Andrew and Tristan Tate have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The brothers, dual British-U.S. citizens, are prominent in the far-right, hypermasculine online community known as the “manosphere.” They previously lived in Romania, where in 2023 prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them for human trafficking, while Andrew faces a rape charge. Despite the charges, they were freed from travel restrictions in Romania early last year after White House officials reportedly took an interest in their case.
“Andrew Tate has become a really important political force for the MAGA movement,” explains Heidi Blake, a reporter for The New Yorker. Despite the Tate brothers’ popularity with prominent figures in the U.S. right wing, including Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, Blake says the fact that the extradition request has been greenlit by the State Department suggests the Trump administration won’t be protecting the Tates.
Blake’s recent investigation, “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse,” documents the Tate brothers’ systematic exploitation of women over the past decade.
“What I was hearing from women I spoke to was an incredibly similar description of the way Andrew Tate would assault them, by choking them either 'til they passed out or ’til they couldn't breathe, raping them,” says Blake. “Often they describe being beaten over the head, as well, during these assaults.”
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The right-wing social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. The United Kingdom’s Crown Prosecution Service announced the charges Saturday.
KARENA THOMAS: Thirty-eight new charges in total have now been authorized against Andrew and Tristan Tate, bringing the total number of charges faced to 59. The charges relate to seven victims, spanning a period from 2010 to 2017. … I want to make it clear: There is no place for male violence against women and girls in our society, and we will continue to work tirelessly to support victims and investigate all reports made to us.
AMY GOODMAN: Andrew and Tristan Tate are dual British-U.S. citizens, prominent in the hypermasculine online community known as the “manosphere.” They previously lived in Romania, where prosecutors filed a criminal indictment against them in 2023 on charges including violence, rape and human trafficking. Despite the charges, they were freed from travel restrictions in Romania early last year after White House officials reportedly pressured Romanian officials.
In a moment, we’ll be joined by Heidi Blake, an investigative reporter at The New Yorker magazine. Her latest piece is headlined “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse.” But first, let’s turn to a video from The New Yorker that accompanied her piece. Oh, and a warning: The video includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
HEIDI BLAKE: I’m Heidi Blake, a staff writer at The New Yorker. For the past nine months, I’ve been investigating the British American influencer Andrew Tate.
ANDREW TATE: This was my life only three years ago: private jets, Gulfstreams, flying around the world, doing whatever I wanted, wearing expensive cashmere overcoats. Then they threw me in jail, but they forgot I’m a [bleep] tough guy. It’s almost like they thought I wasn’t a tough guy.
HEIDI BLAKE: Drawing on thousands of leaked files and scores of interviews, my investigation reveals how he got rich by building a sprawling empire of online exploitation, recruiting dozens of webcam workers into what he called sexual slavery.
COMMENTATOR: Sharp sidekick from Andrew Tate. He’s very, very dangerous with that shot.
HEIDI BLAKE: Tate is a former kickboxer who appeared on the reality TV show Big Brother before rising to become the defining figure of the manosphere.
ANDREW TATE: In the world we live in today, being a normal man or below normal is going to be terrible. Even to just find a woman you can reproduce with is becoming more and more difficult.
HEIDI BLAKE: My story for The New Yorker charts the rise of Tate’s online pornography empire from the recruitment of his very first webcam worker, a Slovakian teenager who moved to the U.K. to begin staging sex shows online when she was still a minor in 2014. The following year, Tate hastily left the U.K. after being accused of rape by three women, and relocated to Romania, where he turned the webcam business into an industrial operation. Soon, he was bragging to associates that he had police and mafia connections that placed him above the law, and systematically trawling social media for new recruits, often deliberately targeting teenage girls. Tate called his workers slaves, branded them with tattoos and subjected them to harrowing violence.
ANDREW TATE: Look in the camera! Why are you getting hit? Why are you getting beaten? You don’t [bleep] listen. [bleep] you! Do as I say.
HEIDI BLAKE: Tate and his younger brother Tristan have been under investigation on suspicion of human trafficking in Romania since 2022, when their heavily guarded compound outside Bucharest was raided by armed police. At the time of the raid, Andrew Tate was rapidly becoming one of the most famous men on the planet. He told alienated young men that they were the victims of a feminized society, and he urged them to get fit, get rich and reclaim what he called their natural masculine imperative for power. Often, that imperative seemed to equate to sexual violence.
ANDREW TATE: It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face, and you grip her up by the neck. Machete’s on the floor. Her panties are all wet. And you go [bleep] her. That’s how it goes: slap, slap, grab, choke, “Shut up, [bleep]!” sex.
HEIDI BLAKE: After his arrest, the files reveal how Tate compelled some of his alleged victims to record videos defending him, orchestrated a smear campaign against others and allegedly bribed some to stay silent as he fought back against the case. But the brothers have strenuously denied any wrongdoing, insisting that they are the victims of a liberal smear campaign. And right-wing allies, including Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, have branded the case a conspiracy. After Donald Trump’s election, Romanian prosecutors eventually gave in to U.S. pressure to release the brothers from a travel ban.
ANDREW TATE: Freedom at last.
HEIDI BLAKE: And since then, the case appears to have stalled.
ANDREW TATE: We have our passports back. And just like you, you, you, anyone else here decides to take a trip, we’re allowed to take a trip. So, all of these three years of imprisonment were a complete waste of time against innocent men who have never been tried. It is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty in a democracy. We have never been convicted of any crime anywhere on the planet ever.
HEIDI BLAKE: When I met Tate earlier this year at a cigar lounge in Bucharest, he assured me that the prosecution was doomed.
ANDREW TATE: It’s just garbage out of a corrupt country. No one’s that dumb. Like, human trafficking — OK, show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a — a girl chained up. Show me — show me something.
HEIDI BLAKE: But I have pieced together an account of Tate’s activities over more than a decade, from hundreds of thousands of private messages, internal documents, sealed prosecutorial files and court records, as well as interviews with the Tates, their associates and more than a dozen alleged victims.
AMY GOODMAN: A video from The New Yorker magazine featuring our first guest, investigative journalist Heidi Blake. The video accompanied her recent New Yorker article headlined “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse: How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune — and became a political force — by systematically exploiting women,” unquote. Since that video was made, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have been arrested in Miami after British authorities issued new rape and sex trafficking charges against them. Heidi Blake is joining us from the United Kingdom.
Let’s start, Heidi, with this latest news. Can you explain, as you tracked them from Britain to Romania, where you interviewed them personally, how they got into the United States, and what this request for extradition and their arrest in Miami is all about?
HEIDI BLAKE: Well, these latest developments over the weekend are a huge step change in the case and in the disposition of the U.S. administration towards the Tate brothers, it would appear, because a lot of what I uncovered in my reporting was how, actually, the prosecutors in Romania who brought this human trafficking case against the brothers, under pressure from the U.S. administration in 2025, released the brothers from their travel ban. And when I started investigating this case, the prosecution in Romania had really stalled. The brothers were floating freely around the world. They were traveling back and forth from the U.S. They were visiting other places: Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Turkey. They were in the Bahamas. And they were continuing to amass further influence, to make more money.
When I met them, as you heard there, they said to me the case was doomed. Andrew Tate said there was a 0% chance they were ever going to face trial. So they were very, very confident of their impunity at that point. And what I wanted to understand was how on Earth that was the case and what was the evidence underpinning that investigation. And so, that’s what I set out to do. And as you heard there, I uncovered a huge amount of evidence, really which documented their extremely systematic exploitation of women over many, many years.
But since that article was published, there’s been a big change. The British government have now added 38 new charges to their case against the brothers and have gone to the U.S. and asked them to extradite these two. And that’s gone through State Department. It’s gone through DOJ. It’s now going through the courts. And all the indications seem to be that the Trump administration is cutting them loose. There doesn’t seem to be any help coming, from the briefing that’s coming out at the moment. So it’s a huge change.
AMY GOODMAN: Reading from the BBC last year, “US special envoy Richard Grenell raised the Tate brothers with Romania’s Foreign Minister … at the Munich Security Conference,” who “said he had not considered Grenell’s approach as a 'form of pressure.'” This goes to: How did they end up in the United States?
HEIDI BLAKE: Well, that’s right. So, you know, I confirmed that that conversation did take place between Richard Grenell and Romania’s foreign minister and that that conversation — I was told by a former very senior insider from the Tate brothers’ group of advisers that that had been orchestrated by the campaign team. Now, Richard Grenell denied that, but this person told me that they had asked him to raise the issue. The issue certainly was raised. And what I then learned is that prosecutors in Romania reached out to the Tate brothers’ lawyers only very, very shortly after that conversation and said, “What do the Americans want from us?” And they were told, “We want the travel ban lifted.”
And so, at that point, the brothers were released from the travel ban. They were given their passports back. And the first thing they did was get on a plane to Florida, and they went straight back to the U.S. Now, within days of them landing in the U.S. after that travel ban was lifted, Andrew Tate was again accused by yet another woman of sexual assault and strangulation, the exact same pattern of abuse that has been described by countless other women in this case. And so, you know, they’re free to travel to the U.S. And you now have a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil saying she’s been assaulted by Andrew Tate. But since then, they’ve continued traveling back and forth freely. They’ve been to the U.S. a number of times. They were in the U.S. again over the weekend. But the tide seems to have turned, and that’s when they were arrested.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the things you talk about, or the victims talk about, and that they found that they had in common with each other, were pinprick blood spots, you know, like broken blood vessels, in their eyes, which indicated strangulation, Heidi.
HEIDI BLAKE: That’s right. There were so many features of these women’s stories that were strikingly similar, and that was one of them, that so many of these women described waking up the next morning and having this form of mottling around the eyes, which is called petechiae and is a sign of acute pressure in the head caused by strangulation. And this is — you know, women were reporting this back in sort of 2014, when they first went to the police to accuse Andrew Tate of strangulation. The woman in L.A. who accused him of of sexual assault after he flew to the U.S. last year made the same allegation. And that’s a common feature in so many of these women’s stories.
And, you know, what I was hearing from women I spoke to was an incredibly similar description of the way Andrew Tate would assault them, by choking them 'til they — either ’til they passed out or ’til they couldn't breathe, raping them. And, you know, there, they would develop these injuries. Often they describe being beaten over the head, as well, during these assaults.
So, these allegations are strikingly similar. And these are women who have not met each other, who live in different countries, across a decade. So, you know, that was a very striking feature of the case and something I found it astonishing that authorities didn’t seem to have taken account of sooner. And so, this is — again, this is a very big step change in the case that these charges have been added, that the British government have made this request and that the U.S. government, so far, has greenlit it.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we talk about how they came to the United States and their relationship with the Trump family and other Trump allies, I want to go back to 2024. A woman who asked to be identified as Anna told the BBC about briefly dating Andrew Tate in 2013. She described what happened when she went home with Tate one evening. A warning again: The video includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence. The clip is voiced by an actor.
ANNA: He just looked up at the ceiling, and I remember thinking, “This is weird.” And he said, “I’m just debating whether I should rape you or not.” Out of the blue, he just got up, grabbed me by the throat, smashed me to the back of the bed, strangling me extremely hard. And he’s telling me to take my trousers off. And I’m, like, refusing, and I’m like, “No, Andrew, you said you wouldn’t.” And he’s getting more and more angry at me, strangling me, hurling abuse at me, threatening me. I went straight home, got in the bath, started to cry. It’s hard for me, because I tried to block all that memory out of my brain, because it upsets me too much. I get too upset. I can’t…
AMY GOODMAN: That was a woman identified as Anna who spoke to the BBC in 2024 about “dating,” quote-unquote, Andrew Tate in 2013. So, I want to go, Heidi Blake, to their relationship with Trump allies and the Trump family. If you can talk about their relationship with everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump Jr. to Tucker Carlson?
HEIDI BLAKE: Well, Andrew Tate’s relationship with Donald Trump Jr. dates back to 2017. He became a big fan of Trump soon after his election, and he began pumping out a lot of pro-MAGA content on social media and managed to befriend Donald Trump Jr., who then invited him to Trump Tower, where the two of them met. And they have been in touch ever since then. They have a personal relationship, which has obviously been beneficial to Andrew Tate in the years since. He’s also cultivated a relationship through an intermediary in the U.S. with Barron Trump and pledged support to Barron Trump, who was kind of instrumental in mobilizing young male voters for his father’s reelection campaign. Andrew Tate had a big part in that.
AMY GOODMAN: Just for people to understand, because Barron Trump is hardly in the news, Barron Trump is President Trump’s youngest son. He’s in college.
HEIDI BLAKE: That’s right, absolutely right, yeah. So, there are relationships there, you know, with the Trump family itself. But also, Andrew Tate has become a really important political force for the MAGA movement, because he’s become a defining figure within the manosphere and a proponent of this masculinist ideology, which has become very — you know, a dominant part of what kind of holds the MAGA coalition together, this idea, you know, that feminism has gone too far, it needs to be rolled back, that patriarchal power needs to be reasserted, you know, that women need to be put back under the thumb. He has really led on that.
And he has garnered a huge amount of support from people like Tucker Carlson, who, after he was accused of all of these crimes, has dedicated hours of airtime to proclaiming Andrew Tate’s innocence and decrying the case against him as a political conspiracy. Elon Musk is actually still defending him. I see on X he’s still out there, you know, tweeting supportive messages about the Tate case. But he has consistently defended them and dismissed the allegations against them. And, you know, Richard Grenell has publicly expressed his support, Trump’s special presidential envoy who raised their case with the Romanian foreign minister.
So, he’s really enjoyed the support of a large number of influential figures across the MAGA movement. And, you know, that was a big part of the reason why the Romanian government and prosecutors began to feel that they — it was not going to be politically expedient to be pursuing this case against the brothers in the way that they were, and what led to that travel ban being lifted.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2025, ProPublica published a piece headlined “The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation.” In it, according to the report, “Federal authorities were chided for seizing electronic devices from Tate and his brother, and told to return them, records and interviews show. Experts said the intervention was highly inappropriate.” If you can talk more about that?
HEIDI BLAKE: That’s right. That was great reporting from ProPublica. The person at the White House who was said to have interfered there was a lawyer called Paul Ingrassia, who actually worked for the Tates before he was appointed as a lawyer at the White House. And, you know, he had been part of their legal campaign against the women who have accused them of human trafficking. There’s a particular woman in Florida who has been the target of a huge smear campaign by the Tate brothers. They are suing her and members of her family in Florida. And Paul Ingrassia had been a part of that and has been a huge, you know, public defender of Andrew Tate before he was appointed to this role.
And so, it was pretty astonishing to hear that, in that role, he was then intervening in this federal investigation into the Tate brothers in which their phones had been seized when they landed in Florida. Now, I have to say Ingrassia denies that he did that, but the ProPublica report seemed to be very well sourced and said that it had seen documentation and spoken to people with knowledge of that intervention. So, you know, yet more evidence of the extent of the Tate brothers’ ties with the Trump administration. But again, that does seem to be changing now.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, if you can talk about Elon Musk and also Tucker Carlson, particularly after he was forced out of Fox?
HEIDI BLAKE: So, Tucker Carlson first hosted Andrew Tate on his Fox News show back in 2022. That was actually right after the Tate brothers had first been — their compound had been raided in Romania because of these reports that a U.S. citizen was being held there, and, you know, she had accused them of trafficking her and other women. But the Tate brothers were dismissive of those reports. Soon after that, they were ejected from mainstream social media because of the misogynistic views, the kind of violent misogyny they were preaching. And Tucker Carlson was one of the first people to really embrace them as free speech martyrs. He had Andrew Tate on his Fox News show and was highly critical of the decision to deplatform him. And then, after Andrew Tate later that year was arrested and this time detained by organized crime prosecutors in Romania on very serious human trafficking and organized crime charges, Tucker Carlson hosted a two-and-a-half-hour fawning interview with Andrew Tate, in which he pretty much declared Tate innocent and allowed him to lie extensively about the case against him and about the nature of the allegations. So, he’s been a huge champion of the Tate brothers. I can’t imagine he had any real knowledge of the case or the evidence against them, because the evidence I have seen is extremely overwhelming. But he certainly — he certainly kind of stuck his neck out for them.
Elon Musk, similarly, has dismissed the charges against them. He’s said that the Tate brothers are being targeted by authorities who want to distract the public from real sex trafficking. I’m not sure how he’s making the distinction between what these two men have done and real sex trafficking, but that’s been his position. He’s still making that kind of argument today on X. So he’s been a big defender of them.
Candace Owens, another major right-wing commentator, has, again, dedicated hours of airtime not only to proclaiming the Tate brothers’ innocence, but also to attacking their victims, one victim in particular who she dedicated a whole episode to, to kind of smears that the brothers had — you know, allegations that they’d made against her in court.
So, they’ve had a lot of support from very influential right-wing figures. But that, apart from — you know, Elon Musk is still out there defending them. But that support does certainly seem to be fraying. I mean, the indications now coming out of the State Department and briefings coming out of the White House are that Donald Trump is not going to come to their aid, Marco Rubio is not going to come to their aid. That’s what, you know, various outlets are reporting. And so, it seems like there has now been a change, I think perhaps as figures within the administration have actually got to grips with the nature of the evidence in this case, and perhaps realize that it’s unsustainable to continue supporting these guys publicly and politically.
AMY GOODMAN: And as you mentioned Elon Musk, he was — Andrew Tate was deplatformed — right? — from Twitter, but when Elon Musk took over and it became X, he was replatformed. Is that right?
HEIDI BLAKE: That’s right. Elon Musk reinstated his account on X, where he now has about 11 million followers. And meanwhile, another thing I uncovered in my reporting is that the right-wing streaming platform Rumble, which had just received major investments from Peter Thiel and JD Vance, Trump’s future vice president, gave Andrew Tate a $6 million contract to move his streaming over to their platform after he was banned from YouTube. And there, that caused a huge spike in active users. Their active user base went up by 45% when Andrew Tate moved over, propelled the Rumble app to the top of the Google and Apple charts. So, it was a — you know, it was, in that sense, a success for them. But they’ve been huge supporters of Andrew Tate and very instrumental in allowing him to continue spreading his message.
AMY GOODMAN: And one more time, if you can explain — you mentioned JD Vance — his role?
HEIDI BLAKE: Well, JD Vance, as I say, is a big investor in Rumble, which has profited hugely from the Tate brothers and their presence on the platform. He also, notably, follows the brothers on X. Soon after the election result, he followed them. And so, a lot of people have taken that as an expression of support for them. As far as I know, he still follows them. And there have been briefings that — you know, there’s been reports in the past that JD Vance would take a dim view of it if the British government were to seek the Tate brothers’ extradition.
Now, it’s unclear what his position is now. As far as I know, he has not commented on the fact that this extradition request has now gone through and been greenlit by the State Department. But certainly, the sort of understanding has been that JD Vance has been broadly supportive of these guys. And it will be interesting to see whether he has anything to say now.
AMY GOODMAN: Heidi Blake, we want to thank you very much for being with us, investigative reporter at The New Yorker magazine. We’ll link to your latest piece, “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse: How the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune — and became a political force — by systematically exploiting women.”
Coming up, Forensic Architecture has uncovered new details about how the U.S. killed over 160 people, overwhelmingly children, by bombing an Iranian elementary school on the first day of the war. But first, we’ll hear from the grilling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Tuesday in the Senate. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: The great Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso performing here in New York years ago.
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