Who is Andrew Tate? Influencer charged with rape and human trafficking

A translation of the prosecution statement accused Tate, his brother Tristan and two associates of tricking the alleged female victims into sexual exploitation with “false claims of marriage and love” - which authorities have labelled the “loverboy method”.

The Tate brothers and their associates have been under house arrest in Bucharest since April. All have denied the allegations.

The indictment deposited from the Bucharest court says that the four defendants formed an organised criminal group in 2021 to commit human trafficking in Romania, but also in other countries including the UK and US.

According to a statement from Romanian prosecutors, the alleged victims were placed under continuous surveillance and control, intimidated and forced into debt. They were then allegedly forced to take part in pornography which was later disseminated on social media.

Alongside charges of human trafficking, Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist, has also been charged with raping one of the victims, while his brother Tristan has been charged with instigating others to violence.

They have also denied these allegations.

Andrew Tate, 36, was born Emory Andrew Tate III on December 14, 1986. He is an American-British kickboxer born in Chicago, Illinois and was raised in Luton, England. He is the son of the late chess player Emory Tate and his mother Eileen was a catering assistant.

Tate worked as a TV producer while training as a kickboxer, before going on to fight professionally. His appearance on Big Brother in 2016 kick-started his life in the public eye. Since then, Tate has gained notoriety for making offensive, misogynistic comments on social media, particularly 

Videos of Tate amassed millions of views on the social media platform before he and his brother were banned in 2022. TikTok now also removes content associated with Tate.

The influencer, who has more than six million Twitter followers, was arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking and rape on December 29. The former kickboxer was detained alongside his brother Tristan and two Romanian women. His brother and the two women face the same allegations and deny all of them.

Tate’s arrest happened after an organised crime unit raided his property in Bucharest. Tate is currently under house arrest in Romania.

His arrest in December came soon after he provoked environmental activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter. He boasted about his cars and the emissions they produce. In response, she tweeted: “Please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

Tate hit back with a video in which he asked someone off-camera to bring him pizza. This sparked theories that the Romanian pizza boxes allegedly gave away Tate’s whereabouts.

But how did he get to this point?

Meta banned Tate from Instagram and Facebook for violating its policies in 2022. Meta said it did so in response to his “violating its policies on dangerous organisations and individuals” but did not provide further details. Last August, Tate was also banned from Alphabet-owned YouTube, the BBC reported.

Tate earned infamy for his offensive remarks on social media since his brief stint on Big Brother in 2016 – which also ended in scandal after he was removed from the show over a video that appeared to show him attacking a woman – a clip he claimed had been edited.

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him from the platform in 2017 after he said that women should “bear responsibility” for being sexually assaulted.

At the time of his removal from Instagram, Tate had 4.7 million followers, gaining appoximately 1 million followers since June, reported the BBC.

Responding to news of Tate’s ban from Facebook and Instagram, Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, said: “Tate poses a genuine threat to young men, radicalising them towards extremism misogyny, racism and homophobia. We’ve provided significant evidence to the major social media platforms, including Meta, about his activity and why he must be removed.”

Hope Not Hate is a UK advocacy group, which campaigns against racism and fascism.

In 2022, a TikTok spokesman said: “Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok. We’ve been removing violative videos and accounts for weeks, and we welcome the news that other platforms are also taking action against this individual.”

Ruth Davison, chief executive of women’s safety charity Refuge, said Meta had made the “right decision” in banning Tate.

“This is the kind of decisive action needed to tackle the online radicalisation of young men towards a violently misogynistic worldview,” she said.

“The same kind of action is now needed outside of high-profile cases like this – we know that women are experiencing stalking, harassment and abuse online every day, often without so much as a response from social media companies.”

Tate appeared on the 17th season of Big Brother UK, in 2016. However, he was removed after a week after a video emerged of him violently hitting a woman with a belt and verbally abusing her.

Tate later said that the actions in the video were consensual and that he was still friends with the woman.

But Big Brother viewers had already called for him to be removed from the house after offensive tweets resurfaced.

He allegedly wrote abusive tweets about Girls Aloud singer Cheryl and was accused of being homophobic and racist.

In September 2017, Tate caused a backlash on Twitter over his comments about depression.

He tweeted: “Depression isn’t real. You feel sad, you move on. You will always be depressed if your life is depressing. Change it.”

Even Harry Potter author JK Rowling responded by sharing his tweets and saying: “This thread will teach you a lot about the defence mechanism of projection, but zero about the real mental illness that is depression.”​

A month later in October 2017, amid the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault allegations, Tate came under fire for saying that women should “bear responsibility” for being raped.

On Twitter, he said: “If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must [bear] some responsibility. I’m not saying it’s OK you got raped.

“No woman should be abused regardless. However with sexual assault they want to put zero blame on the victim whatsoever.”

At the time, he also said: “A man looking at you or whistling at you or asking your name isn’t harassment.

“This belief does discredit as a whole. Stick to the serious definitions and stop pretending normal male behavior is rape.”

He also said: “Women have been exchanging sex for opportunity for a very long time. Some did this. Weren’t abused.”

This backlash brought him more fame, which resulted in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ podcast InfoWars. He also mingled with right-wing figures including Donald Trump Jr, Nigel Farage, and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson.

In 2022, Tate went viral on TikTok for his contentious comments. But his growth on the social media platform was not totally organic.

Tate has founded an online learning platform called Hustler’s University. This involves him charging his followers £36 a month to access courses about how to make money.

The website also sells specific programmes for thousands of pounds – that supposedly teach subscribers how to get rich.

His subscribers can also earn money by selling a membership to someone else, similar to a multi-level marketing scheme.

The Guardian reported that thousands of Tate’s Hustler’s University members worked together to flood TikTok with videos of him in a “blatant attempt to manipulate the algorithm” and “artificially boost his content”.

As a result, TikTok feeds were flooded with videos of Tate making offensive statements, mostly about women, before TikTok began removing them.

As well as his offensive comments about sexual assault, Tate has also said that women “belong in the home” and that they are a “man’s property”.

He has said that if a man sleeps with a woman while he has a girlfriend he loves, it doesn’t count as cheating. However, if his girlfriend spoke to another man, he would.

Tate said a man shouldn’t let a woman go to a restaurant or nightclub with her friends if he isn’t there too, and that she should stay at home instead.

He has also said that “probably 40 per cent of the reason” he moved to Romania was because it was easier to evade rape charges.

He added: “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.”

Policy lead at Rape Crisis England and Wales, Amelia Handy, told the Daily Mail: “These videos are a clear example of rape culture, where rape and sexual violence are minimised and survivors are blamed for crimes committed against them.”

A spokeswoman from domestic abuse charity White Ribbon told MailOnline: “Men and boys regularly watching and listening to negative presentations of masculinity may begin to adopt these attitudes and behaviours, believing that they are acting as the ‘ideal man.’

“This relates to being seen as tough, aggressive and suppressing emotion. These traits feed into gender norms, what ‘being a man’ and ‘being a woman’ is. Gender inequality is a direct result of traditional and negative stereotypes which confine women’s and men’s roles in society.”

She added: “Not only does this create a lot of pressure on men and boys, often affecting their mental health and self-image, it also creates dangerous cultures and environments for women and girls to exist in.

“Sexist and derogatory comments exist on the same spectrum as controlling behaviour and physical and sexual violence, which creates environments where men go on to murder women.”

​Zainab Gulamali, policy and public affairs manager at Women’s Aid, told the publication: “Making derogatory comments and videos about abusing women is as dangerous as it is unacceptable: this normalises the misogynistic and sexist attitudes which are at the root of all violence against women and girls.

“We know that violence against women and girls is a spectrum, running from sexist comments and ‘banter’, right through to horrifically violent crimes and murder.

“Sexist actions and language that reinforce women’s inequality have been tolerated for too long. It is vital that we all challenge these deep-rooted misogynistic attitudes, which normalise women being emotionally abused, belittled, and controlled, as well as physically harmed.”

In a statement released to Mirror Fighting in August, Mr Tate denied he held misogynistic views and accused his critics of “twisting facts”.

“It is very unfortunate that old videos of me, where I was playing a comedic character, have been taken out of context and amplified to the point where people believe absolutely false narratives about me,” the statement said.

“Internet sensationalism has purported the idea that im (sic) anti women when nothing could be further from the truth. This is simply hate mobs who are uninterested in the facts of the matter trying to personally attack me.

“The media is spinning a false image of me, on repeat, and instagram bowing to pressure is a massive shame.

“I have nothing but positivity to spread regarding all PEOPLE, wether (sic) male OR female, and this has been reflected in all of my recent messaging and posts.”