This is Democracy Now, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. The right-wing social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service announced the charges Saturday.
>> 38 new charges in total have now been authorized against Andrew and Tristan Tate, bringing the total number of charges faced to 59. The charges relate to seven victims, spanning a period from 2010 to 2017. I want to make it clear there is no place for male violence against women and girls in our society and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to support victims and investigate all reports made to us. >> Andrew and Tristan Tate are dual British-US citizens prominent in the hyper-masculine online community known as the manosphere. They previously lived in Romania where prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them in 2023 on charges including violence, rape, and human trafficking.
Despite the charges, they were freed from travel restrictions in Romania early last year after White House officials reportedly pressured Romanian officials. In a moment, we’ll be joined by Heidi Blake, an investigative reporter at The New Yorker magazine. Her latest piece is headlined Andrew Tate’s empire of abuse. But first, let’s turn to a video from The New Yorker that accompanied her piece. Oh, and a warning.
The video includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence. >> I’m Heidi Blake, a staff [music] writer at The New Yorker. For the past 9 months, I’ve been investigating the British American influencer [music] Andrew Tate. >> This was my life only 3 years ago. Private jets, Gulf Streams, flying around the world doing whatever I wanted.
Wearing expensive cashmere overcoats. Then they threw me in jail, but they forgot my I forgot. It’s almost like they thought I wasn’t a tough guy. >> Drawing on [music] thousands of leaked files and scores of interviews, my investigation reveals how he got rich by building a sprawling empire of online exploitation, recruiting dozens of webcam workers [music] into what he called sexual slavery. >> Shot.
Psychic from Andrew Tate. He’s very, very dangerous, that shot. >> Tate is a former kickboxer [music] who appeared on the reality TV show Big Brother before rising to become the defining figure of the manosphere. >> In the world we live in today, being a normal [music] man or below normal is going to be terrible. Even to just find a woman you can reproduce with is [music] becoming more and more difficult.
>> My story for The New Yorker charts the rise of Tate’s online pornography empire from the recruitment of his very first webcam worker, a Slovakian teenager who moved to the UK to begin staging sex shows online when [music] she was still a minor in 2014. The following year, Tate hastily left the UK after being accused of rape by three women and relocated to Romania where he turned the webcam business into an industrial operation. >> [music] >> Soon, he was bragging to associates that he had police and mafia connections [music] that placed him above the law and systematically trawling social media for new recruits, [music] often deliberately targeting teenage girls. Tate called his workers slaves, branded them with tattoos, [music] and subjected them to harrowing violence. >> Look at the camera.
WHY ARE YOU GETTING HIT? WHY ARE YOU GETTING BEATEN? LISTEN. YOU. DO AS I SAY.
>> Tate and his younger brother Tristan have been under investigation on suspicion of human trafficking in Romania since 2022, when their heavily guarded compound outside Bucharest was raided by armed police. [music] At the time of the raid, Andrew Tate was rapidly becoming one of the most famous men on the planet. He told alienated young men that they were the victims of a feminized society, [music] and he urged them to get fit, get rich, and reclaim what he called [music] their natural masculine imperative for power. Often, that imperative seemed to equate to sexual violence. >> Get bang out the machete, boom in her face, >> [music] >> and grip her up by the neck.
The chick is on the floor, her panties are all wet. You go [ __ ] her. That’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up, sex. >> After his arrest, the files reveal how Tate compelled some of his alleged victims to record videos defending him, orchestrated a smear campaign against others, and allegedly bribed some to stay silent as he fought back against the case.
The brothers have strenuously denied any wrongdoing, insisting that they are the victims of a liberal smear campaign. And right-wing allies, including Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, have branded the case a conspiracy. >> [music] >> After Donald Trump’s election, Romanian prosecutors eventually gave in to US pressure [music] to release the brothers from a travel ban. >> Freedom at last.
>> And since then, the case appears to have stalled. >> We have our passports back, and just like you, you, you, anyone else here who decides to take a trip, they’re allowed to take a trip. So, all of these 3 years of imprisonment were a complete waste of time against innocent men who have never been tried. It is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in a democracy. We have never been convicted of any crime anywhere on the planet ever.
>> When I met Tate earlier this year at a cigar lounge in Bucharest. He assured me that the prosecution was doomed. >> It’s just garbage of a corrupt country. How was that done? Like, human trafficking, okay.
Show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a a they’re all chained up. Show me Show me something.
>> But I have pieced together an account of Tate’s activities over more than a decade from hundreds of thousands of private messages, internal documents, sealed prosecutorial [music] files, and court records, as well as interviews with the Tates, their associates, and more than a dozen alleged victims. >> A video from The New Yorker magazine featuring our first guest, investigative journalist Heidi Blake. The video accompanied her recent New Yorker article headlined Andrew Tate’s empire of abuse. How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune and became a political force by systematically exploiting women. Unquote.
Since that video was made, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. Heidi Blake is joining us from the United Kingdom. Let’s start, Heidi, with this latest news. Can you explain, as you tracked them from Britain to Romania where you interviewed them personally, how they got into the United States and what these this request for extradition and their arrest in Miami is all about? >> Well, these latest developments over the weekend are a huge step change in the case and in the the disposition of the of the US administration towards the Tate brothers, it would appear, because a lot of what I uncovered in my reporting was how actually the the the prosecutors in Romania who brought this human trafficking case against the brothers under pressure from the US administration in 2025 released the brothers from their travel ban.
And when I started investigating this case, the the prosecution in Romania had really stalled. The brothers were floating freely around the world. They were traveling back and forth from the US. They were visiting other places, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Turkey. They were in the Bahamas.
Um and they were they were continuing to amass further influence, uh to make more money. Um when I met them, um as you heard there, they said to me the case was doomed. Andrew Tate said there was a zero percent chance they were ever going to face trial. So, they were very, very confident of their impunity at that point. And what I wanted to understand was how on earth that was the case and what was the evidence underpinning that investigation.
And so, that’s what I set out to do. And as you heard there, I uncovered a huge amount of evidence, um really which documented their extremely systematic exploitation of women over many, many years. But since that article was published, there’s been a big change. Um the British government have now added 38 new charges uh to their case against the brothers and have gone to the US and asked them to extradite um these two. And and and that’s gone through State Department, it’s gone through DOJ, it’s now going through the courts.
And and all the indications seem to be that the Trump administration is cutting them loose. There doesn’t seem to be any help coming uh from the briefing that’s coming out at the moment. So, it’s a huge change. >> Reading from the BBC last year, US special envoy Richard Grenell raised the Tate brothers with Romania’s foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference, um who said he’d not considered Grenell’s approach as a form of pressure. This goes to how did they end up in the United States?
>> Well, that’s right. So, so, you know, I confirm that that conversation did take place between Richard Grenell and uh and Romania’s foreign minister. Um and that that conversation I was told by a former very senior insider from from uh the the Tate brothers group of advisers that that had been orchestrated by the campaign team. Now, Richard Grenell denied that, but this person told me that they had asked him to raise the issue. The issue certainly was raised, and what I then learned is that prosecutors in Romania reached out to the Tate brothers’ lawyers only very very shortly after that conversation and said, “What do the Americans want from us?
” And they were told, “We want them We want the travel ban lifted.” And so, at that point, the brothers were released from the travel ban. They were given their passports back, and the first thing they did was get on a plane to Florida. And they they went straight back to the US. Now, within days of them landing in the US after that travel ban was lifted, Andrew Tate was again accused by yet another woman of sexual assault and strangulation.
The exact same pattern of abuse that has been described by countless other women in this case. And so, you know, they’re they’re free to travel to the US, and you’re now a US citizen on US soil saying she’s been assaulted by Andrew Tate. But since then, they’ve continued traveling back and forth freely. They’ve been to the US a number of times. They were in the US again over the weekend.
But but the tide has seems to have turned, and and that’s when they were arrested. >> One of the things you talk about or the victims talk about and that they found that they had in common with each other were pin prick blood spots, you know, like broken blood vessels in their eyes, which indicated strangulation, Heidi. >> That’s right. There there were so many features of these women’s stories that were were strikingly similar, and that was one of them. That so many of these women described waking up the next morning and having having this this form of mottling around the eyes, which is called petechiae, and is a is a sign of acute pressure in the head caused by strangulation.
And this this is you know, women were reporting this back in sort of 2014 when they first went to the police to accuse Andrew Tate of strangulation. The woman in The woman in in in LA who accused him of of sexual assault after he flew to the US last year made the same allegation and that’s a common feature in so many of these women’s stories. And you know, that what I was hearing from women I spoke to was an incredibly similar description of the way Andrew Tate would assault them, um, by choking them till they either till they passed out or till they couldn’t breathe, um, raping them and you know, that they would develop this these injuries. Often they described being beaten over the head as well during these assaults. So, these allegations are strikingly similar and these are women who have not met each other, who live in different countries across a decade.
So, you know, that that was a very striking feature of the case and something I found it astonishing that authorities didn’t seem to have taken account of sooner and so this is again, this is a very big step change in the case that that that these charges have been added, that the the British government have made this request and that the US government has so far has has greenlit it. >> Before we talk about how they came to the United States and their relationship with the Trump family and other Trump allies, I want to go back to 2024. A woman who asked to be identified as Anna told the BBC about briefly dating Andrew Tate in 2013. She described what happened when she went home with Tate one evening. A warning again, the video includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
The clip is voiced by an actor. >> He just looked up at the ceiling. And I remember thinking, this is weird. Yeah, and he said, I’m just debating whether I should rape you or not. Out of the blue, he just got up.
Grabbed me by the throat, smashed me to the back of the bed, strangling me extremely hard. And he’s telling me to take my trousers off and I’m like refusing and I’m like, no, Andrew, you said you wouldn’t. And he’s getting more and more angry at me, strangling me, hurling abuse at me, threatening me. Went straight home. Got in the bath.
Started to cry. It’s hard for me cuz I tried to block all that memory out of my brain cuz cuz it upsets me too much. I get so upset. I can’t >> That was a woman identified as Anna who [clears throat] spoke to the BBC in 2024 about dating quote unquote Andrew Tate in 2013. So, I want to go, Heidi Blake, to their relationship with Trump allies and the Trump family.
If you can talk about their relationship with everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump Jr. to Tucker Carlson. >> Well, Andrew Tate’s relationship with with Donald Trump Jr. dates back to 2017. He became a a big fan of of of Trump soon after his election and he began pumping out a lot of pro-MAGA content on social media and managed to befriend Donald Trump Jr.
who then invited him to Trump Tower where the two of them met. And they have been in touch ever since then. They have a personal relationship which has obviously been a beneficial to Andrew Tate in the years since. He’s also cultivated a relationship through an intermediary here in the US with Barron Trump and pledged support to Barron Trump who was kind of instrumental in mobilizing young male voters for his father’s re-election campaign. Andrew Tate had a big part in that.
>> Just for people to understand because Barron Trump is horribly in the news, Barron Trump is President Trump’s youngest son. He’s in college. >> That’s right. Absolutely right. Yeah.
So, they So, there are relationships there, you know, with with the Trump family itself. But also, Andrew Tate has become a really important political force for the MAGA movement because he’s become a defining figure within the manosphere and a proponent of this masculinist ideology which has become very, you know, a dominant part of of of what kind of holds the MAGA coalition together. This idea that, you know, that that feminism has gone too far, it needs to be rolled back, that patriarchal power needs to be reasserted, you know, that women need to be put back under the thumb. Um he has really led on that and he’s garnered a huge amount of support from people like Tucker Carlson who, after his he was accused of all of these crimes, has dedicated hours of airtime to proclaiming Andrew Tate’s innocence and decrying the case against him as a political conspiracy. Elon Musk um is actually still defending him.
I see on X, he’s still out there you know, tweeting tweeting supportive messages about the the Tate case. But he has consistently defended them and dismissed the allegations against him. Um and you know, Richard Grenell has publicly expressed his support, Trump’s special presidential envoy who who raised that case with the Romanian foreign minister. So he’s really enjoyed the support of a large number of influential figures across the MAGA movement. And you know, that was a big part of the reason why the Romanian government and prosecutors began to feel that they they it was not going to be politically expedient to be pursuing this case against the brothers in in the way that they were and what led to that travel ban being lifted.
>> In 2025, ProPublica published a piece headlined The White House intervened on behalf [clears throat] of accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate during a federal investigation. In it, according to the report, federal authorities were chided for seizing electronic devices from Tate and his brother and told to return them, records and interviews show. Experts said the intervention was highly inappropriate. If you can talk more about that. >> That’s right.
That was great reporting from ProPublica. Um the the person at the White House who was said to have interfered there was um a lawyer called Pollan Garcia who actually worked for the Tates before he was appointed um as as a lawyer at the White House. Um and he uh you know, he had been part of their legal campaign against the women who have accused him of of of human trafficking. There’s a particular woman in Florida who has been the target of a huge smear campaign by the Tate brothers. Um they are suing her and members of her family in Florida and and Pollan Garcia had been a part of that.
And he’s been a huge you know, public defender of Andrew Tate before he was appointed to this role. And so it was pretty uh astonishing to hear that in that role he was then intervening in this uh this this federal investigation into the Tate brothers in which their phones had been seized when they landed in Florida. Um now I have to say Pollan Garcia denies that he did that but uh the ProPublica report seemed to be very well sourced and and said that it had seen documentation and spoken to people with knowledge of that intervention. Uh so you know, yet more evidence of the extent of the Tate brothers’ um ties with the the Trump administration. But again, that does seem to be changing now.
>> [snorts] >> And then if you can talk about Elon Musk and also Tucker Carlson particularly after he was forced out of Fox. >> So Tucker Carlson um first hosted Andrew Tate on his Fox News show back in 2022. That was actually right after the Tate brothers had first been uh their compound had been raided in Romania because of these reports that a US citizen was being held there and she had initially accused them of trafficking her and other women. Um but the Tate brothers were dismissive of those reports. Soon after that they were ejected from mainstream social media uh because of the misogynistic views, the kind of violent misogyny they were preaching.
Um and Tucker Carlson was one of the first people to really embrace them as free speech martyrs. He had Andrew Tate on his Fox News show um and was highly critical of the decision to deplatform him. And then after Andrew Tate later that year was arrested and and this time detained by organized crime prosecutors in Romania on on very serious human trafficking and organized crime charges. Tucker Carlson hosted a 2 and 1/2 hour fawning interview with Andrew Tate in which he pretty much declared Tate innocent um and allowed him to lie extensively about the case against him and about the nature of the allegations. Um so he’s been um a huge champion of the Tate brothers.
I can’t imagine he had uh any real knowledge of the case or the evidence against them because the evidence I have seen uh is extremely overwhelming. Um but he certainly um he certainly sort of kind of stuck his neck out for them. Elon Musk similarly has uh dismissed the charges against them. He’s he’s said that uh the Tate brothers are being targeted by authorities who want to distract the public from real sex trafficking. Um I’m not sure how he’s making the distinction between what these two men have done and real sex trafficking but uh that’s been his position.
He’s still making that kind of argument today on X. Um so he’s been a big defender of them. Candace Owens, another uh major right-wing commentator, has again dedicated hours of airtime not only to proclaiming the Tate brothers’ innocence but also to attacking their victims. Uh and one victim in particular who she dedicated a whole episode to um to to kind of smears that the brothers had um had you know allegations that they’d made against her in court. Um so they’ve had a lot of support from very influential right-wing figures.
Um but but but that apart from you know Elon Musk is still out there defending them but that support does certainly seem to be fraying. I mean the indications now coming out of the State Department um and and briefings coming out of the White House are that Donald Trump is not going to come to their aid. Marco Rubio is not going to come to their aid. That’s that’s what the you know the various outlets are reporting. And so it seems like there has now been a change.
I think perhaps as figures within the administration have actually got to grips with the nature of the evidence in this case and perhaps realize that it’s unsustainable to continue supporting these guys publicly and politically. >> And as you mentioned Elon Musk, he was Andrew Tate was deplatformed right from Twitter, but when Elon Musk took over and it became X, he was re-platformed. Is that right? >> That’s right. Elon Musk reinstated his account on X where he had now has about 11 million followers.
And meanwhile, another thing I uncovered in in my reporting is that the right-wing streaming platform Rumble, which had just received major investments from Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance, Trump’s future vice president, gave Andrew Tate a $6 million contract to move his streaming over to their platform after he was banned from YouTube. And there that caused a huge spike in active users. Their active user base went up by 45% when Andrew Tate moved over.
Propelled the Rumble app to the top of the Google and Apple charts. So it was a you know, it was in that sense a success for them, but they’ve been a huge supporters of Andrew Tate and very instrumental in allowing him to continue spreading his message. >> And one more time if you can explain you you mentioned J.D. Vance, his role?
>> Well, J.D. Vance as I say is a big investor in Rumble, which which has has profited hugely from the Tate brothers and their presence on the platform. He also notably follows the brothers on X. Soon after the election result, he followed them.
So a lot of people have taken that as a as an expression of support for them. As far as I know, he still follows them. And there have been briefings that you know, it’s been reports in the past that J.D. Vance would take a dim view of it if the British government were to seek the Tate brothers’ extradition.
Now, it’s it’s unclear what his position is now. As far as I know, he has not commented on the fact that this extradition request is now gone through and being greenlit by the State Department, but there certainly the sort of understanding has been that J.D. Vance has been broadly supportive of these guys, um, and it will be interesting to see whether he has anything to say now. >> Thanks for watching Democracy Now on YouTube.
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