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The truth about Andrew Tate: ‘His home is less
Hollywood hideaway, more rundown meat factory’
The former kickboxer has achieved global notoriety by
peddling violent misogyny to millions, and claims to have made ‘trillions’ –
but is his life of fast cars and luxury a facade?
by Paul
Kenyon
Sat 11 Feb
2023 07.00 GMT
Andrew Tate
used to cruise along these scruffy suburban streets about 10 miles from the
centre of Bucharest in Romania. Past a litter dump and a sprawling cemetery and
a line of semis that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the TV soap
Brookside. Rolling by in his Lamborghini or Bugatti or any other of his fleet
of supercars. Puffing a cigar and adjusting his Michael Corleone sunglasses.
Beating his tattooed chest at the red light.
Tate, who
likes to call himself Top G (in street slang G stands for gangster), says he’s
done nothing wrong. He might look and behave like a gangster. He might have
boasted of gangsterish pursuits and claim to have made billions. But now, as a
current guest of the Romanian penal system, he says he’s not an actual gangster
at all. He says he’s a good guy.
His arrest
on 29 December by armed members of Romania’s anti-corruption unit – the ones
who arrest gangsters – was over allegations of people trafficking and rape.
Officers wearing balaclavas stormed Tate’s compound by cover of night, and say
they found guns, knives and large sums of cash. Top G and his younger brother,
34-year-old Tristan, were led away in handcuffs. Two Romanian women, Georgiana
Naghel, and a former police officer called Alexandra Luana Radu, were also
detained. The four are suspected of being part of a human trafficking group,
although they say they are innocent.
I’m on my
way to Andrew Tate’s home. I’d never heard of Tate until last summer. I usually
cover wars, international crises, old-school corruption. Tate sounded like
another self-obsessed attention screecher on social media. “He’s not,” said a
colleague. “He’s one of the most Googled people on the internet. He gets more
views on social media than Rihanna. Oh, and he told a Twitch Stream that he’s
the world’s first trillionaire.”
Young, disaffected men began to follow him in their
droves. They wanted more. Tate responded by ramping up the controversy
But how
could that be true? How does a former kickboxer from Luton convert notoriety on
social media into his claimed Musk-scale wealth? And more pressingly, for Tate
at least, what will the Romanian investigators discover about his money-making
activities? If he is found guilty, he could be detained in a Romanian jail for
the best part of 20 years.
Andrew Tate
is a social media phenomenon. His content on TikTok has been viewed more than
12.7bn times. No one else on the platform comes close. He claims to have
mastered the social media algorithms that sends posts ripping through
cyberspace like a plague. He is a master of buzzwords, hashtags, soundbites and
inflammatory language.
His career
didn’t begin online – he was a kickboxer. A successful one. In 2009, he was
ranked number one in his division in Europe. Commentators squawked about his
“multilayered techniques” and “sharp punches to the body”. But by 2016 Tate had
left the ring and entered another pugilistic arena, Big Brother. He appeared to
be a born provocateur: “I don’t care if nobody likes me,” he told the other
contestants. “I know I’m the most intelligent person in the house. Fact!”
A few days
later, Tate was thrown out after footage emerged of him beating an
ex-girlfriend with a belt (although both Tate and the woman deny abuse and say
the clip showed consensual sex). It’s since come to light that he was also
being investigated by Hertfordshire police over allegations of rape. In 2019,
the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to pursue the allegations.
Tate moved
on. He set up a webcam business in the UK, streaming live sex shows featuring
women he recruited. He grew his brand on social media, becoming Tate the “alpha
male” influencer. He railed against radical feminism and declared that young
men needed to seize back their masculinity. “Life is war,” he said. “It’s a war
for the female you want. It’s a war for the car you want. It’s a war for the
money you want. It’s a war for the status. Masculine life is war!”
Young,
disaffected men began to follow him in their droves. They wanted more. Tate
responded by ramping up the controversy. On social media, he talked about
beating women, about grabbing them by the neck. Then in 2017, he declared that
women who were raped bear some of the responsibility. Unsurprisingly, he was
banned from all the major social media platforms in 2022.
In the last
couple of years, it is Tate’s followers, not the man himself, who have helped
to grow his presence on TikTok. They come from all social classes, creeds and
countries. Having publicly converted to Islam in October last year, Tate was
recently seen carrying a copy of the Qur’an to court in Romania, boosting his
popularity among young Islamic men. Schools in the UK are so concerned about
Tate’s radicalisation of their students that teachers are being given guidance
on how to combat his misogynistic views.
Undermining
the protestations of his global fanbase and doing little to help Tate’s defence
are his bizarrely self-incriminating social media lectures
Tate’s
digital army of followers say his arrest in Romania is a setup, orchestrated by
what they call “the Matrix” – a worldwide conspiracy of mainstream media and
politicians who are trying to silence and control him. I’m part of the Matrix.
You probably are, too. Anyone who thinks Tate’s brand of violent misogyny is a
bad thing is part of the Matrix. “The Matrix has attacked me,” Tate tweeted
after his arrest, “but they misunderstand, you cannot kill an idea.”
Undermining
the protestations of his vast global fanbase (Tate fans took to the streets in
Athens to protest his innocence) and doing little to help Tate’s defence are
the bizarrely self-incriminating social media lectures that he has made over
the years. Possibly useful when trying to burnish his gangster credentials for
a credulous online audience, but less so when faced with a real-world Romanian
prosecutor trying to prove you are involved in organised crime.
When Tate
first arrived in Romania six years ago, aged 30, he was asked why he chose to
relocate. “I like eastern Europe as a whole,” he said, “because corruption is
far more accessible.” In the UK, he mused, only those of high status get away
with crimes, implying that Romania was open to all.
Pushing
through the gears, he then complained about how rape allegations in the UK were
pursued a little too vigorously for his tastes – perhaps a reference to his own
experience. “In western legal systems,” he said, “whether England, America, or
any of them, if a girl says something she needs zero proof … and they will come
and arrest you. It’s insanity and I thought, I can’t live under this system any
more, so I had to move somewhere with common-sense rules.”
Those
common-sense rules have led the Romanian prosecutor to keep Tate and his
brother behind bars in what they call “preventive custody” to stop them
fleeing, tampering with witnesses or igniting some kind of Trump-esque
disruption at the Romanian courtrooms. The pair can be kept until the end of
June. Then they must be released or put on trial. Romania has no jury system.
If they are put on trial, judges will decide their fate.
The Romanian
legal system has never experienced such global scrutiny, and the Tate brothers
are already invoking the Matrix as the cause of all this. Leaving a failed
appeal hearing in January, Tristan shouted to waiting camera: “Ask the
politicians, ask the judges, you’re getting closer to the truth.”
I’m driving
towards Tate’s pad, listening to a recording of him from a post that appeared
on Twitter. It’s a tutorial, of sorts, delivered at a gallop in a mangled
American-Luton accent: Tate was born in the US, his parents emigrating to the
UK when he was about five. His father, Emory, was a trailblazing African
American chess champion who died suddenly during a tournament in 2015. His
mother used to work as a catering assistant in Luton and is now said to be in Kentucky,
staying with Tate’s sister, a lawyer. Tate himself claims to have been a chess
prodigy. I continue to listen to the recording as things take an ugly turn.
“There’s no such thing,” he says, “as having girls who work for you who you’ve
not fucked. It’s impossible. You have to fuck them, and they have to love you.
It’s essential to the business, because otherwise women have no loyalty.”
Tate speaks
about curing low self-esteem in young men – undoubtedly an issue – and tells
his online audience to rise early, train at the gym, build their bodies and
minds, push themselves to find self-actualisation. He says they’ll achieve
nothing by sitting in front of their screens all day (I know – that’s where
they’re watching him), and talks fiercely about the need to “suffer” in order
to succeed, a reference to the years he spent in the kickboxing ring, where he
says he saw people die.
The
tutorial has moved on. Tate wants to teach his devotees how to recruit women
into the webcam industry to feature in sexual content for which viewers pay
between $2 and $10 a minute. Some receive a lot more. Romania has the biggest
webcam industry in Europe – reputedly employing around 200,000 women – likely
another reason Tate chose Bucharest as his home.
Tate’s
voice fills my car. He’s explaining how to recruit women who are reluctant to
undress in front of camera. “If you’re on dates and you try to mention [the
webcam business], shit, it doesn’t work, it puts them off. You continue as
normal,” he says. “No mention of webcam. You fuck the girl, after you’ve fucked
the girl … then you start mentioning things like, ‘You’re always busy at work,
you can come and work for me.’”
Given the billionaire hype, and his postings about his
private jets, his yachts, and his fleet of supercars, Tate’s residence is
somewhat underwhelming
To close
the deal, you should take her out to dinner with a webcam girl already in your
employ who will help turn the screw. “Martinis, martinis, martinis,” he says,
clinking imaginary glasses, “bang, threesome … put both girls on camera
together the first day, give them a bottle of vodka.” The money will come
pouring in, he says, and they’ll be hooked. “That’s how you recruit girls,” he
says emphatically. “You can’t recruit girls any other way.”
You can
imagine Tate’s legal team hearing the recording for the first time. It sounds
like textbook psychological coercion. Tricking a woman into thinking she’s your
girlfriend, then pressuring her to strip in front of a camera. In Romania, the
authorities accuse him of the “loverboy” method. In the UK, it sounds like what
we would call grooming.
We pull up
on a patch of waste ground beside Tate’s home in the Pipera district of
Bucharest, a mix of aspirational new villas and ugly post-communist blocks.
Stray dogs bark in the distance. The gate is suitably masculine: heavy, black
and sliding. The door into the compound looks like it might be bomb proof.
Tate’s not there of course, but two of his heavies dressed in black suits
patrol a modest pool, where I’ve seen Tate posing shirtless in online images.
Go around
the side and you realise Tate’s home is less Hollywood hideaway and more like a
rundown meat factory. Faux brickwork, dripping gutters, dark windows. There’s a
pile of rubble where you’d expect the garden to be, and a broken Ikea lamp.
Given the billionaire hype, and his regular postings about his private jets,
ocean-going yachts, and his fleet of supercars, Tate’s residence is somewhat
underwhelming.
There are
plenty of exclusive neighbourhoods in Bucharest, crammed with beautiful villas.
They’re equipped with tennis courts and pool houses and staff quarters, and
they cost millions. If Tate really has the wealth he says he does, why doesn’t
he live in Primaverii (Ceaușescu’s former neighbourhood), Kiselev, or
Dorobanti? His followers say he needs to be “in hiding” in his weird lair to
keep a low profile. But there are plenty of mafiosi in Bucharest who live in
smart neighbourhoods and keep a low profile by not blurting out their every
move on the internet or acting like “gangsters”.
Around the
corner, on the Brookside estate, we’re told that Tate rents a semi for some of
his webcam performers. We wander across, stumbling through a sodden building
site. The house is neat, whitewashed, and in better order than Tate’s, although
its jarringly small windows make it look like a custody centre. On the porch is
a young woman.
Jasmina is
a Romanian in her mid-20s, pretty and charming. She has a lot of tattoos. One,
on her arm, says “Tate”. Others are branded in a similar way: “Tate’s girl” or
“Tate’s property”. We meet a second woman the following day at the same
address. She is branded too.
An
ex-girlfriend of Tate’s in the UK claims she was manipulated by him. “Sophie”
doesn’t want her real name out there because Tate’s followers can get quite
nasty online. She says Tate first contacted her on Facebook. “There were no red
flags at all in the beginning,” she says. “He just took an interest in my
day-to-day life, wanted to know what I was into, what made me happy.” Sophie
flew to Bucharest without ever having met Tate, excited about seeing her new
boyfriend. She lived in the house with Tate and his brother. After a while, she
says, Tate raised the issue of webcam work. “You should do it, you’d make a
fortune – but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” Then she says the
pressure started. “If you love me, you’d do it. If you care about me, you would
do it.”
Sophie had
done some modelling and pole dancing before, so she wasn’t a complete stranger
to this world. It’s probably why he approached her in the first place. But she
went to Bucharest to be Tate’s girlfriend, and fell in love with him. Then she
says he started chipping away at her.
If Tate is to be believed, his webcam business was
extremely fruitful. He said he had 75 women working for him, making him
$600,000 a month
In the end,
she agreed to the webcam work. She says she was under Tate’s spell. She would
have done anything to win his approval. Sophie had never seen his online
tutorial on how to convince women to perform on webcams.
One day,
she says, he pinned her to the wall and slapped her hard. On another occasion,
during rough sex, she says he strangled her until she passed out. Sophie is now
assisting the Romanian prosecutor with the investigation. She is the first
British complainant, and you can understand why she’s worried about a backlash.
The two
branded women we meet at Tate’s rented house have been with him for years. They
are both being treated as victims by the prosecutor, but both say they’re not
victims at all. “I’ve never seen [either] of them being aggressive or rude.
They’ve always respected people,” Jasmina told Romanian TV station Antena 1.
Seemingly unaware of the possibility of psychological coercion, she told
reporters: “The girls were never deprived of their freedom … the door was
always open.”
If Tate is
to be believed, his webcam business was extremely fruitful. He told a podcast
that, at its height, he had 75 women working for him in four different
locations, making him $600,000 a month. We found two of them in Bucharest. An
insider at the Romanian prosecutor’s office said they certainly didn’t find the
75 webcammers that Tate claims.
In the
centre of Bucharest is a former shopping mall converted to offices. On the
sixth floor is Best Studios, one of the biggest and most successful webcam
outfits in the city, with around 200 women on its books. One of its bosses,
Maria Boroghina, shows me around the 40 or so bedrooms where large beds await
the day’s activities. Smartly dressed in an expensive silk blouse, her hair
cropped and bleached blond, she is a former webcam model herself, and made
$20,000 a month back in 2012. Now in her late 30s, she’s the operations manager
and travels the world representing Romania’s webcam industry, attending summits
in Colombia and Portugal.
Maria knows
everyone in the industry. Does she know Tate? Not until she saw his arrest on
television. Is it possible he could have earned tens of millions from the
webcam industry? “Oh!” she says, puzzled. “If he claims that, I would like him
to come and train me, because we are not able to do that.” Then, more firmly.
“It’s not realistic in this industry to win that much money with just a few
models.”
There are
many more Tate companies, though. Perhaps he earned his trillion elsewhere. As
we make calls to the company records office, we stop at a smart Bucharest
coffee shop. Well-heeled teenage boys have congregated from a prestigious local
high school. Have they heard of Tate? There is a rush of excitement. “The Top
G!” A 16-year-old with a bookish air takes charge. “We love Andrew Tate,” he
says, smiling. “He teaches us important lessons about life and things that we
are not taught at school.”
Like what?
“Like how
to act when you want to set up a business.”
Now, for
the sake of completeness, there is more to Tate’s teaching than threesomes and
vodka. Some of his site’s business advice is relatively orthodox. But it’s
difficult to get beyond the misogyny.
I ask if
they think bullying women is OK. “It depends on the girl really,” someone
shouts. There’s laughter and a few whoops. “If you find an educated girl, then
he won’t [bully] that girl … but if you talk to a whore … ” The boy shrugs his
shoulders and gives me a knowing grin.
Romania is
my spiritual home. I met my wife in Bucharest nearly 30 years ago. Back then,
intolerance of all sorts was rife. Homosexuality could land you in jail. There
has been huge progress, particularly since the country joined the EU in 2007.
But traditional views on gender roles remain. It’s not unusual, or offensive to
most, to be told that a woman’s place is in the home rearing children. Wives
cook; husbands are fed. Men are expected to be tough and protective, and to
look like men. Long hair is not much liked.
Sexual
offences have not traditionally been a priority for the Romanian courts.
Neither has human trafficking. Particularly if the accused is of high social
status and the female complainant is not. That’s changing. But would the Romanian
authorities have been pursuing this so assiduously if the Tate brothers’ first
complainant had been a poor Romanian woman?
In fact,
she was a US citizen. In April 2022, the brothers’ mansion was raided by police
following a tipoff from the US embassy that a 21-year-old American woman was
being held against her will. Police officers took the brothers away for
questioning. They were soon released, but the raid and the information gathered
were the catalyst for the brothers’ arrests just after Christmas.
Andrew
Tate, dressed in a black leather jacket and a navy hoodie, is led away by
police wearing balaclavas after the raid on his home in Bucharest, Romania, in
December 2022.
Being led
away after the raid on his home in Bucharest, Romania, in December 2022.
Photograph: AP
In
Bucharest, we’re still following the money. And casinos are in the frame
because Top G says he owns a chain of them. It’s a natural fit for Tate. “The
story is,” he tells his followers in a video clip, “there were three brothers, mafia
guys (naturally) who owned 400 casinos across eastern Europe. I went to them …
” He claims he got involved. Made a fortune. Designed a business model.
Tate says
he owns a chain of 15 casinos and that they earn him $1m a month. Well,
apparently not, according to the company records in Bucharest. We search high
and low, and find no evidence that he owns a single casino. Not of the Bond and
martini variety, at any rate. There is a weak historical link to a chain that
operates slot-machine arcades, end-of-the-pier stuff. Yes, they’re known as
casinos in Romania. But they’re not. That company is currently under
investigation for alleged extortion and organised crime involving the Romanian
mafia.
Tate has
spoken before about owning some arcades in Romania in a business arrangement
with the slot-machine arcades company. His tactic at one was to divert queues
from a neighbouring Starbucks. He’d offer free coffee to tempt people inside,
and they’d shove their lunch money into his one-armed bandits. Enterprising.
But enough to earn him $1m a month?
Curiously,
shortly after the police knocked on Tate’s door in April last year, it seems he
offloaded a Romanian company called Groundbreaking Developments, a consultancy
for business and management, and put it into the name of a woman who was later
arrested as part of the same trafficking case. The company was transferred
again to another woman, who turns out to be a pornographic actor from Grimsby.
It has now been moved to Dubai, and we can’t see how much remains in its
accounts.
I tweeted about Tate’s finances, suggesting he may not
have as much money as advertised. It got 2.3m hits and I was called a moron,
parasite, fake journalist and worse
It’s tough
to find out how much Tate’s Romanian companies are actually worth. We can find
tax returns for only one: Talisman Enterprises, listed as a web portal
business. That has £1.2m of debt.
I tweeted
about Tate’s finances recently, suggesting he may not have as much money as
advertised. It received 2.3m hits and colourful responses from young men
wearing Maga baseball caps. They thought they could detect the hand of the
Matrix. I was called a moron, parasite, fake journalist and much worse.
One Tate
business venture stands out as the likely source of his income. (It’s not as if
Tate is on the breadline; something must explain the €3.6m worth of supercars
and watches the Romanians say they seized from his home.) In 2021, Tate set up
something called Hustlers University, which promised financial freedom through
online tutorials with professors who are “world class multimillionaire
experts”. The website looks like a Vin Diesel film. Explosions. Fireballs.
Drifting Ferraris. But when you get into the meat of it, there appears to be
some sound investment advice. The lecturers look like Bond villains. But
they’re at Hustlers University. What do you expect? One has his face pixelated.
Hustlers
University had an unorthodox recruitment method. Students were paid a cut of the
subscription fee for any new student they managed to bring in. That provided
Tate with a highly incentivised sales force overnight. If you think it sounds
like a pyramid scheme, you wouldn’t be the first. Tate says it’s not.
Subscriptions
cost $49.99 month. Tate claims he had more than 100,000 students. That seems a
little far-fetched – one student said it was more like 30,000. But even that
would have made Tate rich. Hustlers University has effectively rebranded and
opened again as The Real World.
If Tate
really does have immense wealth, I’m struggling to find it. There is one place
we haven’t been able to look though, and that’s the blockchain. Tate regularly
talks up crypto on social media, and in an October 2022 podcast he told
listeners that he flipped a $600,000 bitcoin investment from March 2020,
turning it into a $12m profit.
He does
seem to have at least one digital wallet, but we can’t look inside. Romanian
law enforcement can’t either, but they can track any transactions in or out.
There’s legal precedent, at least, for them to freeze whatever’s there.
Back at
Tate’s Bucharest compound, the supercars have long gone, seized by the
authorities in connection with the investigation into alleged human
trafficking. A neighbour wanders by loaded with shopping. “They’ve never done
any wrong,” he says, gesturing at Andrew Tate’s home. “It’s the politicians
behind all of this. They’re trying to stop him getting to his money.” Tate
would doubtless agree.
He and his
brother are not likely to be home for a while. The courts have until the end of
June to start a trial or release them. An insider in the Romanian prosecutor’s
office said they expect a trial to begin earlier than that, at which point the
Tate brothers will be moved from a holding centre to a penitentiary, where
conditions will likely be more severe. And the mood music isn’t good. The judge
extended their detention in January referring to the brothers’ “capacity and
effort to exercise permanent psychological control over the victims … including
by resorting to constant acts of violence”.
If
convicted, it’s possible they could be looking at many years in a Romanian
jail. Tate, a man created in cyberspace, would see his money reduced to binary
code locked in a virtual wallet that no human can reach.
Andrew Tate
did not respond to a request to comment for this article.
Paul Kenyon is a journalist and author of the
book Children of the Night: the Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania. His
team’s investigation into Tate, Living With Andrew Tate, is available on BBC
File on 4 and BBC Sounds.
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