The cases against Andrew and Tristan Tate

0:00It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, the United Kingdom's case against right-wing influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. The Tates were arrested in Miami over the weekend after Crown prosecutors issued 38 new criminal charges. This brings the total number of charges against them to 59. And these charges include multiple counts of rape and sex trafficking. The brothers deny the charges against them. Andrew Tate is, of course, known for polarizing and misogynistic views. Here he is earlier this year on the Raw Talk podcast talking about women in the U.S.

0:40women run this country women have more rights in basically any situation than a man men don't have a single benefit or right over women in any scenario ever women can accuse you of rape and things you didn't do and completely wreck your life with no evidence at all women have all the power in this entire country everything is all female-led and that is done not because women are powerful that is done by other men evil men who understand the best way to attack masculinity is to empower women to the point where they just completely drown out masculinity. Andrew and Tristan Tate have dual U.S. and British citizenship, and the United Kingdom's Crown Prosecution Service is seeking to extradite them to Britain to face their charges.

1:21Consider this. The crimes that the Tate brothers are charged with are the foundation of a lucrative business believed to exploit women and young girls. Coming up, we talk to a reporter who has dug through the documents at the heart of another investigation into the tapes.

1:40From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang.

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3:01It's Consider This from NPR. Andrew and Tristan Tate deny the dozens of charges against them that led to their arrest in Miami over the weekend. Their lawyer says that all of this is a, quote, political hit. The Tates are also under investigation in Romania, where they were indicted for a series of violent crimes several years ago. Heidi Blake is a reporter for The New Yorker who got a hold of sealed Romanian prosecutorial documents for that case. Also, British police records and thousands of texts between the Tates and numerous women. Heidi Blake joins us now from the UK where she is based. Welcome.

3:39Hi, Elsa. Great to be on the show. Great to have you. So people might be familiar with Andrew Tate as a right-wing influencer, but can you just explain the business of the Tate brothers at the core of these charges? Yeah, so Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan made their fortune in webcam pornography. This was something they struck on at the end of careers as international kickboxers. They realized they weren't going to make big money in that sport, and so they set about figuring out how to make a quick buck and alighted on the idea that they could persuade their girlfriends to perform online for them as webcam pornography workers.

4:16And this was the starting point of what became a massive empire of online sexual exploitation. And they made a point of keeping the money these women made and using all sorts of pretty sophisticated and carefully calculated methods to control these women, to isolate them from their friends and family. And that was the way they made the money that they then parlayed into this huge online following. Right. But these charges don't only involve women, right? Like they specifically note indecent images of a child. Do you know what the story is there? The very first webcam worker that Andrew Tate recruited was a Slovakian teenager.

4:54She was actually 15 years old when he met her and was only 17 years old when he persuaded her to work for him online making webcam pornography. and it is illegal in the UK where this happened and also in the US to make indecent images of a child. But what the Tates did was create a profile for her in which she was portrayed as a Russian woman in her 20s. There are videos still online of her working for them which are very extreme and very, very violent. And that was happening when she was still underage. Is there any evidence that you found of the Tates pursuing other teenage girls beyond this Slovakian teenager or now woman?

5:33Absolutely. When they moved their webcam pornography business to Romania, which they did after they were accused by three women in the UK of rape and strangulation, they actually set up what was a pretty industrialized operation to recruit women online through dating apps, through social media, firing out dozens of messages each day to potential targets and then kind of romancing them. And as their operation got bigger and more successful, and I think as they became more brazen, they very deliberately targeted teenage girls. And this is something that they spoke about with their followers because they established an online men's network called The War Room where they actually taught other men how to recruit women in order to exploit them and make money from them online in this way.

6:19And they talked explicitly about targeting teenagers, targeting virgins, having parties at their compound where they invited 16-year-old girls and attempted to recruit them to webcam work. And some of the most serious charges in the Romanian case relate to allegations that Andrew Tate in particular raped and groomed a 15-year-old girl in a very serious and sustained way. So this is not an isolated incident. There was a pattern of this. And the Tate brothers were pretty brazen about it. I mean, at times, Andrew Tate was even tweeting, in his words, that he was eugenically selecting aesthetically similar teenage models for his webcam pornography business.

7:01I mean, this is so difficult to listen to. And I am wondering, when did the authorities first start fixing their attention on Andrew Tate, on the Tate brothers? Well, something that emerged from my reporting was that, you know, the brothers actually were accused, well, Andrew Tate was accused back in 2015, right at the very, very beginning of the webcam pornography business of rape and strangulation by three different women, two of whom were among the first recruits to the webcam pornography business. And then police pretty much sat on it for four years and did very little. They failed to gather proper evidence from the alleged victims.

7:40Meanwhile, the evidence on Andrew Tate's phone had not been properly retrieved at all. And the officers just simply hadn't done their job properly. So I do think this was a case where these women were just kind of not believed, not taken seriously. And actually, if police had got to grips with this properly 10 years ago, then I think the internet might be a pretty different place for women today. Well, what led to the Tate brothers' first arrest in Romania? The brothers recruited a young American woman, women from Florida, who came out to their compound and quickly reported in texts to her family and friends that she felt she was being trafficked and being held against her will there.

8:17That triggered a report to the US embassy, which then alerted local authorities. And all of a sudden, local police in Romania took this case very, very seriously. They raided the Tate brothers compound and they assigned one of the country's leading organized crime prosecutors to dig into their affairs. And that's when the brothers ended up being indicted for forming an organized crime group to traffic women. How were the brothers able to travel freely again after being arrested in Romania? because they were able to even come to the U.S. at one point. What happened there is there was a change of administration in the U.S.

8:52And all of a sudden, the disposition of the Romanian authorities towards this case changed pretty dramatically. So Andrew Tate was a key agent in Donald Trump's re-election. He mobilized a huge number of young men to vote for Donald Trump, so much so that Kamala Harris singled Andrew Tate out as a major factor in her defeat in her memoir. And the brothers pretty openly said once Trump was elected, you know, we will now be freed. Trump is the president. And what followed was... Do we know if President Trump had any personal relationship with either of the Tate brothers? We don't know that President Trump himself had a relationship with the Tate brothers.

9:30What we do know is that the Tate brothers had a relationship with his son, Donald Trump Jr. He's openly and publicly supported them in the past and called the case against them absolute insanity. So when Donald Trump was re-elected, there was a pretty rapid change in the disposition of the Romanian authorities towards the case. Rick Grinnell, the special envoy to President Trump, raised it directly with Romanian government officials. And soon after that, Romanian prosecutors contacted the Tate brothers' lawyers and asked them, what do the Americans want? And were told, we need the travel ban to be lifted.

10:04And very soon after that, Andrew and Tristan Tate were released from their travel ban in Romania. Since then, they've been traveling freely around the world. And now here we are. They've been arrested in Miami this past weekend. What comes next? What are you most closely watching for as this story keeps unfolding? Ultimately, the decision about whether to extradite them rests with the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. So it will be really interesting to see whether he decides to let this go ahead. You know, I noticed that the Tate Brothers lawyer, Joseph McBride, who is very close with people in Donald Trump's circle, particularly with Donald Trump Jr., has said that, you know, this thing was just approved by a low level functionary in the Department of Justice and seems pretty, you know, seems to be sort of appealing to more senior figures in the administration to overturn it.

10:54Though the Justice Department did tell the Associated Press that these arrests were approved by leadership of its criminal division. That's right. It's gone through State Department and DOJ to get to this stage. I think marks a very dramatic sea change in the fate of these two men. Heidi Blake is a reporter for The New Yorker. Thank you so much for joining us today, Heidi. Thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced by Mia Venkat and Chris Harland-Dunaway, with audio engineering by Tiffany Vera Castro and additional reporting from Robbie Griffiths. It was edited by Justine Kennan.

11:27Our director is Jonas Adams. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. What happens if we refund tariffs? Why are groceries so expensive? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, because the forces shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works.