On 27 February, British-American internet personalities Andrew and Tristan Tate, collectively known as the ‘Tate brothers’, arrived in the state of Florida from Romania, where they were being persecuted for charges of sexual abuse and human trafficking by DIICOT, the Romanian agency in charge of tackling organized crime. The pair are also facing charges of rape and human trafficking in the United Kingdom (UK) and are also defendants in a civil suit in the United States (US), where they are accused of coercing a woman into sex work and defamation. The Tate brothers made their journey to the U.S. by plane after their travel restrictions were suddenly lifted by Romania, following involvement from high-level officials in the Trump Administration. A lawyer for the Tate brothers said of the pair that “they feel secure in America for several reasons, the primary one being that Donald Trump is the president. As a result, they are excited to call America their home again.”
The Tate brothers at ‘UFC 313’ on 8 March, where they were cozied up to by Dana White, the organization’s president, a strong ally of Donald Trump, and a board member at Meta (photo from AP News)
Upon their arrival, the state of Florida launched a criminal investigation into the Tate brothers, with the state’s Attorney General, James Uthmeier, a Republican, announcing that investigators had issued search warrants and subpoenas. Following this, the Tate brothers departed Florida for Las Vegas, denouncing the investigation as “absolute communism”, and made an appearance at the mixed martial arts event ‘UFC 313’, where they were warmly received by Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White, a close ally of President Trump and board member at Meta, the Mark Zuckerberg-led conglomerate that owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. White, who himself was caught on camera in 2023 slapping his wife in a Mexican nightclub, told the Tate brothers, “Welcome to the States, boys.”.
The so-called ‘Tate empire’ made its money largely through Andrew, the older of the two brothers, who in his early days had a mildly successful kickboxing career and made a fleeting appearance on the British reality TV program ‘Big Brother, although he was kicked off the show after less than a week due to a rape investigation and the emergence of a video in which he appeared to assault a woman with a belt. Following this, the Tate brothers—primarily Andrew—ran an adult webcam business that employed 75 women in 4 different countries, earning them $600,000 (~€550,000) a month who used offshore accounts to conceal profits from authorities, with Andrew later acknowledging that the business model was a “total scam.” Along with this, the elder Tate ran an online platform called ‘Hustler’s University’, where participants could pay a monthly fee of $50 (€46) to receive instructional courses on how to make money through methods such as cryptocurrency, e-commerce, and copywriting. Members received sizable commissions for recruiting other individuals to the platform, essentially making it a pyramid scheme.
Andrew Tate rose to true social media prominence around 2022, when paying customers of ‘Hustlers University’ were encouraged to disseminate clips of him and his brother’s online content far and wide across the internet, particularly on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The content was conducive to internet virality due to the ‘shock value’ that it possessed – Andrew himself is a self-described misogynist and has said that rape victims “bear responsibility and that women are “intrinsically lazy.” Through this campaign, Andrew Tate became one of the most googled individuals on the planet and garnered a worldwide audience of millions, primarily young males.
The Tate brothers during their move from detention to house arrest (photo from BBC)
Later that year, Andrew Tate initiated an online argument with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, tagging her on Twitter with a post that read in part, “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” to which Thunberg simply replied, “Yes, please do enlighten me. Email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.” In Tate’s response video to Thunberg’s put-down, he called her a “slave of the matrix” who was trying to “convince (people) to beg (their) government to tax (them) into poverty to stop the sun from being hot.” Shortly after this video was made public, the Tate brothers were arrested and detained by authorities in Romania on “suspicion of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group” following a raid on their Bucharest property. Throughout the past couple of years, the Tate brothers’ legal travails have rumbled on: Andrew was charged with rape and human trafficking in June 2023, won an appeal against house arrest in August of that year, re-arrested in Romania in March 2024, placed under house arrest once again in August of 2024, and re-released in January of this year, with Tristan following a similar path through the courts.
Just this week, it emerged in a British court that former soldier Kyle Clifford, who carried out a triple murder of his ex-girlfriend, along with her sister and mother, had searched online for Andrew Tate’s podcast less than 24 hours before the attack. Prosecutors used the evidence to argue that the “violent misogyny promoted” by content like Tate’s helped fuel Clifford’s attack. Speaking of the revelations, four separate British women who have taken legal action against Andrew Tate for what they allege to be rape and coercive control said in a statement through legal representatives that “This should be a wake-up call for all the social media companies who are continuing to platform Tate and his dangerous messages.”
While Andrew Tate remains in Las Vegas, on 11 March he took to the social media platform X—formerly known as Twitter—to announce that he would be “flying back (to Florida) tomorrow” and “looked forward to getting arrested if you (the State of Florida) have probable cause.” He tagged the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in the post, stating, “Come get me if I’m guilty and charge me in a court of law.” Tate re-upped this public challenge on 13 March, instructing DeSantis, “Tell that weak little twig AG (Attorney General) to stop pretending he’s a man on the news and come arrest me. Then charge me with a crime.” That same day, disgraced rapper Kanye West took to ‘X’, announcing “I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING ANDREW TATE HAS EVER SAID,” a move likely to bring even more attention to the matter. For now, no arrests have been made, and the Tate brothers roam free in the U.S., despite the dark legal clouds hanging over both of their heads. Any direct action by Governor DeSantis or his Attorney General James Uthmeier is likely to cause turmoil within the Republican Party, which at present finds itself starkly divided on the issue of the Tate brothers and whether they should face justice for the multitude of offenses they have allegedly committed.
Featured image: Andrew (left) and Tristan, the ‘Tate brothers’, upon arrival in the U.S state of Florida on 27 February (photo from BBC)
