By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — The wealthy Alexander brothers used the same tactics of luring, drugging and humiliation to sexually assault numerous women and girls, bragging about their exploits in blog posts with titles that included “It’s not rape if,” a federal prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.

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In a closing argument after four weeks of testimony in the siblings’ federal sex trafficking trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Jones reviewed the often harrowing accounts of 11 women who allege they were sexually assaulted by Alon, Oren or Tal Alexander.

The allegations are corroborated by the “sheer number of victims who testified,” the prosecutor said — women who never have met each other and live different lives, but “have one horrific thing in common: they were raped by these men.”

Far from hiding their activity, the brothers bragged about it in text messages, emailed about sneaking drugs — or “party favors” — onto a cruise ship, recorded at least one assault on video and shared photos of victims, Jones said, calling it “devastating evidence” supporting the charges against them.

“You know this playbook because the defendants did this multiple times,” Jones said, chronicling alleged assaults at Hamptons mansions; New York City apartments; an Aspen, Colorado, ski trip; and a Caribbean cruise. One woman testified that Alon Alexander raped her in 2012, hours after they had met at actor Zac Efron’s Manhattan apartment. Efron was not accused of any wrongdoing.

Oren and Tal Alexander, high-end real estate brokers dubbed “The A Team,” and their brother Alon, an executive at their family’s private security firm, have pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and other charges.

In a closing argument, a lawyer for Alon Alexander said prosecutors conflated the brothers’ “obnoxious” and admittedly inappropriate banter with grave criminal allegations. Alon “should be and is embarrassed” by the language he used — but “talk doesn’t constitute a crime,” defense lawyer Howard Srebnick argued.

The defense’s closing arguments will continue on Wednesday.

FILE – Oren and Tal Alexander speak at a panel at the Rockstars of Real Estate Event in New York., on Sept. 3, 2013. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Invision for DETAILS Magazine/AP Images, File)

The brothers are accused of meeting victims at nightclubs, parties and on dating apps, and recruited others for trips to ritzy locales, paying for flights and lodging at high-end hotels or luxe vacation rentals before drugging and raping them. After witnessing an assault at a Hamptons mansion, one woman pulled out her eyeliner and wrote “RAPIST” on a bedroom door, Jones said.

“A lot of the evidence at this long trial was hard to see and hear,” Jones said. “A lot of it was brutal. That’s because the defendant’s crimes were brutal.”

Jones reminded jurors of a video, played during the trial, of Oren Alexander appearing to rape a drugged 17-year-old in 2009 at the Manhattan apartment he shared with his brothers. Oren recorded the video with his laptop computer — and could be seen adjusting the angle before the alleged assault, Jones said.

“You can see the playbook in action here,” Jones said. “When you saw him pick up her limp legs and climb on top of her lifeless body, you knew what you were seeing.”

On another occasion, Jones said, two of the brothers and two other men raped a 16-year-old boarding school student who had skipped her prom to join them in the Hamptons. A photo of the girl, sleeping topless, was found on one of the brothers’ laptop hard drives, he said.

Now in her 30s, she testified that the assault only ended when she kicked one of the men away. Afterward, she said, Tal Alexander told her: “Don’t be mad at me.”

Another woman, a United Nations intern invited to the Hamptons mansion that weekend, testified that she saw the brothers dragging someone to a hot tub and assaulting her. The victim pleaded with them to stop and they didn’t, Jones said, recounting the intern’s testimony.

“I work for the U.N. and I know what you’re doing to girls in there,” the intern screamed before scrawling the “RAPIST” message, Jones said.

FILE – This photo provided by the Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department shows Alon Alexander, left, and Oren Alexander, both of whom have been charged with sex trafficking. (Miami-Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department via AP, File)

The prosecutor urged jurors to reject defense claims that prosecutors were criminalizing “hookup culture” and that accusers were motivated by shame or by money.

“Now that you’ve seen these women for yourselves, you know how wrong that is,” Jones said, noting that one witness was the daughter of a billionaire. “There’s not been an ounce of shame in this courtroom.”

“What walked into this courtroom was not shame,” Jones added. “It was courage and resolve. It was the truth.”

Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison are set to testify before a Congressional committee Wednesday morning in a hearing focused on allegations of widespread fraud in Minnesota government programs.

The state leaders are expected to answer questions from the Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which ramped up its probe into fraud allegations in Minnesota in recent months after the problem gained national media attention. Fraud eventually served as a pretext for a controversial immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota. The hearing can be watched at 8 a.m. central time at tinyurl.com/28fvensb.

Walz and Ellison, both Democrats, have been blamed by legislative and Congressional Republicans for failing to do enough to stop fraud in federally funded programs. Alleged theft in a pandemic-era children’s meal program and state services funded by Medicaid has run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to federal prosecutors.

A former federal prosecutor estimated that Minnesota government fraud could run into the billions since 2018, though Walz and his administration have dismissed that figure as speculative. While there is no hard evidence of fraud topping $9 billion, as former assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimated in December, the number still figures into GOP messaging on the issue.

“As fraudsters looted billions of taxpayer dollars from Minnesota’s social programs, state lawmakers recently testified that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison ignored repeated warnings and retaliated against state employees who raised concerns,” Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., said in a news release on the hearing. “The American people deserve clear answers about how such widespread fraud was allowed to flourish under their watch.”

Walz’s office previously said it was happy to work with Congress but described the Oversight Committee as having a “track record of holding circus hearings.”

“The governor takes Congress seriously, and his hope is that Congress will take Congress seriously,” a spokesperson said Tuesday.

The governor has responded to allegations of mismanagement by pointing to his efforts to audit programs, the appointment of a top anti-fraud official and the shuttering of a housing program beset by fraud after several providers were charged in federal fraud cases.

Still, Walz ended his campaign for a third term on Jan. 5 as scrutiny mounted on his record of managing fraud. The same week he suspended his campaign, three GOP state lawmakers testified before the Oversight Committee in the first of its hearings on Minnesota fraud.

The attorney general’s office, meanwhile, has pointed to its record of prosecuting Medicaid fraud, noting that it had tackled over 300 cases and “won over $80 million in recoveries” for the state. Ellison planned to discuss that record at Wednesday’s hearing, as well as the politicization of fraud, according to a statement from office spokesman Brian Evans.

“Ellison will make the case that turning fraud into a partisan political issue will do nothing to actually help protect Minnesotans’ tax dollars, and he will encourage members of the committee to set partisan politics aside and work across party lines to fight fraud and protect Medicaid,” he continued.

Republican members of Congress have called Walz and Ellison to testify at separate hearings in the last year. Walz in June testified before the House Oversight Committee, where he and other Democratic governors defended their state’s policies on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Ellison, Minnesota Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell and GOP lawmakers testified at a U.S. Senate hearing in February on the federal government’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.

Walz, Ellison and GOP lawmakers aren’t the only Minnesota officials the committee has summoned in recent months. House Oversight Republicans also have sought interviews with leaders at state departments with fraud problems.

Former Department of Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead, who resigned in January 2025 before new fraud prosecutions came to light, received a letter from Comer in December requesting an in-person transcribed interview.

A similar letter went to Eric Grumdahl, the former assistant commissioner of Homelessness and Housing Supports at DHS, who left his job before federal prosecutors announced fraud charges in the state’s Medicaid-funded housing stabilization services program.

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By AAMER MADHANI and SEUNG MIN KIM

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that “someone from within” the Iranian regime might be the best choice to take power once the U.S.-Israel military campaign is completed — but said “most of the people we had in mind are dead.”

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The president, who four days ago had emphatically called on Iranians to “take over your government” once the U.S.-Israel bombardment ends, appeared to drift further away from the idea that the war presents an opportunity to end the theocratic rule that has been in place since the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

Trump said that many Iranian officials his administration had viewed as potential new leaders for the country had been killed in the U.S.-Israeli campaign that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many other top officials.

Trump has not publicly identified anyone whom he views as a credible future leader for Iran. And it’s unclear what, if any, outreach the White House had with Iranian officials since the war started.

“Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. “Now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports. So you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

Trump said Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince of Iran’s last shah who is trying to position himself for a return should Iran’s Shiite theocracy fall, is not someone that his administration has considered in depth to take over leadership in Iran.

“It would seem to me that somebody from within maybe would be more appropriate,” Trump said, adding that it may make sense for “somebody that’s there, that’s currently popular, if there is such a person” to emerge from the power vacuum.

Trump’s comments came as he hosted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for his first in-person engagement with a foreign leader since the U.S. and Israel launched the war against Iran.

Trump said he wanted to avoid a “worst case” scenario where “somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person.”

“That could happen. We don’t want that to happen,” Trump added. “You go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who was no better.”

The White House is trying to counter criticism

The White House has stepped up its push to counter criticism that it moved unnecessarily quickly to launch a war of choice against Iran.

Trump’s decision to strike last week followed lengthy negotiations by the president’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner with the Iranians — talks the U.S. increasingly viewed as an effort to stall any progress.

After the most recent round of discussions in Geneva, Switzerland, last week, Witkoff and Kushner told Trump that reaching a nuclear agreement similar to one that former President Barack Obama struck in 2015 was possible, according to a senior administration official.

The official, who briefed journalists on condition of anonymity, described it as a potential “Obama-plus deal” and Witkoff and Kushner believed such an agreement would take months, but was possible.

Still, even as they expressed their willingness to pursue diplomacy and “fight for every point that we can” if that’s what Trump wanted, the negotiators stressed to the president that the Iranians were not willing to make a deal that would be satisfactory to the U.S.

Trump snaps at the UK, Spain over lack of support

Meanwhile, Trump sharply criticized Britain and Spain for their reluctance to aid the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump fumed about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Starmer had initially blocked American planes from using British bases for the attacks on Iran that started on Saturday. He later agreed to let the United States use bases in England and on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to strike Iran’s ballistic missiles and their storage sites, but not to hit other targets.

Trump also said he was going to “cut off all trade with Spain,” the day after Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said his country would not allow the U.S. to use jointly operated bases in southern Spain in any strikes not covered by the United Nations’ charter.

Trump disputes that Israel forced his hand

The president also sought to push back on criticism from some of his staunchest allies over the decision to go to war — questions that grew louder after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that the U.S. had decided to strike because “we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.”

“And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said.

But Trump rejected the notion that the White House had been dragged into the conflict by Israel. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack,” Trump said. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Rubio on Tuesday echoed Trump’s insistence that the decision to attack Iran was made independent of Israel.

Merz said during his visit with Trump at the Oval Office that Germany is “looking forward to the day after” the Iran war is over.

He said Berlin wants to work with the U.S. on a strategy for when the current Iranian government no longer exists.

“We are having a high interest in common approach and common work and what we can do,” Merz said. “And this is this is important not just for the Americans,” he said. “This is extremely important for Europe and extremely important for Israel and their security.”

Merz also noted surging oil prices were damaging the world economy, laying down an argument for finding a quick endgame to the conflict.

The president acknowledged that oil and gas prices were going to rise as the U.S. remains engaged in the strikes — yet argued it would be fleeting.

“We have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe, lower than even before,” Trump said.

The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. jumped 11 cents overnight Tuesday to about $3.11 in the United States, according to the AAA.

AP writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Fatima Hussein and Michelle L. Price in Washington, and Jill Lawless in London contributed reporting.

It’s almost hard to describe how astonishingly bad “Scream 7” is — though it isn’t entirely surprising considering the circumstances surrounding the film and the lead-up to its production. In 2023, Spyglass Media Group summarily dismissed franchise reboot star Melissa Barrera, who anchored 2022’s “Scream” and “Scream VI,” for posting on social media in support of Palestinians. Shortly after Barrera’s firing, co-star Jenna Ortega departed the film, as well as new director Christopher Landon.

In the wake of the shake-up, Spyglass eventually lured original “Scream” queen Neve Campbell (who had co-starred in the 2022 “Scream” but sat out the New York City-set “Scream VI”) back to the franchise in which she has played Sidney Prescott for three decades. Also returning is Kevin Williamson, the original film’s writer, who was tapped to co-write (with Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt) and direct, his first directorial effort since 1999’s “Teaching Mrs. Tingle.”

Usually all of this extra production context isn’t necessary to explain how and why a film doesn’t work, but here it seems relevant in grappling with why “Scream 7” is such an incoherent mess. Perhaps they were stuck scrapping for parts, or rushed, or working under the dark cloud of the backlash to Barrera’s firing (there have been calls to boycott the film). Whatever the case, the result is easily the franchise’s worst effort, riddled with muddled motivations, inconsistent characters and a serious identity crisis.

The fifth and sixth installments are loosely connected to this seventh film by the presence of the unusually tenacious twins Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown), who are inexplicably interning for Sidney’s longtime frenemy, journalist Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox). There are also several references to Sid “skipping New York,” and questions if a Ghostface attack even counts if she’s not there.

Because Sidney Prescott, now Evans, exists only in relationship to Ghostface, the costume worn by many different knife-wielding maniacs over the years, starting with her high school boyfriend. Much like Laurie Strode in “Halloween,” who shapes her existence around surviving Michael Myers, who is Sidney without the Halloween mask donned by so many of her nearest and dearest? She doesn’t seem to know. Her day-to-day life is defined by her trauma — she’s a heat-packing woman with a high-tech home security system married to a cop (Joel McHale) — but oddly enough, she doesn’t talk about her past with her teenage daughter Tatum (Isabel May). That doesn’t seem like Sidney at all.

Instead, she tries to live a semblance of a “Gilmore Girls” life in the bucolic town of Pine Grove, where she runs a cutesy coffee shop and is a wife and mom to three kids, whom she wants to protect from the world and her pesky ghosts. Still, it makes little sense that Tatum (named after Sidney’s best friend, played by Rose McGowan in the first film) would know so little about her mom’s past. But there’s very little about this film that makes sense.

It doesn’t help that Campbell and May have all the chemistry of two colleagues who met right before cameras started rolling, and the rest of the cast feels like a hastily assembled group of random actors tapped for their turn on the “Scream” ride. McHale, Ethan Embry, Timothy Simons, Mark Consuelos and Anna Camp are the familiar faces as various teachers, neighbors and news reporters; May, Celeste O’Connor, Mckenna Grace, Sam Rechner and Asa Germann make up the new generation of high school screamers that we barely get to know or care about before Ghostface’s blade starts swinging.

Legasequels often try to contend with the larger ideas and evolutions of these iconic properties, and “Scream 7” half-heartedly attempts that. An opening salvo featuring Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph as a horror-obsessed couple seems to set up a cautionary tale about murder tourism, but that theme is quickly abandoned. In the series’ characteristic — yet now obligatory — bit of self-reflection on the genre, characters thumb their noses at “nostalgia” and the “retconning” of the Sidney Prescott story, only for the script to toy with just that, introducing a deepfake AI subplot. For such a self-conscious series, “Scream 7” doesn’t manage to impart any kind of insight about itself. It’s nothing more than an episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

Distracting from the void at its core are the extremely gory kills, splashed with pixelized blood and guts that are indeed successful in making an audience squirm. But there’s no escaping the nagging feeling that it seems like Williamson fed “Scream” into an AI chatbot and the machine spat this wretched thing out — it has all the familiar components but doesn’t move right, sound right or feel right; it’s not funny, or scary, or suspenseful. “Scream 7” is an unfortunate tarnish on this otherwise sturdy franchise’s legacy.

‘Scream 7’

1 star (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, gore, and language)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: In theaters Feb. 27

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