Before She Testified Against the Alexander Brothers, She Was Publicly Claiming to Predict the Future

Dreams, squirrels, and a federal conviction: the story of a witness the jury never fully understood.

Note: “Isa Brooks” is the court-assigned pseudonym used during trial proceedings. Her real name remains sealed and is not used here.

Before examining the legal elements of the charge against Tal and Alon Alexander, it is worth asking a foundational question: how seriously should the jury have taken the testimony of the government’s central witness? The answer is complicated by something the jury was never permitted to hear. Isa Brooks has publicly identified herself as someone who experiences what researchers call “anomalous experiences.” A website dedicated to that subject features an entry about her with the following description: “At 19 and in college, [Isa] would have an anomalous experience that would have a profound affect on her life ever since.” The jury heard none of this.

What the jury also did not hear is that Brooks had, in a video recorded several years prior to the trial, publicly described a pattern of precognitive dreams she believed predicted real-world events. She detailed her involvement in the “dreaming community” and described conducting research on dreams at the University of California Santa Cruz and USC. In her own words:

"So very interested in dreaming. One of the most interesting dream experiences that I've had were kind of pre-cognitive dreams, kind of unexplainable pre-cognitive dreams... Two specific kind of things that stood out to me... I had a dream one night that I saw on the racks, I saw this Hello Kitty t-shirt, just randomly Hello Kitty... The next day, totally out of the blue, I'd never seen this t-shirt before to my knowledge. My friend was wearing a Hello Kitty t-shirt, the same one that I'd seen in my dream. Another example of this happening was I had a dream that my friend got bit by a squirrel, random, but the next day my friend actually did get bit by a squirrel and had to go to the hospital and get tetanus shots and things like that... So, you know, oftentimes dreams aren't necessarily predictive, but these are examples where they were."

To be clear: this is a witness who claims she can predict, through her dreams, when a friend is going to be bitten by a squirrel. She described living at Esalen in Big Sur, a well-known center for human potential and consciousness research, during a period of particularly vivid dreaming.

While she couched these claims by saying dreams are not always predictive, the fact remains that she publicly presented herself as someone who experiences unexplainable, prophetic visions, and who has been formally featured on a platform devoted to “anomalous” and “extraordinary” experiences. None of this background was before the jury. The defense never had the opportunity to challenge her credibility on these grounds. The jury was asked to convict two men largely on the basis of a witness whose memory of the critical events was admittedly “foggy,” missing entire windows of time, and whose broader worldview includes a belief in prophetic dreaming and anomalous perception. That context matters.

A close examination of the trial transcripts reveals a narrative that fractures under the weight of its own contradictions. The government charged Tal and Alon Alexander with the sex trafficking of a minor, specifically alleging that they recruited, enticed, harbored, or transported Brooks for the purpose of causing her to engage in a commercial sex act. To secure a conviction, the prosecution had to prove every element of this charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, when the testimony is analyzed step by step against the legal requirements, the story Brooks tells of Memorial Day weekend in 2009 simply does not align with the documented reality of her actions, her communications, or the government’s own corroborating evidence.

The first element the government had to prove was that the defendants knowingly recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, provided, obtained, or maintained Brooks. The prosecution argued that the defendants used a nightclub promoter named Matt Lipman to lure girls like Brooks to their rented Hamptons house. However, the trial record paints a very different picture of how Brooks arrived in the Hamptons.

In the spring of 2009, Brooks was a sixteen-year-old senior at an expensive boarding school in Westchester. Memorial Day weekend was approaching, and with it, her senior prom. She also had an invitation to a weekend party at a friend’s lake house in New Hampshire. She skipped both. Instead, she chose to go to the Hamptons.

She was not lured there by Tal or Alon Alexander. She testified herself that she had never met them before that weekend. She was invited by Matt Lipman, a nightclub promoter in his mid-twenties whom she had hung out with five to ten times previously. She knew him. She liked him. She had used a fake ID to go to 21-and-over clubs with him in Manhattan. When he texted her about a party bus to a rented house in the Hamptons, she was excited. She packed a bag for three nights, brought her best friend Arielle, and updated her Facebook status to let everyone know she was heading to the “hamptonsssss.” This was not a trafficking victim being lured into a trap; this was a high school senior skipping prom to party with an older promoter she had a crush on.

The events of Friday night further dismantle the prosecution’s theory of harboring or coercion. When the party bus arrived in the Hamptons, it went straight to a nightclub called Pink Elephant. Brooks spent the night hanging out with Lipman. When it was time to go to the house, she did not take the bus with the other guests. She rode separately with Lipman.

At the house, she did not sleep in a guest room with her friend Arielle. She chose to sleep on a cot at the foot of the main bedroom with Lipman. A photograph entered into evidence showed both of them partially undressed. She admitted during cross-examination that her feelings for him were not purely platonic, and the record reflects that she woke up the next morning in an embrace with him, not wanting to get out of bed. She was exactly where she wanted to be, with the person she came to see. The defense rightly pointed out that Lipman was on the lease for the house; he was paying for his share. Hosting a guest who is free to come and go as they please is not harboring.

The fourth element of the charge required the government to prove that the defendants knew Brooks would be caused to engage in a “commercial sex act,” meaning a sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person. The prosecution’s theory relied on the idea that the entire weekend was a setup for commercial sex. But Brooks’s own account of how the encounter began contradicts this entirely.

The alleged assault occurred on Saturday afternoon. The prosecution’s theory was that the defendants drugged Brooks to incapacitate her. But the trial record reveals a critical problem with that theory: it was not Tal or Alon Alexander who gave her the drinks. By her own testimony, every drink she consumed that afternoon was given to her by David Rabello, a separate individual who was renting a share of the house. She testified she had one to two tequila mixed drinks from Rabello, and then took additional swigs straight from a tequila bottle that Rabello was passing around the hot tub. Neither Tal nor Alon Alexander is alleged to have handed her a single drink. The government addressed this by labeling Rabello a “co-conspirator,” but that designation does not change what Brooks herself said: the men she is accusing of trafficking her were not the ones who gave her anything to drink.

The defense further challenged the drugging theory on its face. As they argued in summation, what Brooks described was a sixteen-year-old who drank two tequila mixed drinks, took multiple swigs from a bottle of straight tequila, sat in a hot tub in the sun for approximately an hour, and had not eaten. The “woozy” and “spinny” feeling she described is entirely consistent with being drunk and overheated in a hot tub on a warm afternoon. There was no toxicology report. No medical examination. No evidence of any foreign substance. The government asked the jury to assume she was drugged, but Brooks’s own account of what she consumed and how she felt does not require that conclusion.

Despite feeling unwell, Brooks testified that she started flirting with Tal Alexander by the pool because she thought he was “cute.” She felt “special” when he gave her attention. They went inside, away from the party, and started making out in a bathroom before moving to a bedroom.

By her own admission, everything that happened initially was entirely voluntary. She removed her own shirt. She removed his pants. She engaged in oral sex. She told the government during prep sessions that she “initially liked it” and was excited to be hooking up with him. Then, according to her testimony, Tal said his brother was going to join them. She did not object. She did not say stop. She told investigators her first thought was that the twin was “kind of cute,” and she “went along with it in the beginning.”

If she made a voluntary choice to flirt, kiss, and initiate a sexual encounter because she liked the attention and thought he was cute, the government cannot logically prove that Tal’s purpose from the very beginning was to engage her in a commercial sex act. As the defense argued, what she described was a sexual encounter at a party that she claims later became nonconsensual, not a federal commercial sex crime.

From the moment the brother allegedly entered the room, Brooks’s memory becomes conveniently opaque. She described the rest of the encounter as “foggy” and “blurred.” She claimed her perception of time was off and that she only has flashes of memory. She even admitted there is a “window of time that is missing” entirely. She could not definitively say whether Tal had sex with her while others were in the room. Critically, she testified that when she came to consciousness, she was disoriented because it had gotten dark outside. She had gone inside in the middle of the day, and it was now nighttime.

Perhaps most troubling is her inability to identify her alleged attackers. During the trial, she was shown a photograph and asked to identify the men in it. She pointed to Oren Alexander and identified him as Alon. The government knew she had misidentified him, yet they never asked her to point out Alon Alexander in the courtroom. She has never definitively identified the man she claims assaulted her.

The prosecution attempted to bolster this blurry, incomplete narrative by calling a second witness, Avishan Bodjnoud, a senior UN employee who was also at the house that Memorial Day weekend. The government presented her testimony as corroboration of Brooks’s account. But the two accounts do not corroborate each other; they describe two entirely different events.

Avishan testified that she witnessed an assault at nighttime, outside, in the Jacuzzi. She described sitting in the living room when she saw Tal Alexander dragging a stumbling woman by the wrist through the house toward the pool area, followed by a group of men. She went to the window, and by the light of the Jacuzzi, she says she could see the backs of the brothers and the woman facing them. She heard the woman screaming and asking them to stop.

The problem is that Brooks’s alleged assault happened in the afternoon, inside a bedroom. Brooks herself testified that she went inside in the middle of the day and was shocked to find it dark when she regained consciousness. She was not in a Jacuzzi. She was not outside. And critically, when Avishan sent her very first account to the FBI, before speaking to any agents or prosecutors, she did not write that she saw a rape. She wrote that she could not see, but that she could hear from her room that a woman was in pain. It was only in later accounts, after years of contact with investigators, that her story evolved into a full visual account of watching the assault through a window.

On cross-examination, Avishan was confronted with that original FBI tip. She acknowledged it. She then admitted, under oath: “I still say I did not see the act of sexual intercourse. As I mentioned, it was torso and above.” She repeated this multiple times. The defense made the contradiction explicit in summation: “What Avishan said clear as a bell is that it was nighttime, and Isa’s not there nighttime. Isa is at the club for much of nighttime. And also, the way Isa described her own situation is completely at odds, I suggest to you, to what Avishan said she saw.” Even the government, at a sidebar during Brooks’s cross-examination, acknowledged that Avishan’s incident was “a completely different incident” with “nothing to do with this witness.”

If the assault narrative is murky, Brooks’s behavior immediately afterward is baffling. She testified that she felt “mauled” and was in a state of shock. Yet, she did not call her parents. She did not text a friend for help. She did not lock herself in a room or demand to leave the Hamptons. She had a working cell phone. She could have called a taxi. Instead, she got ready and went out clubbing.

After the club, she did not go back to the house. She went to another man’s house in Sag Harbor. She had met a 25-year-old named Rom, and she went to sleep at his house, on an air mattress, with him and her friend Arielle. The prosecution asks a jury to believe that a traumatized teenager, fresh from a brutal gang rape, decided the best course of action was to go to a nightclub and then sleep at the house of another older man she barely knew.

The digital footprint she left behind is even more damning. On Monday, May 25, the day she left the Hamptons, she posted a status update on Facebook. It did not hint at trauma or a desperate escape. It read: “Had a great weekend in the Hamptons... back in the city. Taking a nap and doing it big for the birthday tonight!” She followed through on that promise. She and Arielle rented a hotel room in the city and went out clubbing to celebrate their joint birthday. The following Sunday, May 31, she posted another Facebook status declaring she had a “damn good weekend.”

It took years for this story to evolve into an allegation of rape. When she first returned to school, she told her friends what happened, but she did not use the word rape. Word spread quickly around the boarding school. She felt judged. People acted like she “wanted it.” Her mother eventually found out through a gossip chain involving another mother. It was only after facing this public shaming and embarrassment that the narrative shifted.

The prosecution built a case on the idea that Tal and Alon Alexander lured a minor across state lines for commercial sex. But the evidence shows a teenager who used a fake ID to party with older men, skipped her prom voluntarily, engaged in consensual sexual activity, went clubbing immediately after the alleged assault, and publicly declared she had a “great weekend.” When the rhetoric is stripped away and the timeline, the Facebook posts, the witness’s own admissions of blurred memory, the misidentification of her alleged attacker, and the irreconcilable contradiction between her account and the government’s own corroborating witness are examined, the story falls apart. The legal elements of sex trafficking simply were not met. And the jury that convicted Tal Alexander never had the full picture of who they were being asked to believe.