine Maxwell, mentioned in the Epstein files to be investigated and sentenced to prison despite the known cohorts and fellow travelers in the files. Meanwhile, as we’ve noted before, European countries including France, England and Norway have opened investigations into high profile men, all the way up to and including the de-princed Andrew.

The brothers were convicted of federal sex trafficking. They deny guilt, but a jury convicted them of a laundry list of heinous sex offenses, mostly involving group roofie rapes and the videotaping of inert victims. Their “sex trafficking” doesn’t appear to have involved the kind of commercial sex Epstein orchestrated, just inducements to party in fancy hotels and resorts – venues that, for the women, turned out to be the horror equivalent of Bluebeard’s cave.

Since late 2024, the three Alexander brothers have been sitting in a federal prison in New York that now also houses Luigi Mangione and Nicolás Maduro. They will soon be moved to institutions where they will serve out 30 year sentences. Prosecutors had asked for life.

For more than a decade, the Alexanders occupied a privileged position in the Trump-Epstein demimonde and luxury real estate world. They were well known to Trump and Epstein, Leon Black, the Witkoffs, Ivanka and Jared (whose Indian Creek mansion purchase two of the brothers handled in an off-market $24 million deal in April 2021) and other Trump pals.

The Southern District of New York arrested the brothers in December 2024, after Trump’s second election and not long before his inauguration. Their trial commenced in January 2026, the same week the DOJ dropped a huge tranche of Epstein files into public view under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Alexanders appear in both images and email exchanges.

But on the night of the document dump, the BBC ran images of a government spreadsheet from the files in which allegations against the Alexanders were placed just below a box naming Trump and Clinton. That box included a 14-year-old victim’s allegation that Trump punched her in the head during sex. That accuser turns out to have been a woman who, as we reported earlier this year, the FBI had earmarked as “Protect Source” and whose FBI interviews have been held back from release for unknown reasons.

The Alexander-Epstein Venn diagram is worth studying.

For at least a decade, they were millennial members of the same skeezy underworld inhabited by Trump, Leon Black, Epstein, and other horny, powerful, desiccated men. They palled around with Alex Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate dealer (for whom Oren handled at least two deals in Miami) who currently serves as Trump’s Special Envoy for Peace Missions.

Oren and Tal, in red MAGA hats, were at the Trump 2016 victory party in New York, along with their boss and one of Trump’s closest pals, Howard Lorber – a scene captured on Israeli TV. After Trump lost in 2020, Oren and some of his family were guests at the White House Hanukkah party. “Spare your political views. The president just served us kosher food in his house and wished us a Happy Hanukkah,” he wrote on Instagram.

They were welcome at Trump Tower and the White House, but the brothers insist they never went to Epstein’s properties – even though one woman has claimed they raped her upstairs at his mansion.

In the Epstein files, Oren appears in photographs with some of the high profile female recruiters/victims, and appears to have dated at least one of the girls Epstein was trafficking.

One of their pals was Ukrainian Anastasiya Siroochenko (who goes by Siro), a recipient of so many off-the-books millions from Leon Black that she attracted the attention of the IRS. Siroochenko was supposedly “selling major works of art” to Leon Black in 2014, including a Louise Bourgeois. In 2015, when Anastasiya was spotted around town with Oren Alexander, she received more than $1 million in gifts from Black, listed separately here.

The trafficking of Siroochenko is explicit in the files, in exchanges like this one between Epstein and model “scout” Ramsey Elkholey in 2011:

Images and emails in the files also indicate that the brothers ran around with Anastasiya’s buddy and Epstein attaché Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva. We profiled Pozhidaeva in our Red Sparrows column earlier this year, as a prolific recruiter of Russian girls who now calls herself a victim and is living under a new name.

In one exchange in the files, Jeff – ever the love guru – advises Lana on how to confess to a boyfriend that she made out with Oren. In another, he asks for details about Oren and Alon’s birthday party.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01198272.pdf

Leon Black flanked on the right by Lana Pozhidaeva

In the decade before their arrests, the Alexanders were dynamic, high profile luxury real estate agents working the high end Manhattan-Miami-Hamptons scene as protégés of Howard Lorber (according to Trump, Lorber is one of his only two friends in New York, the other being real estate magnate Richard LeFrak).

Oren became a sort of made man in New York real estate when, in 2013, at the age of 26, he handled a record Trump Tower sale – a $16.5 million condo. He went on to do other Trump real estate deals, including the first Trump Tower sale after the 2016 election. On January 12, 2017, a week before Trump’s first inauguration, the NY Post reported Tal and Oren Alexander as listing brokers on a “blinged-out” condo that had been on the market for almost a year.

The Alexander team also sold a Trump Park Avenue condo for $9.9 million in 2019. They represented Qatar in a 2014 purchase of a $100 million New York townhouse. And as Trump rose to power, the brothers were flying high: in March 2016, the Alexander Team listings included, in addition to a Trump Tower condo, a $50 million Upper East Side townhouse, a $39 million listing in Tel Aviv, and a $39 million house in the Hamptons.

The brothers also handled a $47 million deal on Indian Creek Road in 2012, at the time the most expensive home in Miami. But the brothers’ biggest Miami deal was Faena House, an ultra-luxury condo building developed by Argentine hotelier Alan Faena and Ukrainian-Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik, who poured a million dollars into Trump’s 2016 inaugural fund. Leon Black bought a condo there for $16 million, seemingly never lived in it, paid it off and then sold it almost immediately in a 2016 deal handled by Oren.

In 2012, Anastasiya Siro, then a model at Jean-Luc Brunel’s agency (and Epstein’s trafficking front MC2), was under a one-year contract as a model to Faena.

Among his other off-work diversions, Oren and sometime Epstein pal multi-millionaire Benny Shabtai co-chaired Friends of the IDF galas at least three times. In November 2023, they hosted an IDF fundraiser at the Faena Forum in Miami Beach, raising $9.2 million for the Israeli military. At that event, Oren publicly played the role of host. Disgraced Hollywood producer and Epstein files figure Brett Ratner, who had absconded to Israel after a major sexual abuse scandal but who sometimes still hung his hat at Faena Hotel, sat front and center with Mike Tyson.

The connections between Donald Trump, Leon Black, and Howard Lorber go back years and involve moneymaking ventures together in the lawless frontier of post-Soviet Russia, as we reported in What Happens in Russia.

A quick thumbnail history of that web: in 1994, businessman Bennett LeBow managed to retain control of a company he had founded called New Valley through a restructuring of debt controlled by Leon Black’s Apollo Global Management. LeBow was already doing big business in Moscow and had acquired commercial real estate across from the Kremlin. Leon Black’s brother-in-law was LeBow’s right-hand man at the time. A restructuring of New Valley enriched Black, and Howard Lorber was installed as president and CEO.

In 1996, Lorber, Black, and Trump went to Moscow together. Black soon formed a joint venture with Lebow and Lorber to develop the Kremlin real estate. In the early 2000s, after selling the Moscow properties to an offshore entity, New Valley gained control of real estate concern Douglas Elliman, where Howard Lorber became chairman and CEO.

Howard Lorber, Donald Trump, Bennett LeBow, and Leon Black at Lorber’s birthday party in New York, 2008Photo by Rob Rich

Later, Lorber partnered with Paolo Zampolli’s real estate company Paramount (where Zampolli bragged that he drew inspiration from Trump and used models as brokers). Lorber also gave the Alexander brothers their own group and made Oren an Elliman vice president.

And that brings us to today.

The investigation, arrest and convictions of these relatively junior figures in the Epstein files – but no one else – suggest that maybe the feds found it easier to go after the low-hanging fruit while leaving the whales alone.

The Alexanders were close enough to Epstein, Black’s Russian “friends” and some of the other younger women the brothers knew to be “working girls,” that the old bulls might have seen them as loose ends.

They were young, ambitious, and well-connected in Epsteinworld. And now they’re going to prison.

The question is: What did they see, hear or know about the old bulls? Does anyone in power have an interest in finding out?

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow