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Alexander brothers found guilty on all counts. Wealthy siblings face potential life terms for a decade of rapes.

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A trio of wealthy brothers was found guilty of federal sex-trafficking charges in Manhattan on Monday in a grand-slam verdict convicting them of each count they faced in a 10-count indictment.

The jury deliberated for three days before announcing a verdict for former luxury real estate brokers Tal Alexander, 39, and Oren Alexander, 38, as well as for Oren’s twin, Alon Alexander, a former executive in his parents’ private security firm.

The three brothers sat at the defense tables, shaking their heads as the verdict was read. Sentencing was set for August 6 for each defendant.

Any sex trafficking conviction, including for the top count of sex-trafficking conspiracy, carries a potential maximum sentence of life in prison.

The verdict follows a five-week trial in which prosecutors called 10 rape accusers to testify, none of whom had reported their incidents to police.

The women gave compelling, sometimes tearful testimony about attacks in luxe locations in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Aspen, and Tel Aviv stretching back to 2008, when the brothers were in their early 20s.

They said the brothers used false promises of “afterparties” or fun weekend getaways to lure them into the worst experiences of their lives — being sexually violated through violence or a drugged drink.

Two women told jurors that they were drugged and then attacked by two of the brothers at the same time.

One said the twins took turns raping her inside a cruise ship cabin in 2012. The other said she was attacked by Tal and Alon Alexander and two other men in the bedroom of a Southampton vacation home in 2009, when she was 16 years old.

“I was wondering why they hated me,” the woman recalled thinking as she fell in and out of consciousness on a bed.

All ten women told jurors that in the hours and days after they were attacked, shame and fear kept them from telling anyone but their closest friends.

Only when they saw that the brothers were being sued and arrested — over allegations like their own — did they find the courage to step forward, the women testified.

“Because this feels bigger than me,” one accuser explained of coming forward now, fourteen years after she said she was drugged and raped at age 20 after a party at the Manhattan penthouse of actor Zac Efron.

“I’m 34 years old now, and I know who I am,” another accuser explained of coming forward. “And I wanted someone to be held accountable for what happened to me.”

Defense lawyers maintained that any sex was consensual and that the accusations were the product of regret and faulty memories.

They pointed to inconsistencies about timing and the women’s failure to take drug tests or report the incidents to law enforcement, and noted that many of the women communicated with the brothers

The defense also challenged whether the accounts the women described added up to sex trafficking, the charge behind half the counts in the ten-count indictment.

To convict on sex trafficking, jurors needed to find that the brothers used force, fraud, or coercion — including by secretly drugging drinks — to cause a commercial sex act, defined as sex in return for something of value.

Prosecutors said that the “something of value” was the brothers’ promise of a beach weekend at a Hamptons mansion, or an invite to go from a club to a hotel room for a fun “after-party.”

Defense lawyers countered that what was described in testimony was not sex trafficking because, in their view, there was no quid-pro-quo relationship proven between the lure — the “something of value” — and the alleged sex.

“The commerce — the thing of value — must be a result of the sex,” argued Marc Agnifilo, defense attorney for Oren Alexander.

In July, Agnifilo won a partial acquittal in another high-profile Manhattan sex trafficking case, that of entertainment and lifestyle entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs.

In that trial, Agnifilo similarly argued that the federal sex-trafficking statute was being stretched beyond its original purpose of protecting sex workers.

Combs was also acquitted of racketeering; he was convicted of transporting for purposes of prostitution and is serving a four-year prison term.




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Parents showed up to face Mark Zuckerberg as he took the stand in a social media addiction trial

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Lori Schott, a mother from rural Colorado, said she stared down Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as he walked into court in Los Angeles on Wednesday to testify in a landmark trial regarding social media addiction.

Schott lost her 18-year-old daughter, Annalee, to suicide in 2020. She believes the content Annalee saw on social media platforms “destroyed” her mental health.

“I made eye contact with him for quite a long time,” Schott said of Zuckerberg. “I was not backing down.”

Schott is not a plaintiff in the case where Zuckerberg testified on Wednesday, but is among more than 2,000 individuals who have similar personal injury lawsuits pending regarding social media addiction and harm.

The case underway in Los Angeles centers on a 20-year-old woman, identified by the initials KGM, who says her use of social media throughout her childhood negatively affected her mental health, contributing to depression and suicidal thoughts. It is considered a bellwether trial that could indicate how other similar lawsuits related to social media harm, like Schott’s, could play out.


LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 18: Lori Schott , holds a picture of her daughter Annalee who died by suicide after consuming social media content on depression, anxiety and suicide, stands outside the Los Angeles Superior Court at United States Court House on February 18, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. A 20-year-old California woman sued Meta and YouTube accusing them of building addictive platforms causing harm to children. Schmitt is not part of this case but has a separate social media case and came to advocate and raise awareness. (Photo by Jill Connelly/Getty Images)

Lori Schott, a mother from rural Colorado, lost her 18-year-old daughter, Annalee, to suicide in 2020.

Jill Connelly/Getty Images



Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, was named as a defendant alongside Google-owned YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. TikTok and Snapchat both settled the lawsuit out of court.

Last month, Meta warned investors that its mounting legal battles over youth safety could “significantly impact” its 2026 financial results. Attorneys for more than 100,000 individual arbitration claimants have “sent mass arbitration demands relating to ‘social media addiction'” since late 2024, the company said in a 2026 10-K, which warned that potential damages in certain cases could reach into the “high tens of billions of dollars.”

In a statement, Stephanie Otway, a Meta spokesperson, said: “We strongly disagree with these allegations and are confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” Otway highlighted changes the company has made over the past decade, including Teen Accounts, which give parents tools to manage their teens’ accounts.

Google declined to comment. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. A Snapchat spokesperson said in a statement: “The Parties are pleased to have been able to resolve this matter in an amicable manner.”

On Wednesday, parents showed up hours before the courthouse opened in hopes of getting a seat inside. Many of them had personal stories about how they believed social media use harmed their children.


Parents and family members, including some plaintiffs in the case, hold hands as they pose together before entering the Los Angeles Superior Court for the social media trial tasked to determine whether social media giants deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive to children, in Los Angeles, on February 18, 2026. Meta CEO and Chairman Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify Wednesday. (Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images)

Parents gathered outside the Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday.

Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images



“We face a lot of stigma from people telling us we’re bad parents,” said Amy Neville, another parent who attended to show her support. She said that once the evidence comes out in the trial, she believes “the tide will turn, and the general public will be on board with us.”

“It is by design that social media is tearing their family apart,” Neville said.

On the stand, Zuckerberg said that teens represent less than 1% of Meta’s ad revenue and that most teens don’t have disposable income, so it’s not especially valuable to advertisers to reach them.

Zuckerberg said it’s in Meta’s best interest to create a platform that inspires people and makes them want to stick around for the long term.

“If people aren’t happy with a service, eventually over time they’ll stop using it and use something better,” he said.

Sarah Gardner said that regardless of the outcome of the trial, she hopes it raises awareness about how the social media companies, and specifically Zuckerberg, have been operating. Gardner is the CEO of the Heat Initiative, an advocacy group that pressures Big Tech companies to make their platforms safer for kids. She was at the courthouse with the parents who believe they have been affected.

Gardner said she’s hopeful the trial will empower more people to say, “I don’t want to be on Instagram anymore.”




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Internal emails show what happens inside Nvidia when its products face backlash

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An internal Nvidia email chain revealed how senior executives at the chip giant — including founder and CEO Jensen Huang — mobilized in response to customer criticism of a key product launch late last year.

The thread offers a glimpse into how the company responds to public backlash as it expands products designed for individual developers and researchers.

The thread, which Business Insider has seen, centered on the launch of DGX Spark, a desktop AI system designed for developers and researchers to build AI products and work on apps for data science, medicine, and other fields.

While much of Nvidia’s business targets data center customers, Huang underscored Spark’s significance in the thread, calling it the “ultimate developer’s platform — out of the box easy to run all NVIDIA.”

Spark drew criticism soon after its launch, with some citing software stability and performance issues, which garnered coverage in other tech outlets.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

Anshel Sag, a Moor Insights & Strategy analyst who has tracked Nvidia launches for 15 years and was an early DGX Spark tester, said the company’s long experience releasing graphics cards in the gaming industry — where products are routinely scrutinized — has made it adept at handling public feedback, with Huang typically keeping a close eye on new releases.

In recent years, the company has become even more reactive, Sag said, due to increased internal resources and “sensitivity about the stock price and how negative sentiment can draw that down.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang steps into the fray

In the fall of last year, AstraZeneca executive director Justin Johnson wrote in a LinkedIn post that while the DGX Spark met performance and speed claims, the software experience was buggy and unstable.

After an Nvidia executive shared Johnson’s post in an internal email thread, Huang entered the fray.

“Jump on x and say you will fix,” he wrote.


A founder's edition of the DGX Spark on display at a Paris tech show last June.

A founder’s edition of the DGX Spark on display at a Paris tech show last June.

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Subsequently, an Nvidia engineer replied that the company had reached out to Johnson to resolve most of the issues, which were related to a version mismatch of CUDA, Nvidia’s software that allows developers to build AI apps powered by its GPUs.

Johnson responded that he appreciated the outreach and was exploring setting up DGX Spark at the pharmaceutical company, the chain said.

Nvidia staffers ramp up responses

Following Johnson’s criticism, Nvidia staffers saw other unfavorable responses online and set up a social listening campaign to flag complaints from other influential figures, as well as discussions on Nvidia forums and Reddit, the emails said.

Staffers tracked complaints and engaged directly with key critics who raised concerns about DGX Spark’s performance, heating issues, and pricing.

Another incident involved the researcher Christopher Kouzios, who wrote on LinkedIn that he’d purchased DGX Spark to conduct medical research after his daughter died from a rare brain tumor, with the goal of studying cancer risk in his sons.

Kouzios said software incompatibility had rendered the system unusable and that he’d only received an automated acknowledgment 38 hours after filing a support ticket.

After an Nvidia executive flagged the post, team members said they were fixing the bug, according to the emails. The executive later circulated an updated post in which Kouzios lauded Nvidia’s customer support.

“While the situation initially frustrated me, Nvidia’s response time was exceptional,” Kouzios told Business Insider. “In more than 33 years working with large technology companies, I have never seen an organization respond that quickly to public technical feedback.”

It’s often standard for hardware to ship without fully finished software, Sag said, adding that Nvidia tends to be more “high-touch” than other tech companies in fielding complaints — an approach that flows down from an exceptionally “hands-on” CEO.

Nvidia has previously faced some launch hiccups and early criticism for new products, such as its Blackwell rollout, which encountered manufacturing challenges.

While a CEO’s involvement is notable and Nvidia’s backchannel efforts appeared to placate critics, such an approach isn’t without risks, another analyst said.

“C-suite engagement during product controversies has become more common in tech, particularly for founder-led companies,” said Kate Holterhoff, a senior industry analyst at RedMonk. “It can signal authenticity and accountability, but it also carries reputational risk if the response is perceived as defensive or dismissive.”

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