Michael Teper

"Anything of Value" I knew Oren Alexander. When I lived in Miami Beach (2021-2024), he was a neighbor of mine on Flamingo Drive. We were both avid freedivers and spearfishermen, and we had several friends in common. I invited him, once, to my fishing compound in the Bahamas for a spearfishing trip. While he was there, he acted inappropriately around a member of my crew. After that, I didn't socialize with him anymore. So I have no trouble believing that he has done awful things to women. On October 27, a federal judge sentenced Oren, his twin Alon and their brother Tal to 30 years each. Oren and Alon still face sexual battery charges in Florida, with a hearing set for November 19. I hope the State of Florida proves its case. If he is convicted, I hope he never gets out of jail. But I have serious concerns about the ‘sex trafficking’ law that put Oren and his brothers in federal prison. Let me explain why. The federal sex-trafficking statute is written so broadly that it will inevitably be used against wealthy men who are innocent. In fact, it can even be used against men who had no knowledge of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Under New York law, forcible rape, or rape of a woman too drugged to resist, is rape in the first degree: 5 to 25 years, and prosecutors can bring the charge at any time – there’s no statute of limitations. A man who commits that crime against more than one woman is guilty of predatory sexual assault, which carries a maximum of life in prison. Florida treats sexual battery on a helpless victim as a first-degree felony: up to 30 years per count. My point? There are already draconian punishments for sexually assaulting women – as there should be. But the Alexanders' lead charge was not rape. It was sex trafficking. So if the Alexanders drugged and raped women, why did the government reach for a law written to catch pimps? Let me show you exactly why: money. Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000 to go after people who sell other people for sex. The crime at the center of the law is trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. It requires what Congress called a commercial sex act. Congress defined that term in only 18 words: "any sex act, on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person." “Anything” is a standard that has no practical limitation. And that means anything you do for a woman could, in the hands of an ambitious prosecutor or a plaintiff’s bar attorney, be construed as a crime. Giving “anything” in connection with a sexual act is now a crime. In the Alexander case, prosecutors argued that the free flights, the Hamptons houses and the parties were the "thing of value." Before trial, Judge Valerie Caproni ruled that the defense argument that there was "no cash for sex" was "irrelevant." And the federal appeals court that covers New York has held that "anything of value" need not involve money at all. Again, this isn’t about the Alexanders. This is about how the law could be used to extort wealthy men who are innocent of wrongdoing. A man who buys a woman dinner has given her a thing of value. Whether the sex happened "on account of" it, and whether force or fraud was used, can come down to her word against his. As we’ve seen from the recent events at M.I.T., women sometimes lie about what happens in their intimate relationships. They do so for all kinds of reasons – but certainly enormous cash judgement awards is one benefit that could inspire false accusations. And here’s the part that most people don’t understand. Many of these claims start with demands for cash, not demands for justice. In 2003, Congress gave “trafficking victims” the right to sue in federal court for damages and attorneys' fees. Few victims used it. Then, in 2008, Congress widened the door. Under the law we have now, a victim can sue not only the trafficker but also "whoever knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture" that the defendant "knew or should have known" was trafficking. The statute defines a venture as any two or more people "associated in fact." Two years earlier, Congress had abolished the criminal statute of limitations for sex trafficking. Thus, an indictment can now come at any time, for conduct decades old. Now read those changes the way a plaintiffs' lawyer reads them. Ask one question: who has the money? In the Epstein litigation, the answer was the banks. JPMorgan (JPM) held his accounts from 1998 to 2013. And paid $290 million to settle claims that it benefited from his trafficking. The court awarded the women's lawyers 30%: $87 million. Deutsche Bank (DB) paid $75 million. In March, Bank of America (BAC) agreed to pay $72.5 million. None of the banks admitted wrongdoing. And it is hard to imagine how the banks gained from trafficking women. Yet, each paid anyway. And whose money was it? It was their shareholders’ money. The law has become a way of gaining assets from people who had nothing to do with these crimes. The Alexander case reached past the brothers too. By the time of trial, they faced at least 24 civil suits. One names the brokerage where Oren and Tal worked for a decade, Douglas Elliman (DOUG), along with its former chairman Howard Lorber and the brothers' parents. It accuses Lorber of providing "money, resources and corporate cover." Lorber says his relationship with the brothers was purely business and that he knew nothing until the press reports. A federal trafficking indictment can turn anyone who did business with a defendant into a possible member of the "venture." Lorber lost his job. He’s about to lose his fortune. Is this fair? And… when the courts open an unlimited opportunity to extort wealthy people, what will inevitably happen next? Thousands of false claims. In October 2024, a Houston lawyer named Tony Buzbee held a press conference announcing 120 people who accused Sean Combs of sexual misdeeds. One woman said Combs and Jay-Z raped her when she was 13. Before naming Jay-Z in court, Buzbee sent him a private "mediation demand." Jay-Z refused. The accusation became public. In February 2025, the woman dropped her lawsuit permanently. In a sworn declaration dated September 24, she said she had "never met Mr. Carter," that her claims against him were false, and that Buzbee's team paid her $1,000 before her television interview. Jay-Z sued Buzbee for extortion in California. He lost! The appeals court found no evidence that Buzbee knew the accusation was false (!). It also ruled that Jay-Z could not establish extortion merely because the letters threatened litigation, public exposure or reports to the authorities (!) Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, was sued in 2023 by a woman who said he raped her at Epstein's townhouse when she was 16. Black said he had never met her. This April, a federal judge sanctioned her for falsifying sonogram images in the journals she offered as evidence, and sanctioned her former lawyer, who the judge found had "lied repeatedly" to the court. This month, the case was dismissed with prejudice. Those men had one advantage: the money to fight. Jay-Z spent two years and is still in court. Black spent three. Neither faced a federal indictment. Now imagine the same accusation, with the same falsified evidence, arriving as a sex-trafficking charge that carries 15 years to life. Imagine it arriving 25 years after the weekend in question, when the receipts, the texts and the witnesses are gone. The statute allows both. The richer the man, and the richer his friends and employers, the more an accusation against him is worth. You don't have to be a rapist to end up on the wrong side of this. If you are rich, you need only a date and an accuser. Buy a woman dinner, fly her to the Hamptons, and you have supplied the "thing of value." Her lawyer needs only to allege fraud. And if she is lying, as the Jay-Z accuser now says she was, ask yourself what the statute offers you. It awards attorneys' fees to the victim who wins. It awards nothing to the man who was falsely accused. I expect that within the next decade, a wealthy American man will go to federal prison as a sex trafficker on an accusation that later collapses. The statute's 18-word definition virtually guarantees it.