Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate (left)Mother Jones; Andrei Pungovschi/Getty
On July 19, a day after brothers and accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by US Marshals outside a bare-knuckle boxing match in Miami, Andrew’s X account sent out a tweet. “The UK can try, but it can’t actually stop me from tweeting,” the account wrote, adding a smiley face. The next day, another tweet captioned “Why They Arrested Me” linked to a three-hour conversation with 25-year-old podcaster Jack Neel.
The next day, with both Tates in custody, Andrew’s account railed against the British government, where he and Tristan are facing a new battery of charges on rape, trafficking and indecent images of a child, leading to their most recent arrest and possible extradition to the UK. “If I was really a sexual predator like grooming gangs, Prince Andrew, BBC Presenters, or Lord Mandelson (Epstein’s Best Friend),” the tweet read. “The British Police would not be hunting me around the globe. They would be protecting me.” In subsequent tweets, Tate claimed he was being held in the SHU, a solitary confinement unit, adding, “No contact with the outside world. My neighbor is a cannibal who screams throughout the night.” (The SHU part seems to be obviously untrue, given that Tate or someone on his behalf is tweeting for him.)
Tristan’s account was active too, reposting tweets from supporters calling the charges against the Tates “a political attack” and “corrupt Romanian bullshit.” “Romanian,” of course, because some of the tweets he was resharing were recycled from previous arrests. The brothers were first arrested in 2022, after Romanian prosecutors accused them of rape and human trafficking there, kicking off a years-long, multi-country legal fight. The Jack Neel podcast was supposedly recorded in May of this year, according to a comment Neel pinned underneath the video on YouTube, and planned to be released if the Tates were apprehended again. Neel has interviewed Tate several times, always focused on the supposed injustice of his legal troubles.
The Tates have, in other words, been arrested so many times and in so many diverse locales that it’s become a kind of marketing strategy for them. (Only this time, however, their florid, nonsensical outfits while being handcuffed were so hilarious that they generated their own minor news cycle.) The infrastructure they’ve created to build their wealth also snaps into action each time they face legal trouble. Using a network of monetized X accounts, some newly-launched Substacks, and referring continually back to the products they sell—along with conversations and relationships with other so-called masculinity influencers and vloggers like Neel—the Tates manage to use their legal troubles to further bolster their infamy and as vehicles for continuing to build their wealth.
In the video released this week, Neel nodded meekly as Tate scrawled on a whiteboard, ranted about the supposedly biased and incompetent legal processes against them, and implied that the UK and Romanian prosecutors were colluding, all before bragging about getting his leased luxury sports cars—he has claimed to have four 812 Competizione Ferraris, among other things —back after prosecutors seized them.
The Tates remain under indictment in Romania, and prosecutors there said in May that given Andrew’s misogynistic rhetoric, they would add hate speech to the charges against him. In his conversation with Neel, Tate insisted that he leased the cars as part of a clever ploy to keep his property out of the hands of authorities, and not because he couldn’t afford to buy them. Tate also darkly intimated that because of his bravery and refusal to bend to what he referred to as “the system,” he might soon be mysteriously killed.
“I want people to understand, no matter what happens to me, I never feel regret. Even if it all goes wrong. Because I’m proud of my track record of always choosing the brave choice.”
“Planes crash, bro,” he told Neel, adding moments later, “I want people to understand, no matter what happens to me, I never feel regret. Even if it all goes wrong. Because I’m proud of my track record of always choosing the brave choice.”
There are other, more accurate terms for the choices the Tates have made. While the pair present themselves as high-flying international playboys, journalists who have investigated them have found that their sources of income divide into two basic, and very pedestrian, income streams: alleged pimping and multi-level marketing. As journalist Heidi Blake recently outlined in a stunning, and often sickening, story for the New Yorker, the Tates built a business from the sexual exploitation of women, using the so-called “loverboy method.” Put simply, their “method” involved enticing women into romantic and sexual relationships, and then coercing and forcing them to perform in webcam porn. The Tates also allegedly used physical and sexual violence to keep them working, while taking most or all of the women’s earnings for themselves.
The other piece of the Tate business model is either explicitly teaching other men how to become pimps, or taking advantage of their desire to be as wealthy and successful as the Tates appear to be. “Tate presided over an online network called the War Room, in which, for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year, he promised to ‘free the modern man from socially induced incarceration,’” Blake wrote in her story. “Members learned how to recruit women into ‘sexual slavery’ in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or ‘Pimping Hoes Degree.’”
The Tates currently run two main, paid programs, The War Room and the Real World, for young men who want to be like them. The Real World purports to teach men how to earn fabulous amounts of money, while the War Room says it works “to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration,” by which they mean building independent wealth and controlling women, are designed to attract young men, who will pay to absorb the Tates’ pearls of wisdom: the Real World starts at $99 a month, while the War Room currently costs at least $2400 to join, according to a conversation I had this week with an AI chatbot on-site, down from the $8,000 cited by Blake.
There are also a profusion of satellite businesses, including a supplement company called Fireblood; an “official Tate merchandise” brand called Top G (a name Andrew Tate often uses for himself and other so-called “high-value” men); a program that’s supposedly “the next evolution to the Real World” that they call “Champions”; Tate TV, a streaming platform, and a Rumble channel, Tate Speech, which broadcasts the same content as Tate TV. Several of these brands and platforms have been leveraged by whoever controls them in recent days to promote the narrative of the Tates’ innocence and their claim that they’re being unfairly persecuted for the crimes of being too rich or too masculine. These properties are also being used to signal that even while incarcerated, the Tates will never be inaccessible; they can continue tweeting and communicating with their followers using intermediaries.
“My daily messages the next few weeks may be delayed. But. I will never stop being on your side. Become a success.”
“Andrew Tate’s NEW message to The Real World students,” blared a tweet from the Real World’s X account on July 21. It showed a screenshot of a chat room for Real World “students,” with a message from Tate reading, “My daily messages the next few weeks may be delayed. But. I will never stop being on your side. Become a success.”
In messaging to his “students,” Andrew Tate has also counseled that when the facts and reality are not on one’s side, they should be ignored. In a recent so-called “emergency broadcast” entitled “Mind Tricks,” recorded for his followers on June 16, Andrew repeated this message, urging the ignore-and-deny approach to anything that happens that they don’t like or that doesn’t make them look powerful, whether it’s a business failure or the rejection from a woman. Even if 50 women reject them, Tate said, a man should ignore them all and claim to his friends that in fact he rejected every single one. Not to worry, he promised, the 51st woman will be “a baddie,” a marker of his students’ success and high-caliber manhood. (This despite the fact that by his own admission, Tate does not enjoy the company of women; he’s referred to sex with women as “gay” if it’s not for procreation.)
“All of a sudden you’re winning,” a shirtless Tate declared into his podcasting microphone.
He then continued and offered media advice to his fans. When being interviewed by a news outlet like the BBC, he said, he would reply “Nah” if they pointed out that he’d been arrested or been to jail, then he would act confused, or tell them “You must have the wrong person.”
“Reality is what I decide; it is inside of my mind,” Tate explained, pointing at his shiny skull. “You don’t get to tell me what reality is.” Within that framework, he said, you get “unlimited opportunities” at whatever goal you happen to be aiming for.
Neither Andrew nor Tristan Tate are, of course, following Andrew’s advice here; by tweeting and posting and vlogging endlessly about their legal troubles, they’re only drawing more attention to the hotter and hotter water they happen to be swimming in. But they clearly hope to marshal powerful support for what could be a long and serious legal fight in the UK.
To date, that hasn’t gone well, and it’s not because they lack powerful allies. The Tates are popular with lots of people in and around the Trump administration and family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump, as well as former Trump advisor and former acting US attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, While the Tates’ US lawyer Joseph McBride recently called on the Trump administration to block their extradition to the UK, the State Department told CNN on Tuesday that the agency had “no plans to act” on that request. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to journalists on Thursday that the president wouldn’t intervene on the Tate’s behalf to stop the extradition. (In response, McBride told TMZ, “Ms. Leavitt is great, but she is not the President or the Secretary of State. There is no extradition without the Secretary of State’s signature. Until that signature exists, it’s all commentary.”)
In addition to the open investigations in the UK and Romania, the Tates are also the subject of a state attorney general investigation in Florida, but no charges have yet been filed. Andrew Tate’s legal woes are not restricted to the joint, pimping-related charges with his brother. He’s being separately sued for sexual assault and battery by an ex-girlfriend in Los Angeles Superior Court, Brianna Stern, who says he beat and choked her during the relationship. The case is still open. According to court documents, Tate subsequently accused Stern of slander and counter-sued her for $50 million, but portions of that suit were subsequently dismissed. Tate also said in an affidavit in the Los Angeles case that he has filed a criminal case against Stern for slander in Dubai, where he owns a penthouse.
Tate’s fans in the MAGAsphere have rushed to their support; this week they’ve gotten supportive comments from figures like white supremacist incel ringleader Nick Fuentes and Republican Congressman Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ), who likened their situation to that of President Donald Trump.
“No American court has charged them with a crime despite years of false alarms and innuendos,” Hamadeh tweeted on July 20. “They’ve been deplatformed, debanked, arrested, and still no convictions—something President Trump has endured for years.”
Despite these ringing endorsements, the consequences for the Tates in the UK could be serious; Andrew specifically could face life imprisonment if convicted on all charges.