Tal Alexander, whose portfolio of luxury real estate transactions includes some of New York and Miami’s most eye-popping sales, is stepping down from the high-end brokerage he co-founded in the wake of mounting allegations of sexual assault.
His exit from Official comes two weeks after Oren Alexander, his younger brother, also stepped down in the face of assault allegations.
The decision to part ways with Tal, said Nicole Oge, one of Official’s five co-founders, was mutual, as it also was with Oren.
“I think Tal and Oren understand that their priority is focusing on the task at hand for them, which is different from mine. Mine is focused on our business,” she said.
Earlier this month, two women alleged that Oren sexually assaulted them more than a decade ago. Oren’s identical twin brother, Alon, an executive in a private security firm, is also named as a defendant in both of those complaints.
In one lawsuit, a woman says she was assaulted at a party mansion in the Hamptons. In another complaint, a woman says she was drugged and then assaulted in Manhattan. In a third lawsuit filed last week, a woman says that she was sexually assaulted by Tal and Alon, and that Oren watched.
The brothers, through their lawyers, deny all of the allegations in all three suits.
Oren, 36, stepped down from Official days after those complaints surfaced, but Tal, 37, stayed on at the brokerage, as many peers within the New York real estate industry questioned whether Official could withstand the negative publicity and the loss of two co-founders.
“Given the salacious nature of this false allegation and impact on Official, Tal and his partners have decided he will take a leave from the company to focus fully on clearing his name,” wrote Milton Williams and Deanna Paul, who are representing Tal through Walden Macht & Haran LLP, in an emailed statement.
Isabelle Kirshner, a lawyer for Oren and Alon Alexander, last week defended the brothers and described the complaints as money grabs in a statement to The New York Times.
“It is disappointing [but not surprising] that plaintiffs’ counsel is resorting to their same generic playbook — file similarly fantastical boilerplate claims against supposedly deep-pocketed individuals without regard to the specific facts or truth,” she said in an email.
When the fresh allegation that includes Tal surfaced, she added, “We have reviewed the allegations contained in the complaint and deny them, as they are pure fiction.”
On Tuesday, lawyers for Tal moved the third case to federal court. In the filing, they note that Tal is a resident of Florida, as are Oren and Alon, while the plaintiff is a resident of New York.
Tal and Oren made a name for themselves in big-money real estate and were as common a fixture on lists of top real estate agents as they were in splashy tabloid dispatches about New York and Miami nightlife. The duo spent more than a decade at the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman, where they led a team of high-producing agents called the Alexander Team.
Together, the brothers helped to broker the billionaire Ken Griffin’s record-setting 2019 purchase of a penthouse at 220 Central Park South, a deal closed for nearly $240 million. In 2021, one year before they left Elliman to launch their own brokerage, the Alexander Team reported more than $1.8 billion in sales.
They left Elliman to create Official in 2022.
Ms. Oge, in a call on Tuesday, said her brokerage remained in a strong financial position.
“Official is not an individual or a team. It’s a collective of exceptional professionals around the country who want to get back to the business that they love and that they’re so good at,” she said.
The brokerage, she added, “is being conflated with two individuals understandably very well known in our industry. But that conflation continues to do an extraordinary disservice to the 90-plus other individuals, coast to coast, who are transacting at the highest level day in and day out.”
