Andrew Tate, the accused human trafficker with Trump's support, returns to the US
Andrew Tate, whose online course 'Hustler's University' morphed into a platform with nearly a million users, became a powder keg among far-right media influencers in the early 2020s due to his explicitly sexist worldview and its profound influence over millions of teen boys and young men.
This latest high-profile turn in Tate's ongoing legal saga has again brought the horrifying allegations against him to the forefront — this time with apparent approval from the US government. It's also a reminder of the cultural reach of the so-called manosphere that Tate helped popularize.
Tate's rise started with a successful kickboxing career, was followed by his removal from the British version of Big Brother , and culminated in a hugely popular podcast that anointed him the 'King of Toxic Masculinity.' As Rebecca Jennings explained for Vox in 2022, his 'inflammatory diatribes against women, whom he compares to property' became viral fodder on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. He was born in the US, raised in the UK, but now lives in Romania — first moving there in part because, he said, 'the rape laws are more lenient,' but has stayed since; following his arrest, he has largely not been allowed to leave the country.
Tate helped bring to mainstream concerns about the 'manosphere,' the term for the internet's loose network of right-wing male influencers and their associated communities. Early on, Tate seemed to be such an obviously extremist node of the manosphere that he should be, as Jennings wrote, easy to ignore.
But Tate's confident, blatant misogyny proved wildly popular: His dictums, which ranged from bragging about never having read a book to flaunting an aggressive emotional and physical dominance over women, seemed to enthrall boys and men who admired him for his flashy lifestyle, vaunted wealth, and commitment to the bit. Tate's maxims swept across teen culture, generating horror stories from parents and teachers about his seemingly pervasive and pernicious influence. Originally, Tate presented his schtick as pure fiction, a deliberately exaggerated regressive persona. It soon appeared that was far from the case, as allegations against Tate and his brother began mounting.
Romanian officials have pursued Andrew and Tristan Tate since April 2022, when they first raided one of the pair's mansions after receiving a tip that the Tates had allegedly abducted a woman and were holding her there against her will. The following year, the brothers and two Romanian accomplices were indicted on charges of rape, forming a criminal gang, and human trafficking. Authorities alleged that Andrew and Tristan Tate had trafficked seven women from the US and the UK to Romania by grooming them and subjecting them to physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. (The brothers promptly responded with a civil suit against two of their alleged victims.) In early 2024, the two faced new UK allegations of human trafficking, stemming from an investigation launched more than a decade prior.
Then, in August, the Tates faced additional charges of human trafficking after police raided their estate again and detained six people. The brothers have also faced multiple civil lawsuits filed by alleged victims. One such woman recently filed a suit against them in Florida, claiming they defamed her after she agreed to be a witness in the Romanian criminal trial.
Despite the severity and breadth of the charges against them, things have been going fairly well for the Tates. Last month, Andrew Tate was released from house arrest, though he and his brother are still not allowed to leave Romania and are under court supervision. This followed the return of their luxury assets in October, and a November appeals court ruling that major evidence in the first Romanian criminal case, including testimony from alleged victims, was inadmissible. A judge, citing flaws in the indictment, sent the case back to prosecutors for revision. This left the case on shaky ground — and that was before the American government came calling.
Romania's foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, dismissed his conversation last week with Grenell, which took place briefly during the Munich Security Conference, as 'just a repeat of a known stance.' Grenell's position as 'special missions envoy' seems to be an informal one based mainly on his status as a longtime Trump loyalist and his previous role as ambassador to Germany, but he's made his interest in the Tate brothers public — and explicitly political.
On February 3, before the trip to Munich, Grenell quote-tweeted a reply to Tristan Tate on X and alleged that Romania had used funds from the beleaguered USAID agency to target conservatives, saying the program was 'weaponized against people and politicians who weren't woke.' There appears to be no factual basis for this claim, but it bolsters the Tates' longtime argument that they are the victims of a political witch hunt.
'I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets,' Grenell told the Financial Times.
According to a statement issued by Romanian officials to the AP, the brothers remain under Romanian judicial control while they await trial. The American government's role in the lifted travel ban is unclear.
Andrew and Tristan Tate now face three different criminal cases and multiple civil lawsuits in different countries, most for extremely serious allegations of violence and sexual abuse against women. Their most expansive alleged crime, human trafficking, became part of Andrew Tate's online brand. He actually sold an online course to his followers on how to do it, what he called the 'Pimping Hoes Degree.'
Experts say that the techniques Tate taught in this course and elsewhere could be seen as a textbook for how to engage in literal, criminal human trafficking — and the messages Tate espouses across the manosphere are replete with boasting about violence towards women, sexual assault, grooming underage girls, and emotional abuse.
The 'Andrew Tate effect' on young men has been so profound that counteracting it has become a mission across multiple public service sectors, from education to public health. Researchers in Sweden found that boys exposed to manosphere influencers were more likely to dehumanize women, while researchers in Australia found 'widespread experience of sexual harassment, sexism, and misogyny perpetrated by boys towards women teachers, and the ominous presence of Andrew Tate shaping their behaviour.'
Concerns about Tate encompass real concerns about public safety, and whether boys who have prolonged exposure to him could become more aggressive toward the women around them. At the same time, Tate and others in the manosphere have been credited with helping swing the 2024 US election resoundingly for Trump among young men.
Tate is already a manifestation of extreme misogyny, the worst of what the manosphere has wrought — and his cultural, and now political, elevation is part of a larger, grimmer regression we are perhaps only just at the beginning of.
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