MIAMI — When financier Jeffrey Epstein was indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, he was accused of recruiting dozens of teenage girls to his Manhattan and Palm Beach mansions for sexual activities and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash each time.

To make the charges stick, prosecutors had to prove Epstein was engaged in “commercial sex acts” in multiple states, including paying the minor girls something of “value.”

Six years later, Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander, who until their arrests in December were dividing their high-end lives between Manhattan and Miami Beach, have also been charged with sex trafficking like Epstein, who died by suicide in a jail cell before trial. But in a federal motion filed Monday, the Alexanders’ defense attorneys say their indictment should be dismissed because they never paid the women who accused the brothers of sexually assaulting them.

The lawyers argue that while the brothers may be accused of luring the women to their apartments, hotels and other places in the United States and Mexico while promising to cover their expenses, “the alleged victims did not provide sex ‘on account of’ those promises, as the statute requires.”

“They did not agree to provide sex in exchange for the travel or accommodations,” defense attorneys for Tal Alexander wrote in their dismissal motion filed Monday in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. Their motion was joined by lawyers for Alon and Oren Alexander.

“The alleged travel and accommodations were not conditioned expressly, or implicitly, on the victims’ participation in the sex acts; and the travel and accommodations did not represent compensation for the sex acts,” the motion states, citing four separate federal court decisions on the sex trafficking law requiring that connection to hold up.

The dismissal motion — filed by New York lawyers Milton Williams, Deanna Paul and Alexander Kahn — is among the first major challenges to the federal indictment charging the brothers with a sex-trafficking conspiracy and eight related counts alleging they used “force, fraud or coercion” — including drugs — to cause a half-dozen women “to engage in commercial sex acts” with them between 2009 and 2021. One of the alleged victims is a minor under the age of 18 whose allegation dates back to 2009.

The brothers, who under a judge’s order have been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, were expected to plead not guilty at their arraignment to an amended indictment on Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan. Their lawyers, including Howard Srebnick and Richard Klugh from Miami, also argued for their release on multimillion-dollar bonds at a federal appeals court hearing in the morning.

The brothers’ trial is set for next January, but there’s going to be a flurry of defense motions, government responses and judicial decisions before they face a 12-person jury in Manhattan federal court.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment on Tuesday.

The defense motion to dismiss the grand jury’s nine-count indictment focuses not only on the critical legal issue of what constitutes a commercial sex act in sex trafficking, but also on claims that federal prosecutors in New York collaborated extensively with civil lawyers for alleged victims who sued the brothers last year. The defense claims prosecutors orchestrated a media campaign to amplify the criminal charges against the Alexander brothers when they were announced at a news conference in December.

“The pre-indictment prelude to this case was a rush for sensationalist headlines at the expense of meticulous sourcing of credible witnesses and forensic evidence,” Tal Alexander’s lawyers wrote in court papers. “In its eagerness to prosecute a salacious story, the Government has cobbled together a pleading that fails to identify accusers, provide specific dates that Tal is alleged to have committed a crime, or identify when acts in furtherance of the alleged conspiracy occurred.”

Before their arrests, Oren and Tal had attained stardom as luxury real estate brokers in Manhattan, while Alon had gone to law school and joined his parents’ security business in the Miami area. Coverage of the criminal case and numerous civil lawsuits in The Real Deal, New York Times and People Magazine has exposed what was once considered a “well-known secret” about their sexual exploits while growing up on Miami Beach and later in New York, according to multiple sources who know the Alexander family.

Federal prosecutors, who last month amended the original indictment, say the three brothers used their wealth and celebrity — and often drugs — to prey on and rape women, sometimes at their Manhattan apartments, other times after transporting them across state lines to Miami Beach. Other destinations included the Hamptons, Aspen and Mexico. Many of the encounters were planned, including trips and parties, but others were by chance, such as at bars, prosecutors said.

The indictment says in some instances the brothers spiked female victims’ drinks with incapacitating drugs before sexually assaulting them. It also says the brothers hired party promoters to set up some of the travel and gatherings in which women were raped.

One of the claims in the latest indictment filed in May goes back to 2009 and alleges Alon and Tal Alexander forced a girl under the age of 18 to take part in at least one commercial sex act. The indictment says the brothers had “reasonable opportunity” to know the alleged victim was underage.

However, the federal indictment doesn’t delve into much detail about any of the alleged crimes, using mostly statutory language. The main conspiracy charge alleges the three brothers “agreed to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide, obtain, advertise, maintain, patronize and solicit female victims ... knowing ... that force, threats of force, fraud, and coercion would be used to cause the female victims ... to engage in commercial sex acts.”

The twins, Alon and Oren, have also been charged with rape and sexual assault by Miami-Dade state prosecutors. They were charged with sexual battery on a woman at a New Year’s Eve Party in 2016 in Miami Beach, while Oren was also charged with raping two other women in Miami Beach in 2017 and 2021.

Their friend, Ohad Fisherman, was also accused of pinning down the woman during the New Year’s Eve incident while the twins allegedly raped her. Fisherman, 39, who owns a hummus business and was once referred to in a New York magazine as the “hummus hunk,” gave himself up a week after the Alexander brothers’ arrests in December, cutting short his honeymoon vacation in Japan.

The twins and Fisherman pleaded not guilty after being charged by the state of Florida in Miami-Dade criminal court. Fisherman was freed from jail on bond and eventually had an ankle monitor removed. He is scheduled for trial next month.

The three Alexander brothers were initially charged and taken into custody through a joint arrest operation involving Miami Beach police and the FBI during the early morning hours of Dec. 11. The arrests at their Miami Beach homes left the luxury real estate industry from New York to South Florida slack-jawed. Often mentioned in the New York tabloids, the brothers were jet-setters who always seemed to be surrounded by beautiful women as they bounced around the club circuit from Manhattan and the Hamptons to Miami and Aspen.

All three siblings initially pleaded not guilty to the federal sex-trafficking conspiracy and other charges in New York. Federal magistrates in Miami and a district judge in New York denied the three brothers’ requests for bonds, citing the alleged sexual assault complaints and deeming them a flight risk.

During a February court hearing in New York, federal prosecutors promised the initial indictment would expand with more charges and victims, saying dozens of credible women had come forward with complaints since the brothers’ arrests in December. At the time, prosecutors said FBI agents had interviewed about 60 women since the start of the investigation a year ago.

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