Will Andrew Tate Finally Be Held Accountable?

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0:53Over the weekend, when I heard that accused rapist and right-wing darling Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were facing extradition to the UK, accused of everything from sex trafficking to child pornography, I had one person I wanted to talk to. Heidi Blake. Heidi is a reporter for The New Yorker. Just last month, she published an exhaustive investigation into the Tate brothers and their camgirl empire. It's an empire that many women say they were forced to participate in. Heidi flew to Romania to interview the Tates. They even put her in touch with women who defended them. She says there was a problem with that, though.

1:41Heidi Blake: I had transcripts of prison calls in which Andrew Tate was directing some of his enforcers to go out there and make these women make videos defending him. So obviously I took these conversations with a grain of salt. But actually, even one of the women he put me in touch with, who did say she didn't feel that she was a victim as such, she did also tell me that they had tried to prevent her leaving the webcam pornography operation they were running by hacking her social media accounts and having one of their associates threatened to set fire to her car.

2:14Did you get the sense when you spoke to the Tate brothers that they thought the law was closing in on them?

2:20Heidi Blake: I actually really think that at the time I spoke to them, they felt pretty confident of their impunity. They said there was 0 % chance that they would ever face trial and that it was all going nowhere. So how surprised were you when a few days ago the brothers were arrested in Miami? This was a shock. This was a shock. I did not expect the US government to greenlight an extradition request from the Brits. I did not see that coming. Because when I spoke to them, they were floating around the world doing whatever they wanted and pretty confident no one was coming for them. And it does seem that in the last few weeks, that situation has shifted very dramatically.

2:58Part of the trouble with the story of the Tates is that it is both horrific and very public. It's a little numbing to think about the things they are totally comfortable copping to, even now. Have you ever tried to count up all the victims?

3:15Heidi Blake: I have. There are seven victims in relation to the first Romanian indictment that was lodged in 2023. There are another 35 victims in a second case that the Romanians opened. There are then these seven victims in the UK. And there are other alleged victims elsewhere in other jurisdictions. So we are talking about... Dozens. Yeah, dozens of women. There's a pattern. The pattern is choking and raping. Choking and raping and then getting you on a webcam. That's right. Choking was something that they talked about deliberately using as a way to program women. Angie Tate said on a podcast, choke her till she can barely breathe, tell her she's yours forever.

3:59Heidi Blake: You just have to be a large enough force to program her. Today on the show, is the Tate brothers' abusive empire actually about to crumble? And if so, is it happening in time to do any good? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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8:00I think a lot of my listeners, they may have been trying to avoid thinking about the Tate brothers recently. So I want to just remind folks how we got to this point of their arrest and possible extradition, if we can. I think most Americans tuned in to who these people were back in 2022, maybe. basically because the Tate brothers had made themselves into these internet characters. They had a background, like one of them had been on Big Brother in the UK. They were sort of selling themselves online as these snake oil salesmen who could like teach you how to be, like how to control women. And so they became a thing on people's feeds, especially young teenage boys in the United States.

8:52Is that how you remember it too? Yeah, that's absolutely right.

8:56Heidi Blake: So Andrew Tate kind of really, his fame level really exploded in 2022. He'd already amassed kind of some millions of followers on social media with this kind of brand of like masculinism where he would kind of rant about how young men are victims of a feminized society that's trying to crush their mental essence and sort of mix up posts about supercars and diamond watches and so forth with these misogynistic rants. He'd never met a podcast he didn't like want to be on, basically. Absolutely. He would not shut up about this stuff. That's yeah, absolutely right. He was extremely prolific. But in 2022, he devised this very ingenious way to expand his reach, which was that he founded an online university that he called Hustlers University, where he promised to teach young men modern wealth creation methods.

9:46Heidi Blake: So we know that at least 160 ,000 young men signed up, they enrolled in this program to pay$49.99 a month to learn these methods. Really, the main thing they were being taught was affiliate marketing and how to promote Andrew Tate. Yeah, because you got like discounts by like posting stuff, right? It's like you could somehow, by becoming a member of the club, you would like expand Tate's reach. It was kind of a way of leveraging the social media networks, right? That's exactly it. Yeah. So they would basically, these members could earn commissions by clipping up and reposting Tate's videos. So he uploaded to this library of content all of those podcast appearances you're mentioning.

10:24Heidi Blake: And they were then, you know, the fans and supporters would launch these fan accounts and they would clip up those appearances, repost them, and they could earn commissions by doing that. So all of a sudden, you had tens of thousands of fan accounts just pumping out Tate content day in, day out, being boosted by Tate's own accounts. He had a big following already and his content just exploded. So in the summer of 2022, on TikTok alone, his videos had more than 12 billion views. Yeah, we should set them in place. They were living in Romania at the time. But the reason they were living in Romania is that they had been living in the UK.

11:02But women had accused them of sexual assault and rape there and sort of the police were closing in and they were like, OK, we'll bounce to Romania and avoid any UK jurisdictions and basically keep doing what we're doing. Because what they had what they had done was they had recruited young women to be part of their webcam business. Right.

11:24Heidi Blake: Yeah, that's right. So they had sort of starting in about 2014 in the UK, they'd started recruiting young women to this business. Two of those women went to the police very early on and accused Andrew Tate of rape and strangulation. And then another woman, it turned out, had also accused him of the same things the previous year. And so when Andrew Tate was arrested for those crimes, he said, you know, in his words, he just thought, well, I'm going to bounce. He got out of England. He moved to Romania. He had a friend in Romania who was doing business with two brothers who have since been accused by prosecutors of running the biggest organized crime syndicate in Romania's history.

12:03Heidi Blake: and Andrew Tate loved that. He was fascinated by those connections. You know, he started boasting that he was a gangster pimp and that he was a mob boss and had mafia links and, you know, had the police in his pocket and could get anything fixed in Romania that he was above the law. And they just seemed at that point to have total confidence that they could do whatever they wanted and nobody was going to touch them there. And so that's when their kind of recruitment methods of women and teenage girls became increasingly brazen. How did it work? Like if I was a teenage girl who encountered Andrew Tate or his brother, how would I encounter them and what would happen next?

12:39Heidi Blake: So what they did was they would fire out like dozens of messages on Instagram and other social media sites and dating sites every single day to young women and young girls. They would often target teenage girls. They would target girls who were still in school. They would look at your kind of geolocation. They would regularly change their location settings to kind of capture new cohorts of women. And then anyone who responded, they would start chatting up, basically. They would start bombarding them with flattery and making them promises of an opulent life. They would try and meet them in person.

13:14Strikes me it was a volume business because a whole lot of women were like, no, I'm not interested in any of this. But like you just need a couple to say yes to begin the process of trying to exploit them.

13:28Heidi Blake: That's right. And Andrew Tate had a very kind of clearly codified recruitment method, which he called his PhD or pimping hose degree, which he taught to his followers in the war room, which is this like online men's network where he taught this to this kind of network of men that he charged$8 ,000 a year to kind of teach the kind of grooming and recruitment and exploitation of women. and what he told them to do was to find women who are particularly susceptible. He used to say that some women are good blueprints which means they're easily moulded and the way he suggested that these guys find out whether women are easily moulded was what he did which was to have sex with that woman and then to rapidly and harshly withdraw your attention and affection from her in a way that made her kind of come begging for more attention and at that point you would start demanding acts of service from her.

14:21So she sticks around when you abuse her. Like, that's a window that's open there.

14:28Heidi Blake: That's it. And not only sticks around, but then starts to serve you. So you would demand that she cooks you meals or brings you coffee at a random moment of the day or, you know, whatever it might be. And if a woman is willing to perform an act of service, you know, rapidly after you have treated her harshly and kind of withdrawn your infection from her, you know, that you move forward with your webcam recruitment and try and start to get her performing online pretty quickly. And eventually the women would police each other. He would like have a woman who is like his enforcer. And, you know, that would also become another wrinkle in this arrangement.

15:06Heidi Blake: Yeah, that's right. So he would really he really talked about how you had to have a woman who was your kind of recruiting sergeant and how the woman needs to hear it from another woman. So So once he'd gone through this PhD process with, as he called it, with a new potential recruit, he would bring in this woman who served this function for him. He was actually his first ever webcam worker. She'd been a teenager when he first recruited her himself. And she would then, you know, in his telling of it, help him to sell this idea to this new person. And he would also they also used both brothers used group sex as a way to kind of further disinhibit these women and kind of create a situation where they felt kind of where they were more susceptible to the idea of taking their clothes off on camera.

15:49Heidi Blake: So he would he would bring in his this this this recruiting sergeant for him and she would engage in threesomes with him and these other women. And then they would basically be gradually groomed and pushed into this sex work. Once they were regularly performing online, he had a network of other women who would kind of control them, direct their activities, make threats if they refused to do what they were being told to do. The women could be fined if they didn't kind of perform the activities they were being told to do online and they would build up these big fines and then it would feel impossible to leave.

16:21Heidi Blake: They were also banned from leaving the properties they were kept in. They were banned from having relationships with other men or being in touch with friends and family. And they were subjected to really harrowing violence by the Tate brothers themselves, is what I was told by these women I spoke to. Yeah, I mean, they would get tattoos that say like Tate property. You know, they were very much enmeshed in this culture. And it seems to me that his whole operation really exploited the fact that while prostitution is generally illegal, webcam work is not. And so as long as you have the appearance of consent from the woman, then you can proceed pretty much with almost anything, as long as no one's asking you too many questions.

17:10Heidi Blake: Yeah, I think that's right. It's just right that webcam work is generally legal. But what is illegal in almost every country in the world is to compel a woman to perform sex work through either force, fraud or coercion. And that includes psychological manipulation. manipulation. So the tactic the Tate brothers use to recruit women very, very closely resembles what trafficking experts and prosecutors call the lover boy method, where you use calculated seduction, you deliberately use sex as a weapon to get these women under your control. And then you gradually break down their defences, you use tactics like isolating them socially, controlling their money, you know, and so on, using threats of force or violence, creating an atmosphere of fear around them.

17:53Heidi Blake: You know, all of these are things which the Tate brothers clearly did and actually in lots of cases openly talked about doing with their followers. You talk about how like Andrew Tate got like a replica of OJ Simpson's murder trial gloves made with like pimp embroidered on the palms. It's like it's just a very clear signal of exactly what he's doing and how he sees it. It's so on the nose. Yeah, too on the nose almost. ridiculous um he also he got he used to carry a cane with him that he called his pimp stick and he would threaten to you know the idea was that he would hit any woman who was out of line in a way it almost like pushes the boundary to being not comical but like it's it's like so out there you know what i mean and i think he exploited that yeah i think that's right and i think part of the reason why he's been able to get away with this behavior for so long is is kind of this like hiding in plain sight tactic of just being you know so flamboyant about it so over the top about it um that he's been able to fall back on this idea that oh look this was all just an act this was all just for fun you know I was exaggerating for comic effect um and that's that was kind of what I wanted to get into as well in this investigation was I wanted to kind of figure out how did the things he's said about his activities map onto what the evidence shows he's actually done.

19:14Heidi Blake: And what I found was that what he's described doing in the past in these kind of videos he's made for his followers, where he's described this kind of recruitment and abuse of these women, is what he has done. I reviewed thousands of text messages that the brothers had sent to each other, to other associates, to their alleged victims, in which Andrew Tate said things like, I love raping you. And, you know, they discussed choking women, they discussed these alleged sexual assaults. You know, the digital trail is extraordinarily powerful. And it's interesting that these British police are now saying that the evidence they have includes, you know, electronic messages and photographic images relating to these crimes, because this is something that I found that the brothers, you know, left a pretty astonishing paper trail around their activities.

20:03Yeah. I mean, eventually, 2022, there was a raid on the Tate brothers compound because an American woman had gone there. She thought she was going to give piano lessons. This turned out very differently. And this is where things begin to turn for the Tate brothers the first time, maybe the second time, if you think like the British accusations are first and then this. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, he was first arrested in 2015 in Britain, skipped the

20:29Heidi Blake: country and went to Romania. But he felt, I think, you know, he felt pretty cocksure that he'd kind of got away with that and there was, you know, no one was coming for him. But it was in 2022, you know, the big mistake they made was they brought a US citizen out to their compound. They weren't just recruiting Romanian women. They'd recruited Romanian women in the past. They've recruited English women, British women in the past. They've recruited other women from around Europe. But to recruit a US citizen who came out from Florida to join them was a pretty dangerous mistake because I mean all she did was send text messages home to her mum and dad and to a family friend saying I think these guys are traffickers I think the other women in this house are brainwashed you know I like I'm scared they alerted the US embassy and the US embassy then alerted local authorities in Romania who had no choice but to act on on this report from the US embassy concerning a US citizen and so that was the point at which finally prosecutors in Romania started to take action against them.

21:28This woman really suffered for coming forward, right? She really did. When she found out that they'd alerted the US embassy,

21:36Heidi Blake: she actually even tried to stop them from doing it because she was frightened. She was frightened that the Tates would harm her. But then when Romanian law enforcement turned up, she cooperated. She gave a witness statement. She turned over her phone. She agreed to stay in the country for a period of time to testify. And it's striking to me in Romania, there's a provision in the law where a victim in criminal proceedings can attach themselves to the case as a civil party, and then they stand to get damages that can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds, which would be life-changing money for this young woman.

22:07Heidi Blake: She declined that. She said she didn't want any money. She only wanted justice. She's never spoken to the media about her story in any form. She's only ever spoken to law enforcement. Nonetheless, the brothers sued her and her parents and her family friend in Florida. They're still suing her. They're suing her for defamation. and false imprisonment because they blame her for the whole case against them. You know, when I met them earlier this year, they were still fulminating against this woman. They are furious with her. They really blame her for everything. What's her life like now? Like, is she able to live a normal life?

22:44She's in hiding. After the break, the long-ranging impact of the Tate brothers' exploitation and their rhetoric.

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24:33Seems to me the story of the Tate brothers, it's the story of these guys who keep daring the world to punish them. Like, they left England after facing potential charges there. They go to Romania after the raid on their compound in 2022. Romanian officials are sort of looking into them, putting travel restrictions on them. Then Donald Trump returns to office and they get popped out of that situation and they're welcomed back to the U.S. in 2025. Is there any reason to think that this latest extradition set of charges is going to be any different?

25:15Heidi Blake: Well, it does seem like this is a pretty big step change. I think, you know, they've been able to kind of bat away the case against him in Romania by saying, oh, this, you know, this is a corrupt country and this is just political hit. And, you know, don't take this place too seriously. And they have until now seem to enjoy the support of, you know, major figures around Donald Trump. But I think the fact that this extradition request has come from the UK has gone through State Department and has gone through the Department of Justice and made its way to the courts. And the fact that all the briefing that seems to be coming out of the White House and the State Department suggests that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have no intention of intervening on their behalf.

25:54Heidi Blake: You know, if that's true, then I think this is very, very serious for them because it means that they will very likely be extradited. And they're going to face an extremely serious case. I mean, 59 charges in the UK, you know, including allegations relating to sexual exploitation of a child. This is very, very, very grave for them. Yeah, I mean, I did take note that it seems like their organic support is fading. Like the New York Times described the scene outside of the courthouse when they appeared in court where it's like, you know, one male supporter wearing a sweatshirt, you know, calling the Tates heroes.

26:27But that's nothing like what they would have experienced potentially in 2022, I think. That's right. But then the question becomes, where are the Trumps? Because the Trumps really did become quite involved with the Tate brothers, sort of championing their cause as a free speech issue. I think I would love it if you could just walk us through just what exactly the Trump family did. because it is shocking to look back at, like to see Donald Trump Jr. calling the Romanian case against them absolute insanity, that sort of thing. Like they really rode for these guys.

27:09Heidi Blake: Right, they absolutely did. Yeah, I mean, Andrew Tate has pretty assiduously cultivated relationships with the Trump family and people in Trump's orbit right back to 2016, 2017, when he formed a friendship with Donald Trump Jr., met with him in Trump Tower and has maintained that relationship ever since. And, you know, he formed a relationship with Barron Trump, Donald Trump's youngest son. They got on a Zoom call during the 2024 election, right? Yeah, that's right. And he said that he's spoken to Barron Trump a number of times and, you know, he pledged support for Donald Trump in the run-up to that election.

27:41Heidi Blake: So Andrew Tate was pretty instrumental in mobilizing young men to vote for Donald Trump, so much so that Kamala Harris singled him out as an agent of her defeat in her memoir. So, you know, they then kind of tried to leverage that. They've tried to claim credit for Trump's victory and say that the Trump administration owes them. And for a long time, it seemed like they did enjoy a great deal of support across the MAGA movement. I mean, I think Angie Tate is a major figure in the masculinist movement and ideology that's become a sort of ideological glue that holds the MAGA coalition together to a certain extent.

28:14Heidi Blake: You know, this idea that feminism has gone too far, it needs to be rolled back and, you know, that patriarchal power needs to be reasserted in society. The other glue, it seems to me, is money. Like there was definitely there were financial interests in what the Tate brothers were doing that sort of locked them into their position of power, it seemed to me like you've detailed how they had a very lucrative contract with Rumble, right? The right wing app. And so it's like they were in these spaces boosting them with their sort of toxic message. And that helped cement them in place. And sometimes that helped cement their exploitation of women.

29:02Like you've detailed a story of this woman, Lauren Southern, who is a right wing influencer who went to Romania to meet with the Tate brothers because she thought they were going to invest in her. Right. There's the money element. That's right. And she ends up being raped by them and she doesn't speak about it or raped by Andrew Tate. She does not or that's what she alleges, I guess we should say, because they deny it. But she doesn't speak about it because she's so wrapped up in the right wing ecosphere and her own identity as a sort of anti-feminist woman that she can't say anything. You can see how all of these things interlock, the financing of what they're doing, the sort of values they are promoting, and then the culture of silence that's sort of created around their actions.

29:47Heidi Blake: I think that's absolutely right. I think that's spot on. Yeah, exactly that. And it has put them in this extraordinary position of power. But it does seem that their support that they have enjoyed from people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, you know, and then others within the administration, the Trump family is fraying now. And I do think that there's an extent to which I think those people backed them and were willing to hold them up as free speech martyrs and willing to go along with the idea that they were being targeted because of their political views, because of their championing of traditional values, which is sort of the way Tucker Carlson has presented them.

30:28Heidi Blake: I don't think there's all that much traditional about Andrew Tate's whole gangster pimp styling, if you ask me. But, you know, but he's quite good at sort of donning different personas, depending on who he's talking to. But I do think that for a lot of those people, if they actually sat down with the evidence, if they actually read it, you know, if they read these text messages with these young women, if they listened, as I have, to voice notes in which Andrew Tate, you know, brags about raping women, you know, you would, I think those people would find it pretty difficult to continue to support them.

30:55Is there an effort to pursue not just the Tate brothers themselves, but the financial backers who made what they did possible? Like you've said, I think this is a really good way to put it. The Tate brothers went to Romania and industrialized their abuse of women. And that was really made possible by the money they made online with these big companies that boosted what they were doing and didn't control it at all. You know, it seems to me like if that kind of investment is not disincentivized, another Tate brother is just going to crop up eventually.

31:42Heidi Blake: I think there are very big questions for social media companies to answer, you know, the way that those algorithms are configured, we know, boost misogynistic content and extreme content. And so when you had all of those fan accounts pumping out clips of Andrew Tate kind of talking about violent misogyny and assaulting women, all that stuff just shot to the top of the for you feeds of young men all around the world. And I kind of think it still would. Yeah, exactly. Some of these questions are not yet answered. I mean, a lot of those mainstream platforms did eject the brothers from their accounts back in 2022.

32:17Heidi Blake: Notably, Elon Musk reinstated their accounts on X when he bought Twitter. but you know then there's Rumble which as you say you know had just had big investments from JD Vance, Vice President of the United States and Peter Thiel which then gave Andrew Tate a six million dollar contract to pump out more of his content after those bans came into place and after he'd initially been arrested for human trafficking in Romania so definitely big questions there. Also I think big questions for platforms like OnlyFans where there are major concerns about women being exploited and forced into sex work and sexual performances on there.

32:53Heidi Blake: You know, not just by the Tate brothers, but, you know, there have been many investigations recently into other evidence of women being trafficked, you know, into working on that platform. So yeah, there really need to be some safeguards put in place to make sure that women are not being exploited in these ways by people who, you know, profit from their abuse. Yeah, I was going to ask you, like, is this extradition too late? Because it feels like there are a couple of things that happened with the Tate brothers. There are the crimes they committed against individuals. And then there's the performance of those crimes for a very wide audience.

33:31And the performance of those crimes was damaging on a very grand scale. I don't want to minimize what happened to the women at an individual level. But the live streams and everything else, it just feels harder to roll back to me. And the only reason it happened is because it took a really long time to get a grip on what these guys were doing. And I'm not sure why.

34:01Heidi Blake: Yeah, I think that's I think that's exactly right. Yeah, the damage has been extremely widespread. And, you know, here in the UK, the government has, you know, is now scrambling out all of these measures to try to counter the influence of Andrew Tate in schools where education leaders in the UK have warned that violent misogyny is spreading through classrooms on what they call an epidemic scale. You know, here we have national police chiefs have come out and declared that violence against women and girls in the UK is a national emergency and have linked that explicitly to the teachings of Andrew Tate, which they've said are radicalising young men in a terrifying manner, in their own words.

34:38Heidi Blake: So now we have the authorities in Britain scrambling to try and get the genie back into the bottle and try to undo this damage, which was unleashed really, you know, I think way back in 2014, 2015, by the failure of police officers to listen to these women who came forward and reported that they were being, they'd been violently abused by these guys. And back then, it was a small time business. These guys weren't famous. They had no platform. They had no following. They were living in a flat with mattresses on the floor and very little furniture. And, you know, they could actually have faced justice then if these women had been listened to.

35:12Heidi Blake: But, you know, what I found was that the police totally failed to investigate. They barely even bothered to download the evidence on Andrew Tate's phone. They didn't gather witness statements properly. They let all sorts of lines of inquiry go cold. And basically what officers I spoke to told me was that these women weren't believed because they were sex workers and there was a lack of interest in really hearing them out. So there's a huge lesson to be learned there about listening to women and about taking these kinds of allegations seriously. Heidi, I'm really grateful for your reporting. It's just, it's exhaustive, kind of exhausting too, but so essential.

35:50So thank you.

35:52Heidi Blake: Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate being on the show. Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter for The New Yorker. Her piece about the Tate brothers is called Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse. You should really go check it out. And that's the show. What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharm, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is our senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. You can go track me down on Blue Sky.

36:28I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you back here next time.

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