The former kickboxer and Big Brother contestant entertains his nine million followers on X/Twitter with an unremitting combination of macho posturing and bluster, often delivered bare-chested, all the better to show off his admittedly impressive physique.
But following the news last week that the Romanian authorities had agreed to allow Tate, 37, and his brother Tristan, 35, to be extradited to the UK on charges of human trafficking and rape once criminal proceedings have been wrapped up there, Tate appeared to accept that he was in trouble.
In a characteristically off-the-wall video exchange with Tristan, he recalls how he refused to celebrate when Tristan gave him a high five for ‘destroying the BBC’.
Instead, he cited the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the World War II naval engagement that resulted in the sinking of the battlecruiser HMS Hood.
‘When Churchill found out the Hood was sunk, he said: “We cannot lose the Hood without them losing the Bismarck. Sink the Bismarck”,’ Tate declaims. ‘When the Bismarck sunk the Hood all of the crew were celebrating except the captain. He updated his will and telegraphed home to his wife and said goodbye because he knew.’
Andrew Tate was arrested in late 2022 after two women, one of them American, told police they were being held against their will inside the home he shares with his brother
Tate has been banned from Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter for violating policies on harmful content
It’s certainly true that things look bad for the Tate brothers, who have made millions from an online empire that has exposed millions of impressionable children and young adult males to Tate’s nauseating views about how real men get rich quick, buy fast cars and – most important of all – treat women like chattels.
In the UK, where the US-born Tate grew up on a bleak Luton council estate, he has been accused of ‘brainwashing a generation of boys’ who – say horrified teachers and education officials – often believe that because he is rich, he must be right.
Children as young as 11 treat Tate as their ‘god’, report teachers in the US, and quote his ugly mantras and soundbites (such as ‘slap, grab, choke, shut up, bitch, sex’) as if they are religious texts.
The Labour Party last month revealed that it takes Tate’s misogyny so seriously that it plans to help schools train young men as role models that will provide a ‘powerful counterbalance’ to him.
Experts are dubious, saying his malign influence is too deeply ingrained, especially on sites like YouTube where he has an army of emulators.
The Tate ‘philosophy’ certainly has its appeal to any smirking 11-year-old boy who discovers the swaggering windbag online: women in his world are ‘intrinsically lazy’ and, incapable of being independent from men, they are a man’s property who should stay in the kitchen or the bedroom.
If they are raped, they must ‘bear some responsibility’ for being attacked. ‘I’m a realist and when you’re a realist, you’re sexist,’ he’s claimed. ‘[Women] are just empty vessels, waiting for someone to install the programming.’
Tate says he prefers relationships with younger women in their teens because he can ‘leave an imprint on them’. He’s spoken about hitting and choking ex-girlfriends, saying: ‘I’m not a rapist but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want.’
He once demonstrated in a video how he would assault a woman if she ever accused him of cheating. ‘It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch,’ he said. Tate has even had the nerve to claim that he is ‘acting under the instruction of God to do good things’ – to save men from ‘enslavement’ and to put women firmly in their place.
And astonishingly, such are the depressing economics of internet notoriety that ever since he was thrown off Channel 5’s Big Brother in 2016 after a video emerged of him slapping his ex-girlfriend and beating her with a belt, instead of becoming a pariah, Tate has become a multi-millionaire.
His claims to be the ‘world’s first trillionaire’ are clearly ludicrous and his insistence that he recently earned £68million from a single burst of cryptocurrency speculation also sounds dubious, ditto his claim to have a £60million collection of supercars.
Previous financial investigations have revealed that his business empire was not nearly so glittering as he made out. Last year, Romanian police estimated his total wealth at a relatively modest £10million.
However, the current home he shares with brother and chief collaborator Tristan – a lavish £600,000 compound on the outskirts of the Romanian capital Bucharest – is far removed from their old family home on Luton’s Marsh Farm Estate.
Last year, the financial news magazine Forbes estimated that Tate’s online school – once called Hustler’s University, now The Real World – which purports to teach money-making techniques and the ‘War Room’ – an $8,000-a-year, members-only section of his website – generates £4million a month from subscriptions.
Tate grew up on a bleak Luton council estate and has been accused of ‘brainwashing a generation of boys’
The Tate ‘philosophy’ certainly has its appeal to any smirking 11-year-old boy who discovers him online
And yet while one might not know it from his bullish and boastful social media postings, the walls may finally be closing in on Tate.
Earlier this month, Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London issued arrest warrants against the brothers over allegations of sexual offences said to have taken place between 2012 and 2015.
Bedfordshire Police said it had obtained the warrants ‘as part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of rape and human trafficking’.
As a result, the brothers were detained by Bucharest’s appeal court which ruled that the Tates can be extradited to the UK after they have been tried on the Romanian charges.
The latter relate to the Tates’ arrest in late 2022 after two women, one of them American, told police they were being held against their will inside the brothers’ Bucharest compound.
Romania’s anti-organised crime agency, DIICOT, has since accused the Tates of recruiting at least seven women using the so-called ‘loverboy’ method – which entailed convincing malleable women they wanted a romantic relationship but instead forcing them to create pornographic videos.
The brothers are accused of recruiting the women as ‘cam girls’ and then subjecting them to ‘acts of physical violence and mental coercion’.
The Romanian authorities allege the Tates, along with alleged female Romanian accomplices, formed a group in 2021 to commit human trafficking in Romania and other countries including the UK and US.
Tate won an appeal last August to be released from house arrest as the trial date has yet to be decided. He and his brothers are allowed to travel within Romania but not leave the country.
It isn’t the first time that British police have investigated Tate. Three women reported him to Hertfordshire Constabulary as long ago as 2014 alleging rape, and serious physical and sexual assaults dating back to 2012.
Some of their allegations were sickening – Tate, they said, enjoyed choking his sexual partners with such force that he burst blood vessels in their eyes. They said he beat them and hit them with a belt. One of them said she supplied police with a text message from Tate in which he told her: ’I love raping you.’
He was immediately arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse but police waited until 2019 to pass the information to the Crown Prosecution Service. Even though one of the accusers said she witnessed another woman being raped, the CPS decided not to prosecute, citing ‘evidentiary’ issues and the ‘no real prospect of a conviction’.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether the current investigation by the Bedfordshire force is related to these earlier allegations.
Matthew Jury, a lawyer for the four women who made the original accusations, criticised some of the media coverage of Tate, saying that recent interviews with Piers Morgan and right-wing US pundit Tucker Carlson had provided him with a platform to ‘spread disinformation about the allegations of criminality he faces’ which ‘only helps to support and spread his toxic influence further amongst vulnerable young men and boys, something we should all be seeking to put an end to’.
Last year Forbes estimated Tate’s online school generates £4million a month
In January, he bragged that his next big purchase might be in the US Virgin Islands where he would buy Jeffrey Epstein’s small island
His accusers – who have called for an inquiry into the CPS’s handling of their case – have turned to crowdfunding to cover their legal costs as, together with a fourth accuser, they pursue a civil case against him, which is their only legal option. They say the delay in prosecuting Tate in the UK allowed Tate to move to Romania in 2017 – where, ironically, he claimed the rape laws were less oppressive – and abuse more women.
The four say they watched with dismay as their abuser became a huge internet star and fear losing their anonymity will make them vulnerable to attack by his fanatical fans.
They say they’re confident there are other UK victims who have yet to come forward, adding: ‘We want to show that we, as survivors, can stand up to him and that his despicable actions have consequences. And we want to show him for what he really is and release impressionable young boys from his toxic hold.’
That is a noble aim although one wonders what more evidence his more fanatical devotees need to desert him. A YouGov survey last September of more than 1,100 UK children aged between six and 15 found that 54 per cent of them had heard of Tate, and that one in six teenage boys had a positive view of him. Twelve per cent of boys aged six to 15 said they agreed with Tate’s views on women.
And that was a year after he was banned from Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter for violating policies on harmful content. On TikTok alone, his posts had racked up 11.6billion views.
Even his family admit they are shocked by Tate’s rise to fame. The son of Emory Tate, an American serviceman and international chess champion, who met his mother, Eileen Ashleigh, a former school kitchen assistant, when he was serving at a US base in Bedfordshire, Andrew Tate initially lived in America, where he was born, and Berlin. He moved to Luton when his parents divorced when Andrew was 11.
Last weekend, his mother’s brother, John Ashleigh, told the Mail On Sunday he wasn’t impressed by Tate’s flashy image but suggested that it – along with his misogyny – was all part of an act to make money.
‘If you met Andrew or Tristan in the pub, they come across as totally different characters,’ he said. ‘Andrew’s no fool but he can come across as quite domineering. That’s not the way he is in real life, he’s very respectful.’
But if it is an act, it’s certainly a convincing one. A camera crew from Vice News was granted a rare audience with Tate in his Romanian home in 2022 and found a hilariously self-important egomaniac who warned the reporter not to go to ‘classified’ areas if he didn’t want an armed guard putting a gun in his face.
In his weird trans-Atlantic accent he spouted endless claptrap while the reporter gamely tried to keep a straight face.
He revealed that he shared the huge house only with his brother: ’I think you get the best version of yourself if you live with other competitive men,’ he explained. ‘I don’t have loser friends. I like sitting down with people and discussing how we can make money from the conflict in Ukraine….I don’t want to talk about TV.’
As for the medieval-style sword he kept waving around, it was ‘a symbol of empowerment – you know, your wife starts talking and you say: “Shut up! I decide what I do. Cook!”’
In January, he bragged that his next big purchase might be in the US Virgin Islands where he would buy the small island getaway of another notorious alleged sexual predator, paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
‘I will buy Epstein’s island and put a massive plaque on it saying Western elites are human traffickers not the Tate brothers.’ he blustered online. ‘Anyone got the price? I swear I will pay it right now.’
Of course, he didn’t. But if he escapes getting a criminal record – which would stop him entering the US – it would be a fitting final destination for the internet’s most poisonous misogynist.
Meanwhile, given the wartime allusion in his latest video, it’s worth recalling what happened to the Bismarck.
The Admiralty mobilised every available warship in the Atlantic to hunt down and destroy the Germans’ flagship and, three days after the sinking of the Hood, on fire after being shelled and bombed, it was finished off with torpedoes.