Luxury real estate agent Tal Alexander—who, along with his brothers Oren and Alon, is facing sexual assault claims and an FBI probe—claimed Thursday that a rape accusation leveled against him is nothing more than a shakedown.
Alexander has been sued by Angelica Parker, who alleges that the realtor and his brother Alon raped her in fall of 2012 in an assault “planned and facilitated” by Oren at the millionaire brothers’ Soho apartment.
Parker’s suit alleges the siblings preyed on her and a friend who’d visited their pad: The women were offered ecstasy, and Alon made drinks for the women. But the friend fled after Alon allegedly hit on her and groped her. She worried about Parker’s safety and she stayed in a stairwell, the complaint alleges.
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Alon and Tal then raped Parker, the legal filing states, while Oren sat by and watched.
But on Thursday, Tal’s legal team filed an answer to Parker’s suit, denying her allegations and calling her “a professional plaintiff who has brought at least two other actions accusing individuals of sexual misconduct, one of which was dismissed after a New York State judge concluded the suit was frivolous.”
While other women have sued 36-year-old twins Alon and Oren for sexual assault, Parker was the first to name Tal, 38, as an alleged rapist.
Parker’s lawyer, Michael J. Willemin, told the Daily Beast that Tal’s response to her suit smacked of victim shaming.
“It seems that the defendants in this action are already in the process of trying to victim shame our client because she has experienced more than one trauma in her life,” Willemin, a partner at Wigdor LLP, said in an email. “It is unfortunately typical for alleged perpetrators of sexual assault and rape to attempt to shame their victims.
“These tactics did not work in the cases against the likes of Roger Ailes, Diddy and Harvey Weinstein. It won’t work in this case either.”
In 2011, Parker (then known as Angelica Cecora) sued boxer Oscar De La Hoya for battery and false imprisonment over an encounter at the Ritz-Carlton. The judge dismissed the case, calling it “without merit,” the New York Post reported at the time.
Willemin recently told the Post that if his client’s lawsuit against De La Hoya were filed today, he didn’t think it would be tossed because of a change in how courts and the public view sexual assault accusations.
“At the end of the day … according to the reporting,” Willemin added, “there’s been dozens of women that have confirmed the Alexander brothers’ predilection for sexually assaulting women.”
Parker alleges in her suit that in the years after the attack, she encountered the broker bros through their “many mutual friends and acquaintances,” adding that they “made various defamatory statements about” her, “gratuitously telling her friends that they had sex with her.”
The lawsuit accuses Tal of trying to assault Parker again years later—this time, in the guest room of someone’s home. That alleged attempt was foiled after Parker screamed, and Tal nicknamed her “the king’s rat” because he was booted from the house as a result.
Parker’s suit adds that she’s “aware of numerous other women who were sexually assaulted by one or more of the Alexander brothers.”
She “would learn that it was common knowledge that the Alexander brothers often forcefully raped women, drugged women and tricked women into having sex by pretending to be one of their brothers (i.e., Alon would pretend to be Oren and vice versa),” the filing continues.
Not long after Parker filed her suit, Tal stepped down from his billion-dollar brokerage firm OFFICIAL so, in the words of his attorney, he could “focus fully on clearing his name.”
Tal’s Thursday filing claims Parker “attempts to use the court system to pursue fabricated allegations for financial gain. The truth sits in stark contrast to the lurid and inflammatory allegations contained in the Complaint.”
