Ahead of their sentencing next week in a federal sex-trafficking case, a Peacock documentary is casting a fresh light on the sordid story of the Alexander brothers.
The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers, which premieres on Sunday, arrives just as brothers Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander — two of them onetime stars in the flashy world of luxury real estate — face potential life sentences. After being accused of drugging and raping dozens of women in a federal trial earlier this year, they were convicted of sex trafficking, while two of them are still awaiting trial for a state case in Florida.
The three-part documentary follows the brothers’ rise from their privileged youth in Miami to reaching the highest echelons of high-end real estate, first at Douglas Elliman and then at their own brokerage, called Official. And it tracks them through their rapid downfall after news broke that two women had filed civil suits against Oren and Alon alleging rape and assault, after which dozens of women came forward with their own grisly accusations. (The brothers have maintained that they never drugged and raped anyone.)
The Wolves of Real Estate director Emma Schwartz is no newbie to stories of sexual abuse and violence: She executive produced and co-directed The Fall of Diddy for HBO Max, which tracked accusations surrounding Sean “Diddy” Combs. Still, she says, even with her track record in telling tricky pop-culture investigations with the production company Maxine (she also worked on Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV), “this one was definitely one of the harder ones” in terms of finding subjects willing to go on camera, she told The Hollywood Reporter.
In the interview, Schwartz also discussed a lingering mystery in the brothers’ story, the details of the case that stick with her and the questions that she hopes viewers ask after watching the documentary.
The story has been covered pretty intensely in the press. What more did you feel that a documentary could bring to the story?
I think a lot of the stories that we like to focus on at Maxine are taking a big look at the story. The day-to-day coverage only tells you part of it. And even the articles that went through a dozen accounts in the summer of 2024, they were sort of part of the buildup of a story. And what you can do with a documentary is you can look at the entirety. How did it begin? What happened before? You can look outside of the walls of a criminal case. You’re right, there were reporters at trial writing articles a number of days, but that only told you part of the story. And part of what we can also do is help raise these bigger questions. Why is it that it takes women so long to come forward? What systems do we have in place to enable women to feel safe coming forward? How much does power and wealth play into the way the justice system goes after cases like this? And so I think there’s a lot of bigger questions that you can see in context in a documentary that you might not understand or see [otherwise]. But beyond that, I think there are really unique accounts that we have from individuals that were not necessarily in the public domain that have not been out there that help you understand people’s relationships with the brothers, the kind of power that they wielded and so much more.
Was the process of finding subjects for this project simple or complex?
Look, I don’t think anyone who’s done a documentary would ever tell you that it’s an easy thing. Certainly not documentaries that investigate people who are powerful, but I think this one was definitely one of the harder ones. There was a sort of cone of silence around the brothers and people who knew them and a lot of fear still from a lot of the women who, while they had come forward, not a lot of them wanted to actually share that publicly. Even if you look at the trial, a number of women testified under a pseudonym. They wanted to testify, but they didn’t want their name plastered all over the Internet. And I can understand that, right? So this was a really difficult story to get people to speak publicly and it took a lot of fits and starts and there were people that wanted to and then didn’t want to. And that’s part of the process. But I do think in the end, we were able to find people across the eras and in different facets of the brothers’ lives to, at least I hope, tell a fulsome account of both what happened and our best understanding of how some of this may have happened.
What surprised you most as you were working on this documentary?
There’s always a lot of surprises along the way, and you get to a point where you almost can’t remember what was surprising anymore. But I think one thing I keep coming back to was the way in which the brothers committed so much to writing, so much about the way that they thought about women and the way that they, in their own words, hunted women, preyed on women, and thought of women as something where you could get your return on investment, almost like property. That kind of language is sort of searing. And while we may never understand why people commit sexual assault or exactly what leads to any particular situation, there was clearly this mentality that women were less than, and that they were pretty brazen in how they talked about women, at least among their friends, quite openly. I mean, even messages that never made it in the doc, I still remember.
Oh really?
There’s this one that was at trial. I mean, I don’t know, it’s all really inappropriate and uncomfortable to say, but there was an exchange with this one woman where she texts Oren and she says, “I woke up with a dick inside of me. That’s not okay.” And he’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” And then she’s like, “You have to ask consent before you do that.” And he says, “I used my fingers first.” I mean, I can’t forget that one, and that was part of the evidence at trial. So I think it really was a lot of those messages that stood out.
It seems like an interesting challenge as a filmmaker to be in the trial and be able to witness that, but not be able to put it on camera. So how did you look to convey what you saw and witnessed through the film?
Yeah, that was an incredible challenge. A lot of documentaries, especially ones in certain states, you have the footage, you have the testimony. We had transcripts, we had court sketches, and then we did obviously have an interview with Lindsey who had testified at trial and journalists who were there. I remember the first cutdown we did of the trial was outrageously long because we’re like, “There were so many things.” But in trying to help people understand what happened at trial, we’re not prosecutors putting on evidence, we’re trying to give you the essence of what happened and not every single detail. And so part of that was laying out the patterns, laying out some of the messages, laying out some of the accounts, laying out videos.
The thing about rape and sexual assault is, not always, but more often than not, it’s not like there are witnesses. There’s not someone who saw the bloody knife in a murder, right? And oftentimes they’re very difficult cases because it’s him and it’s her. But in this one instance, there was a woman who didn’t even remember what had happened to her. She had been 17 at the time, and she testified at trial that they seemed to have found her because they found this video on one of the brother’s hard drives. And it was a video in which she was clearly intoxicated, not just with alcohol, but drugs, and Oren engaging in various sex acts and recording it, which resulted in a charge of sexual exploitation of a minor because she was 17 at the time. And so the public never saw that, which thank God, we don’t need to see that, but those 12 jurors had to watch that seven-minute video. And for those seven minutes, it was like a ghost town. It was silent. I think that silence speaks volumes to the intensity of what they were watching.
It’s horrible. Were there any parts of the story that you were unable to crack in time to deliver this documentary?
One of the things that a lot of people raised was the brothers had friends around them, there were allegations involving the brothers and sometimes a friend, and nobody else was charged with a crime, so what happens to those people is there liability, there’s a lot that remains uncertain about all of those things. But look, with any story, there’s always questions, there’s always things that you wish you could answer and sometimes your job is to lay out the best that you can and raise those questions and hopefully that provokes more from other people.
Beyond the specifics of this story, is there any larger message that you hope the series leaves viewers with?
Yeah absolutely, and thank you for that question. I think sometimes the timing gods work in your favor here, which is to say that I think we always felt going into this story that as a society, even in the wake of #MeToo, that we had not really reckoned with these questions of what is appropriate behavior? What is predatory? How do we make women feel safe coming forward with sexual assault? And what is the appropriate adjudication and justice for that kind of behavior? We’ve seen really in the last week that these are very live question in our public dialogue and with young people, when you look at all of the conversations around the Jane Doe from Cornell, there are—again, these are different cases — but there are certain themes. Themes about does a woman realize it’s sexual assault right away? In the case of Jane Doe it took her weeks to come to that realization. In the case of some of these women, it took years. The guys at the fraternity said everything that happened, it was consensual. That was at the core of the brothers’ argument — they were playboys, they were not predators. Yes, they had a lot of sex, but that was consensual. And so these are questions that I think we are still reckoning with and that I hope in telling these stories we continue to ask ourselves what should be okay? And try to continue to come to places where more women can feel safe to come forward. I think a big reason people in general participated but especially the women participated was that, I think someone said, “I just hope this never happens again.” They wanted people to learn. And look, we don’t learn from everybody’s experiences perfectly but if somebody can, then I think hopefully we’ve done something. So certainly I think this is a microcosm for a lot of questions about sexual assault, about the way power functions, about the justice system, that we can all learn from, I hope, and go through that journey.
Anything else you want to add?
The one thing I will just throw out here and this might be a little wonky but I think is really important here is the reason why these women were even able to file these civil lawsuits, it took two women to snowball into these floodgates of dozens of women, but that only happened because there was a special law in New York called the Adult Survivors Act which you no doubt know about, but it had a time window to allow women to come forward with just civil claims that were outside the statue of limitations. That doesn’t exist anymore. And in most states, there are time windows on sexual assault, on when a survivor of sexual assault can come forward and can actually lead to some sort of criminal case. So I think there’s a lot of questions around the system we have today and whether it is designed to, what we know from research is the reality of when people come forward or how people come forward. Which is often not right away and often can take years. So I think there are real questions about whether any of those systems will be reconfigured or repealed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.