The Abuse That Fuelled Andrew Tate's Media Empire

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3:42Hi, Heidi. Hi, Taylor. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. When did you first hear about Andrew Tate? Like, when did he come onto your radar? You know, I think the first time I became fully conscious of him was back in 2022, when he was arrested on suspicion of human trafficking, along with his brother Tristan in Romania. Their heavily guarded compound outside Bucharest was raided by armed police, and they were taken into custody. And my phone kind of blew up with a lot of people saying, oh my God, did you see Andrew Tate was arrested? and I just hadn't really focused that much on him before that point or particularly followed his his rise over the course of that year sort of in the the manosphere and sort of into more mainstream public consciousness I think I'd been burrowing down and some other investigative rabbit hole and like not particularly plugged into social media and so hadn't been super aware of him and yeah It was only then that I started to kind of really read about this guy and what he'd come to represent over the course of it, particularly that year to so many young men.

4:52That's Heidi Blake, an investigative reporter at The New Yorker who just wrote a wide-ranging piece on Andrew Tate, the British-American influencer and figurehead of the Manosphere, an online community focused on masculinity, wealth, and dating that many critics have described as deeply misogynistic, a label that Tate himself has embraced in the past. Tate has become immensely popular and influential, with his content amassing billions of views and his various online ventures attracting millions of followers and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. But before building that media empire, Tate and his brother Tristan ran a highly profitable webcam business that has been dogged by allegations of rape, assault, coercion, and sex trafficking.

5:34The brothers have faced investigations in Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And as Heidi's reporting shows, members of Donald Trump's orbit have at times taken an interest in their case. I wanted to talk with Heidi about Tate's popularity and appeal, her reporting on the many allegations against the Tate brothers, and the symbiotic relationship between Tate and the MAGA movement. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

6:05So you've written a piece that pulls together so many threads, both about the Tate brothers, their content empire and imitators, and the investigations into their various alleged crimes, which we'll get into later on. But just to start things off, can you tell us a little bit more about who Andrew Tate is, what his public persona is, and how he's managed to accrue such a large audience? and maybe would also help to talk a little bit about what the Manosphere even is, just for any of the listeners who are lucky enough to have not heard of it yet. Yeah, so Andrew Tate, he kind of, he rose to prominence out of a career as a kickboxer, and he appeared on the reality TV show Big Brother in the UK.

6:47And he made a lot of money as a, what he described as a webcam pimp. So kind of like recruiting young women to work for him on webcam, and then sort of flaunting the money that he made on social media. So he cultivated this brand that was all about supercars and diamond watches and puffing cigars as he stepped onto private jets and just kind of flaunting a lifestyle that is sort of beyond the wildest dreams of most teenage boys. While showing this gift for kind of pop culture provocation, He was just good at lobbing grenades into the sort of various sacred spaces of the online world. So like one of his first viral sensations was a series of jibes at fans of Star Wars, which he posted like the day after Star Wars Day.

7:36And, you know, he kind of just blew up the internet by insulting this beloved franchise and getting fans of Star Wars to kind of retweet his post and criticize him and thus go super viral. But he also developed this kind of line of basically extreme misogyny, just kind of posts which openly taunted feminism and women and sort of were just designed to provoke, but which actually also really encapsulated what has proved in my own work to be a very deeply held set of views about women emerging from his own work as someone who had recruited huge numbers of women into online sex work. through very coercive and exploitative methods.

8:23And so he rose to fame in that way through the kind of, you know, sort of post-Trump election, post-2016 period. But it was in 2022 that he became super famous. And what he did was he devised a very ingenious way of expanding his reach. He established this online school called Hustlers University, where lots of students enrolled, more than 160 ,000 students enrolled to learn what he built as modern wealth creation methods. But what it really was, was a gigantic affiliate marketing program, which functioned as an enormous content factory. So members of the university were given access to a library of his videos and could repost them with an affiliate marketing link and then earn commissions by attracting new members to the school.

9:12And so it just meant that Tate's content exploded on social media, he suddenly had all these thousands of fan accounts pumping out Tate content day in, day out into algorithms that were already primed to amplify extreme messaging and misogynistic content. And so that was why, particularly in the summer of 2022, his content was suddenly absolutely everywhere on the phones of every teenage boy around the world, pretty much. Would you say that there's a segment of Tate's audience that likes some of what he has to say but takes issue with the misogyny? Like, I'm thinking of figures like the author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has his own audience that overlaps with the alt-right, far-right, and the manosphere.

9:51But there are also just some people who really like the more anodyne aspects of his teachings, like which were more about, you know, sort of self-help stuff, like clean your room and get organized and stand up straight and live confidently. And so I'm wondering if Tate is also kind of benefiting from an audience that's willing to kind of like split their views or whether you would say that most Andrew Tate fans are aware of the misogyny or our fans because of the misogyny. Yeah, I think that's a really important point. I think that Tate has quite cleverly positioned himself by producing a lot of content which kind of purports to be just about traditional masculinity, just, you know, and about male excellence and traditional values and personal responsibility.

10:33And, you know, by kind of posing as somebody who's just all about encouraging young men to get fit, make money, take charge of their own destiny. And that gives a lot of cover to people who want to make common cause with him because they're interested in tapping into his enormous audience, you know, and can just say, look, this is just about someone who's espousing traditional masculine values, when actually there's obviously a huge amount of very toxic misogyny packaged up with it. But he's good at kind of ducking and diving between those positions and sort of adapting himself to whoever it is that he's talking to at any given moment.

11:07And so if he's talking to, say, Tucker Carlson, he's talking about traditional masculinity and almost framing his message as being about kind of like a sort of pious form of masculinity, which is about like traditional family values and things, which is absolutely not what he's talking about in other corners of the internet. And I think that allows people to see what they want to see in him. And so there certainly are a lot of young male fans who I think really identify with what he says about what it is to be a young man and identify with his message about how alienated a lot of young men feel by the conversations about toxic masculinity, which has been such a prevailing part of the culture now for a good few years, I think those guys can attach to those messages without really confronting the more extreme misogyny.

11:50And that's partly why I really wanted to write this piece and to pull together everything that Tate has done alongside everything that he's said and to show that the misogynistic message that he's propagating really arises from a long career of exploiting and abusing women in a very real way, which is not just about some sort of online performance, which is sort of designed to draw attention to questions of traditional masculinity. Does there seem to be a coherent political project at play in Tate's work, especially as it relates to issues outside of gender? Or is it more about like mobilizing male voters and kind of using these ideas to do so?

12:31I think Tate's message is really all about masculine power and, you know, the sense that the strong conquer the weak is something that comes up frequently in his content. And, you know, for him, the most interesting expression of that is male power over women, male sexual dominance over women, and, you know, societal dominance over women. He's bragged a lot about having shifted the Overton window heavily since he became famous. You know, he's staked out a lot of very extreme positions. He openly has called for women to be stripped of the vote. He's called for women to be barred from the workplace.

13:07He said that women should be forced to procreate to stave off declining birth rates. So in that context, you know, more sort of mainstream conservative calls to roll back gender equality laws, to erode reproductive rights suddenly seem a whole lot less extreme. And I think that is what Tate feels is his political project, is to try to move the Overton window, to try to expand the boundaries of acceptable discourse to a place where it is absolutely acceptable to be having conversations out loud about stripping women of very basic human rights. Let's take a break and then when we come back I want to get into the abuses that have been alleged against Tayden that you have thoroughly reported on and what you describe in your piece as a web of abuse.

13:54This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

14:12So, Heidi, we were just talking a bit about Tate's public persona, his beliefs, and his content. And now I want to get into, for a lack of better way of putting it, the behind the scenes of his operations, which, you know, by your account in your piece is just deeply horrifying. So you've written a story that focuses on a few different examples of women who were caught in what you refer to as Tate's web of abuse. Can you start off by just talking a bit about one of these women? Like, can you give us, you know, sort of one example to start with of what this looked like? Well, I think perhaps the best example to start with is the very first young woman or girl who Andrew Tate recruited into his webcam business.

14:53So this is a young woman called Bibiana Hrushkaba. She was 17 when Andrew Tate asked her to move to the UK, to leave her family in Slovakia, come to the UK, and start making webcam porn for him. Now, by his own account, he had decided that he was not making enough money from his kickboxing career and had decided to start a webcam porn business. In his words, females are assets, and he realized that he had a lot of girlfriends around the world and he wanted to find a way to monetize his assets, as he put it. And so he asked Bibiana Hrushkova to move to the UK, to Luton, where he was based, and asked her to begin making webcam porn.

15:30And as I say, she was just 17 years old. Now, it is illegal in the UK and in the US, in many countries around the world, to film sexual imagery of anybody under the age of 18. So that means that the imagery that was being filmed of Bibiana Hrushkova at that point was effectively child pornography. But online, Tate created a profile for her in which she was presented as a Russian woman in her 20s. And she was persuaded to get a tattoo which said Tate property above her crotch and a large tattoo of a cobra down one side of her body. That is Andrew Tate's personal insignia. He calls himself King Cobra.

16:06It's a legacy from his kickboxing days. And this has been a pattern with many of the women. There are dozens of women who Tate has recruited who he is persuaded to get his name or his branding tattooed onto their body as a mark of his ownership over the course of about a decade working in the webcam business. But there are a lot of indications that Viviana Hrushkova was coerced into working for Andrew Tate. There were many women I spoke to who said that they had worked alongside her and felt that she had been brainwashed by him, that she was frightened of him, that she wanted to get away but didn't know how to do it.

16:39And there are videos that have been filmed of the two of them together in which he is seen whipping her, abusing her and threatening her. And that was really the beginning of a pattern of conduct in which Andrew Tate went on to recruit dozens of women into this webcam operation in a similar way to the way that he recruited Bibiana Hrushkova. I want to go back to something you were just saying, which is how Tate managed to get a lot of women to tattoo his name on themselves. He seems like he was kind of incredible at cultivating this sense of loyalty among these people who he was abusing. And I guess I'm wondering if you developed a sense in your reporting of how he was able to accomplish that, given how just frankly kind of terrible and unlovable he appears to be in the piece.

17:29Like, was there a different register he was able to hit in his interactions with women in the early stages? Yeah, this is a question that really interested me deeply as I reported this out, was how were these women lured in? I mean, I think there was, you know, there's the fact that a lot of these women were very, very young. He did very particularly target teenage girls in his recruitment operation. So I think a lot of these were very impressionable girls who were sort of dazzled by this, you know, this guy who presented himself as being sort of all powerful, extremely charismatic, extremely charming, you know.

18:03And then later on, also a millionaire and somebody with all the trappings of a very glamorous lifestyle. a lot of the women came from troubled homes, had dealt with, you know, abusive parents, had come from, had been living in poverty, you know, had various kind of sources of vulnerability in their own lives that made them, I think, particularly susceptible. And Andrew Tate talks very specifically with his associates and the messages that I have about identifying susceptible women, finding weak targets, finding women who are living in poverty, for example, because they're easier to break down.

18:38And applying very calculated mind games to eroding their self-esteem, isolating them from their support networks. These are things that he talks about very explicitly. But I think also you can see in the messages that I've been studying, where I have sort of transcripts of Andrew Tate's messages with women that he recruited, that these women often really did start out with a lot more sense of self and made more efforts than I might have imagined to assert themselves and to push back against him in the early stages of the recruitment. And he was very good at throwing them off balance and sort of switching between being extremely charming and using the sort of familiar technique of love bombing, which is something I think that has talked about in the context of abusive relationships, where he would absolutely bombard them with affection, with compliments, with flattery, with promises of an extraordinary life together, and then sort of switch in and out of a state of cruelty and abuse and that kind of affectionate mode.

19:45And sort of one of the women I spoke to, who was part of what Andrew Tate referred to as his harem, as the way that he talks about the group of women in his life, talked to me about how he just sort of peppered the abuse casually throughout the day and sort of ratcheted it up over time in a way that made it feel sort of normal. and so that by the time you kind of began to realise what was happening, it was sort of too late and you were too deeply immersed in it to really see clearly. But even she said to me that she didn't really know how to explain how she'd become so entangled. You know, a lot of these women talked about almost feeling hypnotised, kind of mesmerised, and for some of them there was a moment where something suddenly snapped and they broke free and got away and had a lot of therapy and did a lot of work to come through what had happened in order to understand it.

20:31And others are clearly very much still in his thrall and have not broken free and are out there publicly defending him, despite, you know, the messages and evidence I've seen that these women were themselves very badly abused. What was the size and scope of this operation? Like, how many women have come forward with allegations? Well, prosecutors in Romania have tracked several dozen women who say, or who prosecutors say, were trafficked by Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. The prosecutors say these women were targeted using what's known as the lover boy method of human trafficking, which is where the perpetrator uses the sort of pretext of a romantic relationship to lure women into an exploitative situation.

21:10And by Andrew Tate's own account, at the peak of the webcam business that he and Tristan ran, they had 75 women working for them. That was at one point in time. So he also talked elsewhere about having used these sort of exploitative methods that he described in some of the messages I have on more than 100 women. So, you know, this was a pretty large-scale operation, and it was really the source of Andrew, Tristan Tate's wealth. Like, this is how they made all of the money that they then parlayed into this massive following on social media. The Tate brothers have denied virtually all wrongdoing and allegations, in some cases saying that people have been making things up or that certain things just didn't happen.

21:50I'm curious about this aspect of their defense that seems to hinge on the claim that Tate is playing a character online and how he and his brother have responded to leaked chats that seem to suggest some amount of abuse or coercion, if not outright sex trafficking or kidnapping. Yeah, this is a line that was kind of devised by this expensive team of PR operatives and political advisors and lawyers that the Tates hired after they were first accused of human trafficking. That team came up with this storyline that Andrew Tate had just been playing a character online and didn't really mean any of the things that he'd said about exploiting women because, you know, they were faced with a large cache of evidence online in the form of Andrew Tate's own videos that in some cases he'd just publicized on social media and in other cases he'd sold to members of the War Room, which is this network of this men's network that he ran, in which he described pimping women, exploiting women, deliberately coercing women into sex work, isolating women from their friends and family.

22:53And so they had to contend with that and find an explanation for it. And the explanation was that this was not real and he was just playing a character. What I wanted to do in this investigation was to try as forensically as possible to document his actions over the past 10 years, you know, to separate his actions from the things that he said and to say, look, this is not a question of somebody just using hyperbole on the internet or playing a character. You know, these words map exactly onto the actions that can be proven to have been taken by him over a very long period of time. And I think, you know, that is what the piece strives to show.

23:33Both Andrew and Tristan Tate were born in the U.S. and raised in the U.K., but their operation is based in Romania. And I'm curious how Eastern Europe figures into their success, like why they decided to set up there, but also if there's something in the culture or legal system that makes it more hospitable to their project and alleged crimes. Yeah, I mean, I think this is really central to the whole story, because the reason why they moved to Romania in 2015 was because Andrew Tate was accused of rape and strangulation by three women in the UK, two of whom were among the first women he recruited to his work camp operation.

24:11And so Tate was arrested for those alleged crimes. He was released after being questioned and he promptly decided to skip the country. And he's explicitly talked about that, that the reason he left and went to Romania was to escape that police case in the UK. And he feels that Romania is a more favourable jurisdiction for somebody who is running a business that relies on recruiting women into sex work. He talked about having consulted a lawyer when he got to Romania about what would the implications be of being accused of rape in that jurisdiction and being assured that he would have a much softer ride than he would have in the UK with allegations like that.

24:51But he also quickly established links with two brothers who are alleged to be organized crime bosses by prosecutors in Romania. And he made connections with police chiefs and politicians by his own account and sort started to talk about having a sense that he was above the law in Romania. And I could see in my reporting that the police had sat on reports that he and his brother Tristan were recruiting women or coercing women into sex work at least twice before they were eventually raided. And it was only when the US embassy instructed local authorities to go and raid the Tate brothers' operation, because an American citizen reported having been held captive by the brothers in their property north of Bucharest, then suddenly the situation changed and authorities took things much more seriously.

25:39But I think the Tates had apparently operated with impunity in Romania for quite a long time up to that point. Do you think that that, you know, feeling that they were above the law sort of factored into their eventual decision to talk to you for this piece? I mean, I was struck that, you know, in a story where you're talking to so many alleged victims and kind of going so deep into these heinous acts committed by the Tate brothers that the Tates themselves were also willing to speak to you. And I'm wondering what that was like to your conversations with them, especially given what you were saying earlier about Tate developing this whole brand based off of his misogyny.

26:16Like, what it was then like for you as a woman reporter speaking to someone who was so openly misogynistic? I do think that the sense that they feel above the law in Romania has played into both Andrew Tate's brazenness in discussing his webcam operation on social media pretty openly over many years, and, yeah, into the decision to talk to me as well. Part of the reason I wanted to report on this story was that the brothers have been now saying publicly for some time that the case against them in Romania is falling apart, that there's nothing to it. We know that Romania succumbed to pressure from the US to release the brothers from a travel ban in February last year, and that since then the brothers have been traversing the world, kind of making money, spreading their influence, and saying that the case is going nowhere.

27:05And so they do seem to feel very, very confident that nothing is going to come of the prosecution. And I think that did feed into why they spoke with me. I think also they are very keen to put across a narrative that the case in Romania is itself corrupt and part of a political smear campaign against them. And they were keen to impress that upon me. And so I think part of the reason for talking to me was to kind of get that message across. But yeah, it was very interesting for me to meet them and talk with them. Partly, I was fascinated by the extent to which they are willing to totally reinvent history in talking about their affairs.