Andrew Tate's alliance with Trump has been in the making for a long time
Ever since I began reporting on Andrew Tate four years ago (during which time my colleague Jamie Tahsin and I made two documentaries, wrote a book on him and interviewed his alleged rape victims), I've been sounding the alarm on the far-right disinformation network that connects him to Trump's inner circle.
Earlier this month, US special envoy Richard Grenell, a vocal supporter of Andrew Tate pressured the Romanian government to remove judicial control restrictions on the Tate brothers, demanding that the alleged human traffickers be allowed to travel freely, according to sources who spoke to the Financial Times. The Romanian government has since confirmed this was a request but denied there was political 'pressure'.
The alliance between the Trump administration and the Tate brothers has been in the making for a long time. Paul Ingrassia, one of the lawyers Andrew Tate hired to fight his human trafficking case, was recently sworn in as the White House liaison for the Department of Justice. According to him, the Tate brothers were 'sacrificed on the altar of the Matrix under the banner of egregious crimes they never committed'.
Andrew Tate is friends with Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate's detention 'absolute insanity,' since 2016. Donald Trump himself Jr also appeared on a stream with Andrew Tate sycophant and collaborator Adin Ross in August 2024. Around the same time, JD Vance appeared on pro-Tate podcast the Nelk Boys.
Elon Musk responded to Tate's 'run for prime minister of the UK' by saying 'he's not wrong' and JD Vance followed both Tate brothers on X in December.
Alina Habba, who now holds the high-ranking political adviser role of counselour to the president, has said she is a 'big fan' of Andrew Tate. 'I sympathize with you,' Habba told Tate on a rightwing podcast, 'because I think you go through a lot of the same 'show-me-the-person-I'll-find-the-crime' that President Trump has gone through … I agree with everything you say, and I have your back, out here in the States.
After Trump won the 2024 election, Tate tweeted that his case would be 'dismissed'. 'Watch this space ;-),' he said.
Tate has access to the highest levels of Trump's inner circle. If, as he is insinuating, he has convinced the administration to act on his behalf, they would be attempting to interfere with dozens of alleged human trafficking and rape victims' quest for justice.
Trump and Tate have a lot in common, and both stand to gain much from each other. They are disinformation virtuosos, having sought to delegitimize criminal allegations against them through information warfare. They both mastered their loud, obnoxious performance of self under the lights and cameras of reality TV (The Apprentice for Trump, Big Brother for Tate), before using the same model to dominate social media. There, among the likes and the shares and the algorithms, they learned that while truth and integrity get you nothing, controversy, lies and extremism can be easily transmuted into fame, wealth and power.
Tate is aware of the value he can offer politicians. In January he instructed his associates to call two Romanian rightwing politicians to tell them:, 'You will get a lot of votes when Tate says you took their side,' according to prosecutors who tapped his phone. Whereas this Romanian politician ultimately turned Andrew Tate down, the Trump administration apparently has fewer scruples.
But the Tate-Trump alliance is about more than just votes, especially now Trump has won. The Trump administration and Tate are both promoting a conspiracy theory that USAid and the mainstream media have worked together to fabricate charges against Tate. By supporting him, the Trump administration is forging a new axis of disinformation to go after the press and the very idea of justice and due process.
Before we get into that, let's remind ourselves of what exactly the Tate brothers are being accused of.
Andrew Tate is a misogynist influencer and conspiracy theorist. The charges against his brother and him mostly relate to the webcam sex businesses they operated first in the UK and then in Romania.
Tate and his brother are accused of either trafficking, raping, grooming or abusing at least 48 alleged victims in total. They have denied all charges.
Four of these women are pursuing a civil case in the UK against Andrew for rape or physical abuse (Three of them had previously reported Tate to the UK police for sexual violence and physical abuse, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided against bringing charges in 2019). Both brothers are also being investigated for crimes of sexual aggression relating to at least two separate women by Bedfordshire police, who have obtained a European Arrest Warrant for them.
In 2023 Romanian authorities formally charged the Tate brothers with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women, naming seven alleged victims. Prosecutors allege Andrew Tate raped at least one of them repeatedly and coerced the women through threats of violence and financial ruin. In 2024 they filed a second indictment which mentions 35 alleged victims of trafficking, including one who was 15 years old at the time. Both Tate brothers deny all of these allegations, and have repeatedly characterised them as a coordinated attack by 'the Matrix'.
Our work uncovered Andrew Tate's War Room Network, which trains men how to manipulate vulnerable women into sex work. Andrew Tate denies any wrongdoing and says he is prepared to defend his innocence.
I have met many of these women. Their stories are horrific. Many have told me stories of violent strangulation. Andrew Tate texted one of them 'I love raping you'. When asked about this text in 2023 and 2024 Tate did not respond, but he has denied any accusation of rape.
Rightwing pundits have been attempting to delegitimize the cases against the Tates for years.
When they came forward with their allegations, many of the alleged victims were called misogynistic slurs by thousands of Tate supporters, liars by manosphere podcasters like Sneako and Fresh and Fit,' and 'paid actresses' in viral posts on X. Some also suffered witness intimidation and abuse. Tate's other lawyer, Joseph McBride, who worked with White House official Paul Ingrassia, publicly named one of the alleged victims (who was meant to stay anonymous) and discussed her 'body count' on the Fresh and Fit podcast, leading to online harassment. Another Tate ally, the self-proclaimed 'investigative journalist,' Sulaiman Ahmed, showed up outside one of the alleged victims' parents' house in Florida. The victims' legal representatives claim he was paid by Tate to silence her in a conspiracy that 'amounts to witness tampering.'
Court documents from the second Tate indictment in Romania allege that after he was moved from jail to house arrest, Tate attempted to pay one of his alleged victims – a 15-year-old – 2500 euros to say 'only good things' about him to the Romanian authorities.
The potential for witness tampering and interference is one of the reasons the Tate brothers have been placed under judicial control. Another is that they might try to escape Romania. (The streamer Adin Ross said Tate told him he at one point planned to leave Romania and 'never come back'.) Tate's team have denied the brothers are a flight risk.
By pressuring the Romanian authorities to release the Tate brothers from judicial control, Trump's special envoy Grenell could be seen as hampering Romanian due process and multiple human trafficking investigations, not to mention breaking Article 41 of the Vienna convention which requires that diplomats don't interfere with domestic affairs in their guest country. If someone was accused of similar crimes in the US, they would almost certainly not be allowed to leave the country – and the administration knows this.
So why support someone being investigated for human trafficking?
For those of us following closely, all the signs of a coordinated disinformation attack on the media and the courts by the Trump administration, the Tates, and a network of far-right agitators and pundits are there. Tate's attack lines are parroted by the Trump administration and vice versa.
On 3 February, Tristan Tate suggested a conspiracy theory on X that USAid could somehow be involved in the investigation into the Tates. Hours later, Grenell, Trump's special envoy, responded that Romania was the 'latest example' of how 'USAid programs were weaponised against people and politicians who weren't woke'. The implication that it is 'woke' to oppose the Tates is a new low for the 'Maga' movement. But this is simply the latest round of artillery in an information war in which Andrew Tate and Trump are natural allies.
The day after Grenell's comment on X, Elon Musk boosted a post saying that 'USAid funds the BBC'. (The reality? USAid made a $1.9m donation to the BBC's media charity in India.) Andrew Tate was quick to jump on the bandwagon, replying to Elon: 'The real redpill as that all of these 'other' funders of the BBC are ALSO funded by USAID. ALL OF IT IS USAID. Propaganda arm of The Matrix.' (Tate hates the BBC because the documentaries I've made about him were commissioned there.)
On 17 February, the conspiracy evolved, with Tate now claiming: 'It was Biden who locked us up in the first place. USAid-sponsored attack. UK foreign office heavily involved. They want me to serve time for tweets. None of the charges against me were ever real.'
USAid. The legacy media. The Romanian courts. The Biden administration. Tate seamlessly weaves them all into one giant convoluted conspiracy that's bent on putting him in jail to prevent his wisdom from freeing young men. He does so with support from the Trump administration and Musk. (In January Musk, who reinstated Tate's account after buying Twitter, tweeted 'Great point' to an X post that read: 'The same government and journalists who accused the Tates of sex trafficking overlooked actual sex trafficking.' One of his 'department of government efficiency' employees appears to be a Tate fan.)
Paul Ingrassia, the former Tate lawyer who is now a White House Liason for the Department of Justice, once wrote a sycophantic blog post about the Tates in which he never discusses the allegations or the case itself but audaciously accuses the media of using the Tate brothers as scapegoats to 'drown out' the 'real victims' and 'legitimate cases of sexual abuse and sex trafficking'.
Ingrassia never responds to specific allegations or evidence, nor provides an argument as to why the allegations are 'bald-faced lies'. The facts are never discussed.
The idea that someone could be accused of heinous sexual crimes and successfully delegitimize those allegations as a politically motivated sham is presumably appealing to Trump and his inner circle, many of whom have themselves faced allegations of sexual assault.
Not once has an official in the Trump administration said anything about the 48 alleged victims who say they were either raped, trafficked, physically abused, or a combination of the above, one of whom is an American citizen. They deserve due process without interference.
Judicial independence is protected by law in Romania, but in practice judges have been unlawfully influenced. They will hopefully carry out their investigation regardless of what Trump's cronies say.
Ingrassia, in his excoriation of the supposedly anti-Tate media, wrote: 'The real victims are once again forgotten, lost beneath the howls and cries of those in command of the mainstream media loudspeaker, who drown out – and thereby, exacerbate – legitimate cases of sexual abuse and sex trafficking.'
But this quote reeks of projection. It is true in reverse, as the loudspeaker belongs to 'Maga' and Tate. The challenge journalists now face is to be louder.
Matt Shea is a film-maker and the co-author of Clown Word, Four Years Inside Andrew Tate's Mansophere
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