Arizonas-criminal-case-against-Kalshi-was-halted-by-a-federal.jpeg

Arizona’s criminal case against Kalshi was halted by a federal judge after the Trump administration stepped in

by with No Comment Xpandfy

A judge on Friday ordered Arizona’s attorney general to temporarily pause its criminal case against Kalshi, handing a win to the Trump administration in its effort to stop states from regulating prediction markets.

Federal Judge Michael Liburdi’s decision to back the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the case came at the end of a hectic week of arguments in which a lawyer for the federal regulator said a state criminal case would be a “flawed” way to settle hotly contested questions about whether prediction markets can list sports, politics, and other controversial markets.

State prosecutors filed 20 charges of illegal betting and election betting against Kalshi last month. The charges, all misdemeanors, characterize Kalshi’s contracts as the kind of bets that are either prohibited under Arizona law or require a state gambling license. The criminal case also had the effect of halting a federal challenge that Kalshi had filed to Arizona’s regulatory power.

Then the CFTC stepped in, suing Arizona and two other states earlier this month. The state on Friday argued that Congress never meant to let swaps that bear many similarities to sports bets take place on federally regulated exchanges. Liburdi issued an order that will prevent Arizona from moving forward with a criminal arraignment of Kalshi that had been scheduled for Monday.

“I will enter a temporary restraining order,” the judge said, granting the CFTC’s request to halt the state’s prosecution. He didn’t immediately state what the specific provisions of the order would be, but lawyers for the attorney general agreed to show up to criminal court first thing Monday and ask for their case against Kalshi to be paused.

Robert J. DeNault, a senior lawyer at Kalshi, hailed the decision on X, calling it “a step in the right direction.”

The CFTC’s leader, Michael Selig, has posted videos and made the rounds of podcasts in recent weeks to defend his agency’s authority to regulate prediction markets. The Trump administration has generally applied a light regulatory touch on the industry.

“Arizona’s decision to weaponize state criminal law against companies that comply with federal law sets a dangerous precedent, and the court’s order today sends a clear message that intimidation is not an acceptable tactic to circumvent federal law,” Selig said in a statement after the ruling.

Prediction markets like PredictIt, Kalshi, and Polymarket have existed for years, but they experienced a surge in usage around the 2024 election.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has become a paid advisor to Kalshi, and an investment firm he works for invested in Polymarket. Kalshi also began hosting sports-related markets, which it had not done during the Biden administration.

Federal law prohibits commodities markets related to things like war, assassination, and “gaming,” but the specific meanings of those terms have been debated in court.

Many states, but especially those where the traditional gambling industry holds sway, like Nevada and New Jersey, have argued that the contracts on prediction markets relating to sports, and sometimes politics, are illegal. Some members of Congress have also proposed new laws to regulate prediction markets.




Source link

Natalie Musumeci's face on a gray background

‘Million Dollar Listing’ broker sues Oren Alexander as verdict looms in his criminal case

by with No Comment Xpandfy

“Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” star Tracy Tutor has sued Oren Alexander, accusing him of sexual assault as the ex-high-end real estate broker and his brothers await a verdict in their criminal sex trafficking trial.

Tutor, a real estate broker in California and Texas who has been featured on six seasons of the Bravo real estate TV show, alleged in a lawsuit filed Thursday in New York federal court that she is a victim of Alexander’s “ruthless abuse of women.”

In the court papers, Tutor accused Alexander, then a top broker at Douglas Elliman, of enticing her to attend a 2014 recruiting event in New York and sexually assaulting and drugging her.

“Ms. Tutor did not know that she would cross paths that night with Oren Alexander, a man with a history of slipping drugs into women’s drinks so that he could sexually assault them,” Tutor’s lawsuit says. “Tragically, Oren Alexander did exactly that.”

Jason Goldman, an attorney representing Alexander in civil litigation, slammed Tutor’s lawsuit, calling it “salacious and demonstrably false” in a statement.

Goldman said Tutor and her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, timed the filing of the lawsuit “for maximum media impact, “choosing the eve of jury deliberations in the federal trial despite the fact that the allegations are more than a decade old and have already been aired publicly.”

“This appears to be nothing more than a transparent attempt to create headlines and taint the proceedings at a critical moment,” Goldman said. “We are confident the jury will focus on the evidence presented in court, not on opportunistic litigation tactics.”


Oren Alexander.

Oren Alexander faces up to life behind bars.

Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images



Kaplan, Tutor’s attorney who previously represented E. Jean Carroll in her sexual abuse and defamation cases against President Donald Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.

Alexander, his brother Tal Alexander — also a former luxury real estate broker — and Oren’s twin, Alon Alexander, are standing trial in Manhattan federal court on sex trafficking and other sex crime charges.

A six-man, six-woman jury began deliberations Thursday, after five weeks of testimony in the criminal trial. Prosecutors have alleged that the brothers raped and drugged dozens of women and girls in a more than decadelong scheme.

The Alexander brothers face up to life behind bars. They have vehemently denied the federal charges against them, as well as other allegations.

Tutor, who now works for the real estate firm Compass, is one of a slew of women who have filed civil lawsuits against the Alexander brothers.

Her lawsuit says that in 2014, Douglas Elliman paid for Tutor to fly from Los Angeles to New York for a networking reception to meet the company’s top executives and agents.

“At the dinner after the reception, Ms. Tutor accepted a drink from someone, which she did not order, and blacked out not long afterwards,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit alleges that a friend of Tutor’s, identified as Cory Weiss, found Tutor in a men’s restroom stall with Oren Alexander kissing her with his shirt open, and Tutor acting “out of her mind.”

Oren Alexander, the lawsuit says, was “touching her in intimate areas for his own sexual gratification.”

“Mr. Weiss proceeded to get into a heated argument with Oren and eventually managed to extricate Ms. Tutor from the restroom,” the lawsuit says, adding that Weiss decided to leave the dinner, but asked that someone else make sure Tutor got back to her hotel safely.

“Unfortunately, she did not,” the lawsuit says. “For more than a decade since that night, Ms. Tutor believed that she had woken up the next morning in her own hotel room.”

“Several critical memories returned” to Tutor following 2024 lawsuits against the Alexanders, accusing them of rape, her lawsuit says.

Tutor spoke out about her 2014 allegations to The New York Times in July 2024. Her lawsuit says that she now “recalls that she woke up in someone else’s hotel room the next morning, naked and alone.”

The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and an unspecified amount in damages.




Source link