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How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

[TW: Sexual Assault, Sexual Abuse, Rape, Graphic Content, Misogyny, Sex Trafficking, Antifeminism]

Heidi Blake at The New Yorker:

Just north of Bucharest is a neat development of red-gabled houses known as American Village. It is an unlikely place to be the center of an international criminal intrigue, but on its western border is a sprawling compound, patrolled by armed guards, that belongs to the British American influencer Andrew Tate and his younger brother, Tristan. The Tates moved to Romania a decade ago to build an online-pornography empire, and American Village was where they kept their recruits. One day in April, 2022, Iasmina Pencov was in a villa near the compound, recovering from surgery. A slender, dark-haired former psychology student, she had met Andrew Tate the previous year and agreed to move across Romania to be with him. Tate had told Pencov that he considered her his wife, and when he first asked her to strip on camera she was appalled. “I’m old fashioned and I do believe in God,” she texted him. “My body is intimate and only my husband should be able to touch and see.” But he had worn her down—“identified the objections and destroyed them,” he wrote in private messages describing her recruitment. “She never believed in god. Women never believe in anything.”

Tate presided over an online network called the War Room, in which, for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year, he promised to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” Members learned how to recruit women into “sexual slavery” in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or “Pimping Hoes Degree.” He had used Pencov as a teaching case, reporting on her subjugation over the secure messaging app Telegram. “I’ve done this with over 100 girls,” he told members. “I almost sound evil. But I’m not. I’m a shepard. Leading the sheep.” Pencov had become an online sex worker who staged live shows through the night and posted pornography on OnlyFans. The Tates had paid to have her teeth fixed, and then to have her breasts enlarged. The words “Tate Owned” were tattooed in swirling letters across her upper arm, along with a cobra, Andrew’s personal insignia. She remained passionately devoted to him. “I love you enough to fight for you, compromise for you, and sacrifice myself for you,” she texted him. Pencov was not alone in her devotion. The Tates used the same method to recruit all the women who came to American Village. “You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business,” Andrew explained in a video sold to War Room members. “You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.” (I have pieced together an account of Tate’s activities from thousands of private messages, internal documents, sealed prosecutorial files, and court records—as well as scores of interviews with the Tates, their associates, and more than a dozen alleged victims.)

The Tates had moved to Romania from the United Kingdom in 2015, after three British women accused Andrew of rape and strangulation, and the brothers seemed to operate there with impunity. Court records show that local police sat on at least two reports indicating that the Tates were coercing Romanian women into sex work. Andrew openly discussed bribing law-enforcement officials in War Room chats, and bragged on social media about his connections. “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Doubt me? EPSTEIN HAD ACCESS TO PUSSY. Look at his fucking friends list.” Pencov had been entrusted with supervising new arrivals at a villa in American Village where the brothers housed sex workers. Tate called her his “mafia wife,” and told her, “it’s important you and I work together and just control them all.” She had become an eager accomplice. “We’re the power team,” she told him. Pencov was concerned about the latest recruit: a twenty-year-old aspiring musician whom Tristan Tate had romanced on a recent trip to Miami. The musician had refused to strip on camera, insisting that she had come to Bucharest to teach Tristan piano. Pencov found her demeanor “weird and secretive”; she had caught her talking furtively in her bedroom with another reticent newcomer. That day in 2022, Pencov heard a hammering at the front door. Another recruit went to answer it, and a voice asked if the American woman was inside. When the worker said yes, there followed a cacophony of voices, radios, and pounding boots as police stormed the property.

It turned out that, soon after arriving in Bucharest, the American had begun sending distress messages back home. “These guys are actually evil,” she had written. “They are definitely trafficking women.” The other women in the house seemed “brainwashed,” she said. The U.S. Embassy was alerted, and swiftly notified local police. A SWAT team was deployed to take the women in the villa into protective custody.

The Tates were questioned, and one of Romania’s leading organized-crime prosecutors opened an investigation into suspected human trafficking. But the brothers were quickly released, and Andrew waved away reports of the incident, claiming that it had been a prank. He had been saying for years that he was “above the law,” and he saw no reason to doubt it now. At the time of the raid, Andrew Tate was on the cusp of becoming one of the most famous men on the planet. He’d amassed a vast following on social media, mixing posts about diamond watches, cigars, and supercars with jokes and misogynistic rants. He told alienated young men that they were the victims of a feminized society determined to crush their male essence, and urged them to get fit, get rich, and reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power.”

[...]

Tate had risen to prominence in the online realm of incels, pickup artists, and red-pill believers known as the manosphere—and he’d engineered an ingenious way to expand his reach. Not long before the raid, he had launched Hustlers University, an online school that, for $49.99 a month, taught “modern wealth creation” methods, including an affiliate-marketing program that functioned as a gigantic content factory. Members were given access to a library of Tate’s videos, and earned commissions by reposting clips to attract new subscribers. More than a hundred and sixty thousand students enrolled, pumping Tate’s content into algorithms already primed to amplify extreme ideas. In the months after the raid, videos tagged #AndrewTate were viewed more than twelve billion times on TikTok alone, and he became one of the world’s most Googled people. His followers spread his rhetoric to millions of homes and classrooms. Teen-age boys around the world barked Tate’s slogan “Make me a sandwich” at female teachers, and reports spread of sexual aggression by his followers.

Tate’s enormous reach made him a political force. He had always been an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump—“He’s grabbing bitches by the pussy. I like that guy,” he’d once said—and he became a singularly influential proponent of masculinism: a creed, devoted to countering feminism and restoring the patriarchy, that helped unite the disparate factions of the MAGA coalition. Tate called for women to be stripped of the vote, barred from the workplace, and forced to procreate. By comparison, conservative politicians’ efforts to erode reproductive rights and roll back gender-equality laws seemed moderate. “I have shifted the Overton window heavily since I became famous,” Tate bragged. In the summer of 2022, feminist and antifascist groups mounted a campaign to deplatform Tate, and he was ejected from mainstream social media. But the bans only enhanced his fame, with conservative pundits hailing him as a free-speech martyr. “We’re adults and Americans, and we’ll listen to anyone we want,” Tucker Carlson said as he welcomed Tate onto his Fox News show. Tate played his part adroitly. “When somebody who’s championing men’s issues like myself comes forward and finally manages to garner huge percentiles of the public support, I’m silenced,” he said.

Tate made a deal with the right-wing streaming service Rumble, which had recently received major investments from Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, and J. D. Vance, Trump’s future Vice-President. The details have not previously been confirmed, but a confidential contract shows an agreement to pay Tate at least six million dollars a year for a weekly quota of five short videos and a thirty-minute live stream. His presence inspired a forty-five-per-cent increase in active users, sending Rumble to first place on the Apple and Google charts. A few months later, Elon Musk bought Twitter and reinstated Tate’s account. When Tate was arrested on human-trafficking charges, his allies defended him. Donald Trump, Jr., called the case “absolute insanity,” and Musk suggested that the authorities were targeting the Tates while ignoring “actual sex trafficking.” Carlson, who had just released a documentary called “The End of Men,” devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming Tate’s innocence; so did the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. The activist Charlie Kirk praised him onstage. “What he says is so powerful,” Kirk said. “Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.”

Prosecutors went on to allege that the Tates had trafficked dozens of women by using romantic relationships to lure them into sex work. Though the brothers were released from custody, they were barred from leaving Romania. Tate issued a defiant statement: “The Matrix has attacked me. But they misunderstand, you cannot kill an idea.” To fight the charges, he hired an expensive team of lawyers, P.R. operatives, and private detectives. Tate’s representatives claimed that he hadn’t really meant what he’d said online about sexually exploiting women—he had simply been playing a character “for entertainment.” At the same time, they devised a campaign to attack his accusers with scores of legal filings, while Tate’s affiliate network harassed and smeared them online. Even one of his team members described it as “textbook victim intimidation.”

As the 2024 U.S. election approached, the team saw an opportunity. Tate forged relationships with Barron Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. In the weeks before the vote, he pumped out pro-MAGA content, mobilizing young men in such large numbers that Kamala Harris later named him as a key factor in her defeat. When the result was in, Tate posted jubilantly on X: “THE PATRIARCHY IS BACK.” After the Inauguration, he added, “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president.” Weeks later, under pressure from the U.S., Romania lifted the Tates’ travel ban. Since then, the brothers have travelled the world, while the case appears stalled and the evidence remains sealed. When I met them earlier this year at a cigar lounge in Bucharest, they assured me that the prosecution was doomed. “It’s just garbage out of a corrupt country,” Andrew said, puffing a Davidoff and flashing pearly veneers. “Show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a girl chained up. Show me something.”

[...] In 2015, when the Tates decided to leave England, Andrew’s plan was “I’ll just run around the world, and I’ll be above the jurisdiction of any one place.” Then a friend from his kickboxing days called from Romania. Sebastian Vieru ran a mixed-martial-arts company with backing from two brothers, Mihăiță and Sorin Doroftei, who were later indicted for heading one of the largest criminal cartels in Romanian history. (They deny the allegations.) Tate was fascinated by his friend’s connections. He became a partner in the cage-fighting business, and then began investing in real estate. Tate boasted in texts about how easy it was to “hide” cash in Romanian property. “Turn up with money in a bag,” he wrote. “No banks no mortgage no bullshit no tax.” He later partnered with the Dorofteis to open a series of casinos, which he described as “big time mafia shit.” To Tate, Romania seemed like a gangster’s paradise. He bragged about bribing officials, filling his house with guns and machetes, and hiding money from the authorities through cryptocurrency. He repeatedly claimed to have used mafia and police contacts to hunt down people who had crossed him. “Please do not underestimate how connected I am in Romania,” he tweeted. “MPs Police chiefs Street thugs ANYTHING can be fixed.”

The Tates had brought Hruskova and several other women from the U.K., and put them to work in properties around Bucharest. They hired a former member of Romania’s security services, who recruited dozens of guards to protect them. Tate said that he also consulted a local lawyer about the potential implications of being accused of assaulting a woman, and was assured that without “physical evidence” she would have no case. “This is probably forty per cent of the reason I moved to Romania, because in Eastern Europe none of this garbage flies,” Tate later explained in a video. “I’m not a fucking rapist. But I like being able to do whatever I want.” During my visit, the Tates strenuously denied that they had hurt a single woman. “I’ve never done anything wrong in my life,” Andrew told me. He insisted that none of the women he’d recruited had accused him of crimes, adding, “They’re still my friends.” By the time police raided his properties, he said, “the webcam business—which, by the way, is not illegal—had been closed for ten years.” He showed no trace of emotion as he lied.

In Romania, the Tates turned their small-time webcam enterprise into a kind of industrial operation. Their approach to recruiting resembled what trafficking experts call the “lover-boy method.” They trawled dating apps and social media for young women, blasting out hundreds of identical messages and frequently changing their location to expand their reach. Women who responded were romanced. Tate sent one a flurry of questions: Where did she want to travel? Had she ever been skydiving? Had she ever seen a Dubai sunset? Those who proved susceptible were groomed for sex work. “Every day, I sent twenty Instagrams. Every day, I was on a date. I was fucking four girls, five girls a week,” Tate said in a War Room video. “I built my business off the back of my dick.”

[...]

After the initial pitch, Tate would get his target and Hruskova drunk and have sex with them. “Martinis, Martinis, Martinis. Bam. Threesome. Slam them both,” he said. “That’s how you recruit.” The compulsory group sex continued once the women were employed. “Every day after work for me was a threesome, foursome, fivesome, orgy,” Tate said. He wrote to one eighteen-year-old about a threesome with Hruskova, “You can be little sisters and hold hands while you get dick.” The women lived in the brothers’ properties, and the most prized workers were not allowed to go out unattended or to have relationships with anyone but the Tates. Otherwise, Andrew explained, “that other person she’s fucking is going to have the control over her mind.” Each brother had a personal “harem.” Tate called the women his wives, and ordered them to address him as “king.”

Often, the recruits came from troubled homes or were living in poverty. One former member of Tate’s “harem” told me that she had found his initial love-bombing intoxicating: “You go along with it, and, before you know it, you’re in absolute hell.” Tate had a way of “casually peppering the abuse through day-to-day life,” she said. “He kind of serves it to you in a tongue-in-cheek, humorous way, but it’s deadly serious.” Physical abuse was often disguised as “rough sex.” Once, she said, Tate beat her so hard that she sustained lasting injuries to her eye and breast. “You’re a sexually violent person,” she texted him afterward. He replied, “You never told me to stop.” In Romania, Tate rarely seemed to face consequences for his actions. In the summer of 2016, though, he risked returning to the U.K. to appear on the reality show “Big Brother.” People who had seen his early sex shows with Hruskova remembered him, and some of the footage was leaked online.

[...] His fans looked to him for entertainment, but also for inspiration. Tate projected a credo of masculine excellence that revolved around self-discipline, physical prowess, and mental fortitude. He insisted that “depression isn’t real” and told sufferers to stop complaining and start working out. For young men feeling dejected by the public conversation about toxic masculinity, Tate’s celebrations of manhood were galvanizing, and his mocking assaults on feminism felt bracingly irreverent. “The reason feminists think men are losers is because the only men that bother to interact with feminists ARE losers,” he posted.

At the height of the #MeToo movement, Tate tweeted that women should “bare some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. During the controversy that followed, his disdain for women began cohering into a political identity. He appeared on Infowars and then at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was photographed with Candace Owens, the right-wing television personality Jack Posobiec, and the far-right British politician Nigel Farage.

After the 2016 election, Tate had posted a string of pro-MAGA tweets, and he began messaging with Donald Trump, Jr. Eventually, he secured an invitation to Trump Tower. “That was the first time he had ever had any kind of interaction with anyone that big,” his former “harem” member told me. “It was like a drug to him.” After the visit, he posted a photograph of himself in a gold-embroidered blazer, clasping hands with a grinning Trump, Jr. He wrote, “The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” Tate started selling an online course called Network Brilliance, in which he declared, “I have access to the president’s son,” and claimed to know “every big person in politics on the right.”

Tate’s longest-standing political connection was to Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator whose Islamophobic rhetoric and inflammatory claims about Asian sex-grooming gangs have stoked violent unrest across several British cities. Robinson also grew up in Luton, and he and Tate knew each other well.

Tate was intrigued by one of Robinson’s allies, the Canadian activist Lauren Southern. She had become a darling of the manosphere at the age of nineteen with a video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she argued that men were the real victims of an unjust society. She followed up with a series of videos in which she trolled women who marched against sexual violence, ridiculing their views and holding up a sign saying “THERE IS NO RAPE CULTURE IN THE WEST.”

In February, 2018, Tate asked Robinson to bring Southern to Romania to discuss a business venture. She told me that she flew to Bucharest without knowing much about Tate; Robinson had simply said that a kickboxer in Eastern Europe wanted to finance her work. When they arrived, Tate was waiting in one of his supercars, and he insisted on taking her out for lunch alone. Over steak, he told her “everything that you would want to hear as a conservative right-wing woman,” talking about the importance of family and praising her work. “You’re saving Western civilization,” she remembers him saying. [...]

Tate started kissing Southern and pulling off her clothes. She told me that she tried to push his hands away, but he wouldn’t stop. Then he hooked his arm around her neck and started to squeeze. She remembers thinking, “Oh, shit, this guy actually is going to rape me.” Southern was anti-abortion, and was terrified of getting pregnant. She began pleading with him: “I know what you’re gonna do here. Please just wear a condom. Please.” Southern remembers fading in and out of consciousness as Tate raped her unprotected and choked her. Afterward, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Don’t tell the press I raped you.” She remembers saying, “My whole brand is literally talking about how stupid bitches get themselves in situations like this. There’s nothing I can say without destroying my career. So congratulations.” In the car to the airport, Southern said, she discovered burst blood vessels around her eyes and marks on her neck. Back in Toronto, she was examined by a nurse who specialized in sexual assault. On an assessment form, the nurse recorded that Southern had been raped and strangled by a “well known male” at a hotel in Romania and had suffered an intimate injury. She noted that Southern seemed to be experiencing “personal struggles with her belief system” as a result.

Southern told me that she tried to apply her political convictions to her experience, telling herself that she was at fault for drinking with a man she didn’t know. A month later, she texted Tate. “It was really shitty what you did that night in Bucharest,” she wrote. “I’m not going to tell anyone obviously because I was an absolute moron, but I hope you don’t do that to anyone else.” “What did I do?” Tate replied. “I expected tons better from you. This msg is some liberal #metoo bullshit.” “You literally strangled me when I said I didn’t want to have sex,” Southern wrote. “You literally told me in the morning ‘don’t tell the press I raped you.’ ”

“You’re absolutely embarrassing yourself,” he wrote. Tate denied raping Southern, but he bragged to the War Room about spending the night with her, saying that he had invited her to Romania to discuss a business deal but “didn’t invest a fucking penny.” Southern came to wonder if his proposal had been just a pretext. She thought back to her confrontations with women protesting sexual violence and felt regret. But, she told me, “I knew one hundred per cent there was no world in which I spoke about this where I got to retain my status within the right-wing world.” For years, she remained silent.

In 2019, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service informed Tate that he would face no charges from the allegations of rape and strangulation that had caused him to flee the U.K. The police had let the case lie dormant. At the time, conviction rates for reported rapes hovered at around two per cent. For Tate’s accusers, the long wait had been excruciating. “We were just so sick of having him in our minds,” Maya Navarro told me. “It’s always there—him, and us needing to go to court and get justice. Finding out that nothing was going to happen was very defeating.” The women were not told why it had taken four years to decide not to act. But prosecutors did write to all three of them, setting out reasons why they were apparently to blame for the collapse of the case.

[...] War Room members from around the world met at “summits” to compare notes. In Los Angeles, attendees were promised an evening of tutorials, including “Installing Spells & Sexual Magic,” accompanied by “the best grass-fed Steaks grilled to perfection on an outdoor grill, fine aged whiskey, smoking Cuban and Empalador cigars.” Another summit was arranged in a turreted castle in the mountains of Transylvania. The Pizzagate conspiracist Mike Cernovich was a member, as was the far-right lobbyist Jacob Wohl, who bragged about supplying women to U.S. politicians, claiming that “these men will always want to win your good graces in hopes that you might toss them a girl or two.” Wohl was later convicted of running a voter-suppression scheme targeting Black neighborhoods during the 2020 election.

[...]

In Bucharest, Petrescu joined the Tates’ team as the spokeswoman. She was thrilled. Many of her clients were nationalist Romanian politicians; the Tates were global celebrities. “It was the case of the moment,” she told me, and everyone she knew was “in awe.”

One of her first tasks was responding to a report that the Taliban were concerned about Andrew Tate’s well-being. The brothers had been trying to secure residency in Dubai, and Andrew had announced that he’d converted to Islam. When the Taliban seized control of Kabul, barring women from work and girls from school, he had tweeted approvingly, “Dinner will be ready on TIME. The Taliban restores order. Inshallah.” Now the group was apparently calling for his freedom. Petrescu’s initial counsel was “We don’t want to associate with the Taliban,” but, she conceded, “we don’t really want to upset the Taliban, either.” Privately, she thought, “Wow, this is my life now. I don’t want to upset the Taliban.” For Petrescu, that kind of cognitive dissonance was part of the thrill of the job. She loved being the only woman on Tate’s crisis team and prided herself on being paid more than the men. While Tate was in jail, he had no access to the internet, but his “Tate Speech” newsletter and his posts on X kept appearing. Petrescu told me that she had written many of those words. She got a peculiar “amusement” from ventriloquizing the world’s most notorious misogynist, she said. But she was also impressed by Tate. “I’m absolutely fascinated by the balls he has, to say the things he says and not have an ounce of a sense of ridiculousness or guilt,” she told me. The weeks after Tate’s detention were chaotic, Petrescu said. She could hardly keep track of the lawyers and advisers clamoring for a role in the case. “Everybody saw the goose with golden eggs,” she told me. She had expected someone as famous as Tate to have a well-structured operation, but what she encountered seemed to run on “a long chain of impulses and the deep belief that there is some sort of godlike inspiration that cannot go wrong.” The Tates had a deputy managing their affairs while they were in prison: their cousin Luke Leilas, who had moved from the U.S. to work for them. On Andrew’s instructions, Leilas had been directing impassioned videos in which Hruskova, Pencov, and Anghel denied all the charges. “Don’t let them get lazy and wake up in the morning and look like shit,” Tate told Leilas. “No one cares what ugly girls say, they have to look amazing.”

[...] Three weeks after Trump’s victory, Romania held its own Presidential election, and again the Tates played an unusual part. The brothers had been backing a right-wing candidate named Călin Georgescu, who was a virtual unknown until he won the first round of voting. Georgescu was stridently pro-Russia, and the Kremlin celebrated his victory—but Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the result, citing evidence of interference. The ensuing controversy gave U.S. officials a pretext for taking an interest in Romania’s internal affairs. J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and other right-wing figures suggested that liberal élites had stolen the election. Trump’s special Presidential envoy Richard Grenell accused Romania of joining a global conspiracy to silence “people and politicians who weren’t woke.” Petrescu told me that the team had been lobbying Grenell to help the Tates, and that he was willing. “Ric was rooting for the boys,” she said. Soon after the cancelled election, Grenell met at Mar-a-Lago with a Romanian politician named Victor Ponta, who later told the Times that they had discussed the Tates’ case. (Ponta told me that he no longer remembered this and had no involvement with the Tates. Grenell denied aiding the Tates or speaking about their case with Ponta, though he has publicly affirmed, “I support the Tate brothers.”)

[...] On February 27, 2025, the Tates flew from Romania to Florida. Thousands of fans tracked their private jet as it crossed the Atlantic. When it landed in Fort Lauderdale, a crowd of journalists and onlookers was gathered outside the executive terminal to watch the brothers arrive. “They were expecting this grand tour—the martyr comes home, a free-speech hero,” Petrescu told me. There was a hitch, though: border officials seized the Tates’ phones. They were working on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, which had quietly opened an investigation into the brothers under the Biden Administration. Tate made a furious appearance on Candace Owens’s show. “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence?” he said. “You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.” Petrescu told me, “I had never seen him so unhinged.” She felt grimly vindicated, having advised the brothers against flying to Florida, where Hadley and her family lived. It seemed to Petrescu like blatant witness intimidation. Only a couple weeks earlier, Hadley’s pro-bono lawyer had filed a counterclaim against the brothers for human trafficking, coercion, defamation, and harassment, alleging that they were attempting to silence her.

Tate embarked on what amounted to a publicity tour of right-wing America. He and Tristan were photographed puffing cigars with Roger Stone, whom Andrew hailed as the “lawfare OG.” In Las Vegas, they were greeted ringside by Dana White, the president of the U.F.C., who hugged them and declared, “Welcome to the States, boys!,” before greeting other guests, including Grenell and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director. In Los Angeles, Tate met with Kanye West. He tweeted at California’s governor, “I’m in LA. Please begin criminal charges.” Later, he headed to the Beverly Hills Hotel to spend the night with a model named Brianna Stern. He had met Stern a year earlier, when she came to Romania for photo shoots to promote his meme coin, $Daddy. Tate’s seduction followed his familiar pattern: he said that he loved her and called her a whore, demanded that she have his baby and told her, “I want to beat the fuck out of you.” At the hotel, Stern alleges, Tate choked her and battered her head and face, telling her repeatedly that he would kill her if she ever crossed him. Afterward, she went to a doctor, who diagnosed post-concussion syndrome. Stern waited for Tate to leave the country, then told the Beverly Hills police that he had assaulted her. She also filed a civil suit, attaching her medical report and a series of texts in which he’d threatened to beat her.

When Petrescu learned of Stern’s allegation, her reaction was “You gotta be fucking kidding me.” She said to colleagues, “We all have kinks. But can he please, please, please have some vanilla sex for six months?” Petrescu told me she was predisposed to accept Tate’s explanation that Stern was an opportunist looking for money. But the texts attached to the lawsuit made for grim reading. “There’s stuff I know about the Tates, from reading a lot of the depositions, declarations, text messages, that one doesn’t really want to know about their client, ” she said. As a P.R. person, she added, “you don’t question—you can’t.” But she began to worry that she was normalizing Tate’s behavior: “I started wondering, Is that seeping into my subconscious? Am I becoming that?”

The Tates were in constant motion in the following months, posting from pricey hotels in the Bahamas, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Still, Andrew seemed bored. “I miss human trafficking,” he tweeted. “The emotions ran high. Been chasing dopamine ever since.” His online rants were becoming increasingly extreme. He responded to the release of the Epstein files by posting that “women have become such lying whores that it’s impossible to take any of these unsubstantiated claims seriously.” Despite his mixed heritage, he promoted the great-replacement theory, declaring, “The west is collapsing because it’s full of disgusting traitors. White people who beg to be erased.”

In the American courts, Tate was enjoying a run of good fortune. The L.A. district attorney announced in June that he would not be prosecuted for his alleged assault on Stern, citing insufficient evidence. McBride claimed that he’d given the D.A. a “do-not-prosecute packet” demolishing the case; he promptly filed a fifty-million-dollar defamation suit against Stern. In Florida, Judge G. Joseph Curley dismissed most of Hadley’s counterclaim, including the allegations that the brothers had harassed her and attempted to coerce her into sex work; he, too, cited a lack of evidence. “Thank God for U.S. justice,” Tate tweeted.

There was a threat from the U.K., though. British police had been investigating the origins of the Tates’ webcam business, and had charged them with a combined twenty-one counts of rape and trafficking. But a Romanian judge ruled that the brothers could not be extradited until the local proceedings were complete—and, two years after Cezar Profira took over, the trafficking case seemed to be going nowhere. Prosecutors hadn’t even fixed the procedural errors in the initial indictment. In chats with advisers, Tristan acknowledged that he and Andrew were effectively being “protected by Romania.” Romania has recently been rocked by a judicial-corruption scandal: a documentary called “Captured Justice” revealed that judges were being pressured to dismiss or delay politically sensitive cases. More than nine hundred judges and prosecutors have since signed an open letter warning of systemic abuses, and protesters have marched through Bucharest, demanding reform. One of the country’s most senior prosecutors called Romania a “paradise for criminals.” This April, the Tates were released from all bail conditions relating to the Romanian indictment. The brothers were jubilant. “Case never made it past trial. Innocent,” Tate wrote to advisers. “Yeah we spin it as this. If we can,” Tristan replied. “Then when we’re reindicted they look stupid.”

The New Yorker has a detailed report on how far-right rapist manosphere influencer Andrew Tate ran an empire of abusing women.

Read the full story at The New Yorker.

#andrew tate #sex trafficking #misogyny #sexual violence #rape #long post

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