Andrew Tate is now a free man.
The rightwing anti-woman influencer landed in Florida last week after being held detained for over two years in Romania on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges. The Romanian courts abruptly reversed their previous refusal to allow Tate to leave the country after several high-level Trump administration officials took an interest in his case – including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate’s arrest in Romania “absolute insanity”. The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”
There are so many allegations of sexual abuse and violence by the misogynist mega-influencer Andrew Tate that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. After ending his middling career as a professional kickboxer in 2014, Tate first came to fame in the UK as a contestant on the 2016 season of the popular British reality TV series Big Brother. Tate was kicked off that show after producers became aware that he was under police investigation for sexual assault and rape following a 2015 arrest. (Tate denies wrongdoing.)
But after being kicked off of TV, Tate had another career to fall back on: that of a pimp. For some years, Tate has been running an online business in which he collects the earnings of women who perform webcam pornography. In the years following his expulsion from Big Brother, he became a booster of this business model online, where he has amassed a staggering number of followers – almost 11 million on Elon Musk’s X alone – including a large and growing proportion of young boys.
Women who knew Tate during this period in England say that he was forceful, manipulative, coercive and violent. Four of them have filed civil suits against him for rapes and sexual assaults that they say he committed between 2013 and 2016. At least one says that Tate repeatedly strangled her (Tate denies wrongdoing). In the new book Clown World: Four Years Inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere, the British writers Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea speak to one woman who said she knew Tate during this time, who recounted a brutal scene of violence and intimidation at his hands. She told them that once, while hiding from an irate Tate in a bathroom, he screamed at her through the door: “I don’t give a fuck if you call the police. I’m going to beat the shit out of you.” In addition to the British civil suits, Tate is now wanted by police in Bedfordshire in relation to an investigation into rape and sex trafficking. A warrant has been issued for his arrest. (Tate denies wrongdoing.)
At some point, Tate moved to Romania, saying in a now-deleted YouTube post that “40%” of the reason he chose the eastern European country was because he believed that sexual assault cases were less likely to be investigated there. No such luck. Tate’s compound in Bucharest was raided in December 2022, and in 2023 he and his brother Tristan were charged with sex trafficking of seven women and money laundering. Tate himself was charged with rape, and Romanian prosecutors alleged that he coerced the women into performing for his webcam business through threats of violence and financial ruin. Tate is alleged to have continued his monetized system of sexual force while on house arrest in Romania awaiting trial: after a second raid on his properties by the Romanian authorities in 2024, additional charges were filed against him, including for the sex trafficking of a 15-year-old girl. That second indictment listed 35 known victims of trafficking (both Tate and his brother deny wrongdoing).
Meanwhile, Andrew Tate has become one of the most influential public figures of his generation – perhaps not in spite of his alleged abuse of women, but because of it. His was the third-most Googled name in 2023; videos have been widely shared of him saying that women are a man’s property, that women are to blame for their own rapes, and that women who talk back to men or accuse them of cheating should be beaten. (“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,” Tate says in a typical video.) Others show him declaring that “humanity cannot survive with female empowerment” and that women should not be permitted to drive. Videos of him have been watched more than 11.6bn times on TikTok alone.
In addition to his enormous social media following and ongoing webcam business, Tate is a prolific producer of content, including videos and podcasts, and is a frequent guest of rightwing media figures from Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens to Piers Morgan. He monetizes his followers through a number of subscription content services, including a seminar course offering called The Real World (previously branded as Hustler’s University and offering a “PhD” – “pimping hoes degree”). Hustlers’ University/The Real World charges a subscription fee and also works on a multi-level-marketing model, where Tate acolytes both buy his content and get a kickback for recruiting other men downline. (Tate has denied that the venture is a pyramid scheme.) Among other things, the courses instruct men in how to, as Tate puts it, “Inspire a girl to make money and give you the money.” A hacking leak of the platform’s data revealed that the subscription service has well over 800,000 users.
Tate also offers a more expensive subscription service, called The War Room, for especially devoted fans. The War Room costs $8,000 (for a special additional fee of $5,000, members can sign up for “the Test”, an opportunity to fly to Romania to be beaten up by a professional MMA fighter). The War Room bills itself as an all-male secret society meant to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration”; in practice, according to a BBC investigation, it operates as a kind boorish fraternity, something of a mixture between male-bonding, self-help, and – allegedly – a pimp networking and professional development group. In Telegram messages obtained by the network, members of Tate’s War Room network discussed how to coerce and trick women into sex and prostitution; the BBC identified 45 women who the War Room members were targeting for abuse in the chats over a period of 13 months. They allegedly did not stop at planning. The BBC spoke to women who said they had been groomed and forced into web cam pornography by War Room members; Tahsin and Shea, in their book, also speak to women who said they had been groomed into webcamming by Tate followers. The women describe experiences typical of gendered abuse: being isolated from their friends and family, subjected to violence and threats, and forced to perform various demeaning or menial acts as a sign of their submission. “This is how you train dogs,” one War Room message reads. The picture that emerges from the allegations is of a massive, organized, and monetized global network of sexual exploitation, operating largely in the open, helmed by a man who is being lauded and rewarded by legions of fans for his misogyny.
Is it any surprise that Andrew Tate is a supporter of Donald Trump? Is it any surprise that so many in Donald Trump’s administration are supporters of Andrew Tate? In some ways, Tate is the ultimate Maga man. Like Trump, he seems to have pushed American men dramatically to the right, especially on questions of gender equality. And like Trump, Tate appears to have inspired much more abuse than he has personally committed.
The men’s appeal is not only in providing their followers with the vicarious pleasure of witnessing their public sadism, but in granting ideological and rhetorical permission to pursue sadism of their own. Any man can be a rapist, the logic goes, and so any man can have—to soothe their own sense of inadequacy – the comfort of knowing that there is at least one person less powerful than him. In that way, Tate’s logic of monetized sexual exploitation is perhaps a decent model of Trump’s theory of governance: that force and domination are their own end.
The Trump regime is now stuffed with alleged rapists and sexual abusers. Besides Trump himself, there is his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and Hhealth and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr; Trump’s first pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was accused in a House ethics report of “regularly” paying for sex, including with minors. These are not deficits or embarrassments in Trump world: they are assets. Sexual violence may have been the first form of authoritarianism: for the Trump regime, it also seems to be the paradigmatic one.
