The women who spoke out against the Tate brothers: rape, violence and sexual exploitation

“There is no victim,” stated Tristan Tate, brother of Andrew Tate, one of the most famous men on the internet, before the two were heard in Bucharest, Romania, by the Terrorism and Organized Crime Investigation Department (DIICOT) in January 2023. The two are being investigated for establishing a criminal group, human trafficking, and rape. 

Four women told prosecutors how they were held against their will and raped, assaulted or forced into sex work.

RISE Project has obtained the testimonies of the victims – young women from the United States, the Republic of Moldova, and Romania. Then, it set out to track the early days of the Tate brothers’ webcam empire in Great Britain, amassed over 50 accounts of women and girls in their proximity, from Prague to Chișinău and Dubai, and pieced together the profile of a potential human trafficker, popular across the globe. 

His opinions on violence against women and rape victims, cosumed by millions of fans all over the world, encourage boys to despise their sisters and girlfriends, and even commit violent acts against their female colleagues and teachers, warn school safety organizations in the UK. Andrew Tate “is brainwashing a generation of boys, and it’s very frightening,” stated one teacher in London. His youngest fans are ten years-old. 

The accusations made by Romanian anti-mafia prosecutors are overturning the idol’s image of a responsible businessman. Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, the prosecutors allege, were actually recruiting women and girls, in order to exploit them for online porn. 

“The police have fabricated the evidence” was the Tate brothers’ defense during the three months they were in police custody. Recently placed under house arrest, the two have maintained their total innocence, after launching a public support campaign and trying to intimidate the victims who had testified against them. 

”Are they really that dangerous?”

Irina* is a blond girl with almond-shaped eyes who goes to high school in Bucharest. Last winter, Tristan Tate (34) started following her on Instagram. He is the brother of Andrew Tate (36), one of the most famous men on the Internet. “We matched on Tinder, he told me he was in London…”

Adela* teaches at a private kindergarten in Bucharest. She is also very beautiful. She, too, received an Instagram message from Tristan last year, asking her out for coffee. “He told me I was interesting and he’d like to get to know me better. After briefly researching him and finding out what he does for a living, I declined. (…) I think if you’re slightly more vulnerable, getting a message from an influential, successful man can pique your interest. You feel you’re special and  you don’t give it a second thought that maybe something isn’t quite right,” says Adela.

In December 2022, a few weeks after Tristan had tested the waters with high school student Irina*, he was arrested in Romania, alongside his brother and two of their accomplices for human trafficking and rape charges. Since early 2021, the DIICOT prosecutors write, the Tate brothers formed an organized crime group in Romania, with the aim of sexually exploiting girls and women from several countries. The head of the network was Andrew, the older brother, with Tristan serving as deputy.

They ran their operations on the outskirts of Bucharest, in the suburban town of Voluntari: a villa with a pool and a garage for swashbuckling, and another house within a stone’s throw, in the American Village residential compound, for the girls and for webcamming. 

The recruiting pool, however, was global. The two men used social media platforms and dating apps in order to seduce young women from all over the world and force them into sex work. 

Under 18

Underaged girls and virgins were always on the list of potential Tate brothers’ victims. In a video from “The Tate Movement” series, Tristan brags that he takes the virginity of two-three girls each year and promises he can also teach his fans the recipe for deflowering. 

In another video, the younger brother recounts that he took the virginity of one of the girls currently making money for him when she was 17 and that she now has 200,000 Instagram followers. “Why would you be with a woman who’s not a virgin anyway?,” Andrew rhetorically asks himself in a 2014 interview, which he gloriously ends with the sentence “I’m a pimp superstar.”

The two went on to exploit minors for personal gains in Romania as well. Before being arrested, Andrew and Tristan Tate were constantly throwing parties at their house, with young women aged 16 to 22 on the guest list, “especially naive girls, with personal issues,” whom they sought to recruit, as one of the victims told the DIICOT prosecutors. “They even repeatedly asked us, who were already working for them, to talk to the girls attending the parties and get them to also do OnlyFans, by presenting it to them as a life of luxury,” the young woman added.

Another woman who was locked up at the Voluntari villa told prosecutors that “a blond girl is working for Andrew (…) I saw her at their house and I know from B. that she is 17 years-old.” 

Aside from them, there was an endless stream of young women at their disposal, whom they could lure in with sweet talk and success stories. We’ve reached out to dozens of social media accounts belonging to victims or witnesses.  

“You’re doing a story about the Tates? (…) anything you want to know I can provide for you.” – we got a message the day after we phoned a couple of young women who attended the brothers’ parties. “I am Tristan Tate.”, said the author. He insisted that he does not commit any crimes and that “As of today ZERO women have come forward to say anything negative about me.”

Then we came back with a question about the accusations of the four women in the human trafficking case. He wasn’t friendly anymore. He denied the existence of the testimonies ”no woman said those things about us” and “No statement from any woman says anything of the kind”. The he told us abruptly that he didn’t want us to credit him with any of these statements and, after we explained that the rules of this game say he should have told us that before he talked to us, he warned us he will put us on the “long list” of people he was going to sue.

 

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Are they really that dangerous?, Irina* asks, and this question betrays all the vulnerability of a whole part of our society. Romania continues to top the European Union chart of countries with the highest number of human trafficking victims.

Sheltered by their fame, the Tate brothers would trick the girls into believing they’d fallen in love with them. They would present themselves as successful businessmen, millionaires, and global influencers. Then, they would talk them into moving to Voluntari and performing pornographic content online, in exchange for payments from clients. The money would land in the brothers’ pockets. 

In fact, they were using the classical ‘loverboy’ method, with a digital twist: they faked love through chat messages, until they caught their ‘girlfriends’ in the Voluntari spiderweb. There, write the prosecutors, “through acts of physical violence and psychological coercion (intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts), they were sexually exploited by members of the group.” 

Four women testified before DIICOT prosecutors. Some talked about how they were locked up and raped, others about how they were assaulted and coerced into forced sex work. They all talk about other girls, minors, war refugees, girls who have managed to escape, or girls who are still prisoners in the brothers’ Andrew and Tristan web of lies: a few of them have moved to Romania and started running some of their businesses. They are raising their children and wearing their tattoos. They make – or used to make – money for them.

The total number of victims is impossible to determine. Their tracks are lost in accounts with thousands of filters and names, created over the past 10 years. We have tracked over 50 accounts of girls and women in the Tate brothers’ close circles, from the USA to the Republic of Moldova. 

Andrew Tate states he began his webcam business by placing his girlfriends on dedicated websites, after he’d had the revelation that “girls are an asset” for making money. But only if they are under his constant surveillance, because “women are lazy” and are content with too little, unless you flog them. Tate also says that, at some point, he had 75 women working for him, on four different points on the map, who were earning him $600,000 each month. 

It was recently revealed that in 2015 Andrew Tate was arrested twice in Great Britain: two women working for him went to the police in Hertfordshire, a county close to London, and told the officers that they had been raped by Tate – one in 2013, the other in 2015, when she was working for his webcam business. A third woman filed a complaint for violence: she had been repeatedly strangled by Tate and had witnessed several instances in which her boss was physically abusive towards her female coworkers. The cases were closed four years later, after Andrew and Tristan had already moved to Romania. 

According to European Council estimates, crimes linked with human trafficking generate €29.4 billion in profit each year. It’s one of the most profitable industries in the world and the most tragic.

Romania is the leader of the pack: our country features as the main source of trafficking victims in the European Union.

In 2021 over one third of human trafficking victims identified in Romania are underage, notes a US State Department report. The same year, a quarter of the traffickers caught by the authorities were sentenced to less than the minimum three years’ imprisonment stipulated by law.

When the justice system is permissive, criminals flourish. According to unofficial estimates by Romania’s antimafia prosecutors, the country is home to 3.000 to 4.000 human traffickers. Andrew Tate is just the most famous of those being charged. Yet audiences know him as a ‘self made man,’ rewarded by the gods of success with a life of luxury and voluptuous pleasure.

Tate’s children

Until their December 2022 arrest, the British-American brothers had exploited social media algorithms in order to propagate their misogynistic, violent teachings to all corners of the internet, from small-time, well-off influencers, concerned by the crisis of masculinity, to ten year-old kids on TikTok. 

Teachers all over the world, from England to Australia, are protesting Andrew Tate’s toxic influence on their students. He is altering the way they view the women and girls in their lives. ”Women are inferior to men” and “women belong in the kitchen, Ms.,” one teacher says she kept hearing from the boys in her classroom. Over the past year, organizations in the field have reported a massive uptick in incidents of harassment and aggression against female students and teachers in British schools, and Tate’s influence over school-aged children was discussed in the British Parliament. 

There are no such debates in Romania, just random signs of concern. In January 2023, the World Vision Romania Foundation (WVR), with decades of activity for the benefit of children in vulnerable areas, points out that “toxic figures online, such as Andrew Tate, are extremely dangerous for children and youths, especially for those in underprivileged environments.” Several girls aged 12 to 15, members of the Children’s Consulting Board at WVR, say they have noticed the influence of the brothers’ Tate toxic discourse among boys their age.

“A blond girl, a curly girl / I leave home each morning / Because I know she’s trash,” “She claims she’s a good girl, but we get inside her like she was a cab / I got pockets full of money, so slaves envy me,” sing two teenage Romanian trappers, who get millions of YouTube views. Asked what words define them, at the Beach, Please Festival, the kids replied, “Top G! I identify with Cobra Tate a lot. Cobra Tate is my brother. I love you!,” one of them said. “Cobra Tate, we looove you!,” the other one yelled.

An entire generation of children is gobbling up advice on life and women from a man accused of human trafficking, disguised as a teacher. Some shell out $50 dollars a month for this, at Tate’s online ‘universities,’ lining his pockets. Others just stumble upon his maxims online. 

In 2017, at the height at the #metoo movement, Andrew Tate was tweeting that rape victims should also bear responsibility for the aggressions. It was also then that he stated he moved to Romania primarily because the police here don’t take rape accusations seriously.

The girl in the window

Her name sounds Russian, she has blue eyes and she’s as beautiful as a painting. She smiles, dances, and does imperfect lip syncs on TikTok. She plays with filters – some thin out her eyebrows, others color her hair. She posts from the same indoor spaces. She seems to be flirting with you. “You look lonely. I can solve this.” “Oh, how I wish I was your leather pants,” someone comments.  

The blue-eyed girl is a human trafficking victim. She says that Andrew Tate lured her to Romania with promises of marriage, then locked her up in a house, and put her to work. In March and April 2022, Natasha* was allegedly raped, monitored, intimidated, threatened, and prohibited from leaving the American Village house in Voluntari on her own, where she was being held together with the other girls producing pornographic content for the Tate brothers. She was also coerced into filming TikTok videos in order to make money. The police released her after a month of terror, in April 2022. She is one of the young women who filed a complaint against the Tate brothers, in the case file in which the two are now being investigated for human trafficking and rape. When her name was published online, Tate fans wished her to be “punished by God.” 

They’re persecuting me because I’m rich and successful. Do not get rich in Romania!

“It’s a set up!,” Tate supporters cry out. “The authorities are planning to steal my cars and steal my money!,” cries Tristan Tate in front of the journalists waiting for them outside the courthouse.

Their defense involves discreditation and intimidation. On the phone while under arrest, at Bucharest police HQ, Andrew Tate orders one of his close acquaintances to drag one of the girls who filed a complaint against him through online mud. The conversation is recorded and the transcript has been made public. But the fight is imbalanced. The Tate brothers’ accounts have millions of followers, both bots and real people, who eat up the messages on Romania’s corrupt justice system and the poor brothers’ innocence.

#freetate t-shirts are sold. Protests are organized.

For a large part of the global public, the Tate brothers are martyrs who spoke the truth and were made to pay for it. The ordeal of human trafficking victims is oftentimes left unspoken. “I am very afraid of the Tate brothers. (…) The Tate brothers are connected to the Russian and the Romanian mafia,” one of the young women stated during the hearings. 

The henchwomen

The Tate brothers have two right-hand women. They are also called “assistants,” “angels,” or “witches.” Through them, they controlled and exploited the girls who worked for them, the prosecutors claim. They both “verbally abused us and threatened to beat us up, if we didn’t do our job,” one of the girls recounted. Both of them have been arrested alongside the Tate brothers. They are also being investigated for forming an organized crime group and for human trafficking. 

Luana Radu is part of the Tate team from at least 2021. She was a sub-inspector officer at police Precinct no. 7 in the Colentina neighborhood in Bucharest, then moved on to webcamming. She is one of the models at the talismanagement agency. With the girls working for the Tate brothers, she seemed to have played both the good cop and the bad cop. Together with the other accomplice, the girls say, she controlled their posts, accounts, money, and lives. If the girls didn’t do as they were told, the women threatened to beat them up. Luana’s social media accounts, two or three on each platform, broadcast sexy photos and videos. More accounts mean better odds at making a profit on OnlyFans. Georgiana Naghel is from Comănești, Bacău county, Romania. Her Facebook profile is a faithful record of her professional ascent, from club hostess to wine representative, event organizer, and “Miss G” (Andrew Tate is nicknamed “Top G”). She modeled for an agency in Brașov, then represented Romania in Lebanon, at „Miss Europe World”, a competition trying to imitate Miss Europe. 

În 2015, she featured in photos from the RXF fighting galas in Romania, where the Tate brothers were commentators. In 2016, she posted a Facebook photo, in which she’s in a pensive mood, inside a closet. Tristan Tate commented: “How did you get out of my closet again?” A year later, she posted photos in which she was driving the brothers’ Lambo, with Tristan by her side. In 2021, she was sitting next to Andrew Tate on a private jet – the photo was posted to Tate’s since deleted Instagram account, with the caption: “Flying in my jet with the only woman I trust. My very own full time witch. Magic powers.” 

“I was afraid of Georgiana,” one of the exploited girls admits. The young women who testified against the Tate brothers says she kept records of the money the girls earned on TikTok and OnlyFans in a notebook. She closely monitored them and told them they work too little. At the end of the month, she was the one who handed them the money and the penalties. 

In the summer of 2022, after the first police raid at the Tate brothers’ estate in Voluntari, several of their companies were signed over to Georgiana Naghel.

In a video posted to Facebook in February 2022, Georgiana Naghel is celebrating her birthday at the Tate brothers’ Voluntari villa: she is using a sword to cut a cake with black glazing wings, which reads ‘Queen of Hell.’ 

Natasha’s*, Anna’s*, Sofia’s*, and Adela’s* testimonies have been pieced together from the DIICOT file in which the Tate brothers are being investigated for forming an organized crime group, human trafficking, and rape. The names in the text have been changed to protect their identity. The case is still under criminal investigation, with prosecutors expected to complete their investigation and refer the case to a judge. Until then, the Tate brothers and their henchwomen wait under house arrest. 

Neither Andrew Tate nor Naghel and Radu would comment on the charges in the file.

„I’m coming to rape you”

The story of the girl in the TikTok window begins in January 2022, when she sees an Instagram video of Andrew Tate praising the beauty of women across the River Prut. Natasha* shares it. Andrew personally writes to thank her. 

He charms her (“increasingly more romantic, a sort of loverboy”) and goes to London to see her on her birthday. He tells her he wants to marry her. He convinces her to come visit him in Romania for a few weeks. 

When she sets foot at the Otopeni airport, Natasha* doesn’t see Andrew. Instead, assistant Georgiana Naghel is there. She takes her to a Voluntari villa turned webcam studio, a few minutes’ walk away from the Tate brothers’ poolside property. She believes she will only spend a few days there, until Andrew returns. Over the following weeks, the girl is coerced to make TikTok videos and refuses to undress on OnlyFans. “A submissive woman is a woman loyal to her man,” Tate insists.

If you want to make money on TikTok, you go live and accept virtual gifts from fans. A rose for a smile, a diamond for a nipple. On OnlyFans you can subscribe to your favorite women and ask them to masturbate for you, in exchange for tips. Both platforms have been investigated for not enforcing filtering systems that are clear enough, in order to protect minors and human trafficking victims.

In 2021, the talismanagement account is set up on Twitter; it is presented as “the world’s foremost OnlyFans talent management agency.” ‘Talisman’ is Tristan Tate’s nickname, imprinted into the name of several of the brothers’ companies, as well as onto the bodies of several girls. The Twitter page works like a photo album with women displaying varying degrees of nudity – the Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts act as hooks, meant to make men pull out their credit cards on OnlyFans. 

Among the talismanagement girls, we spot Abigail Tyson, a longtime collaborator of the brothers, a webcam & porn model and the co-owner of a Dubai company who took over some of their businesses from home, former police officer Luana Radu, one of the two accomplices arrested alongside the brothers, as well as two victims, who refused to present themselves as victims in front of the prosecutors.

Yet the Romanian Criminal Code makes the rules of consent regarding human trafficking clear: a victim is viewed as such in the eyes of the law, regardless of whether or not she accepted being exploited in a vulnerable moment.

In Romania, there are women who claim they make €40,000 a month on OnlyFans. In the US, they can make as much as $100,000. The girls working for the Tate brothers don’t know how much they make. The money goes into the accounts of the network bosses, who only give them a very small percentage of the earnings, according to the testimonies on record. They isolate them from friends and family, to better be able to control them. “Some girls haven’t seen their families in years,” one witness recounts.

Natasha* is under surveillance 24/7 and isn’t even allowed to go out for a walk, without one of the Tate brothers’ trusted people. The American Village house is always locked. After two Ukrainian girls run away, she realizes that she’s also a prisoner and it won’t be easy for her to leave the place. 

She is given a cellphone, which comes pre-installed with the TikTok account of one of Tristan’s ex-girlfriends, who is no longer in the house. She watches the girl’s videos and sees her tattoo of Tristan Tate’s nickname, ‘Talisman.’ She becomes even more frightened. “I yelled at Andrew that he brought me into that environment and that I don’t consent to this.”

I’m coming to rape you, Andrew Tate allegedly writes to her before returning to Romania. He asks her to take photos of herself in sexy poses with the other girls – “He told me that he wanted to see me submit to him, that he wants to see his girl submitting to her man.” Her housemates encourage her to accept, because “this increases Andrew’s pleasure.”

The man who had lured her to Romania with the promise of marriage repeatedly coerces her into unwanted sexual acts, although she had firmly told him she didn’t want this. She is pushed into accepting a foursome with Andrew, two other girlfriends of his, and plenty of alcohol, in a room at the Marriott hotel. After the sex is consummated, the girl weeps in the bathroom. She doesn’t go to the police, because she thinks Andrew is “capable of anything.”

On another night, Andrew “told me to take my clothes off, keep my shoes on, then hit me across the face. I couldn’t reject him, because during the sex act he would grip my head and tell me that he didn’t want to see anymore negative messages from me and that I was lucky he hadn’t locked me up inside a house. Then he told me he would first have to impregnate me, then lock me up inside a house – and that after this I would certainly go insane.”

Digital pimping

Another girl moves to the house. Anna* is from America and has been brought in by Tristan. They had met online, saw each other in Miami, at a War Room conference – a ‘school’ for men who pay thousands of Euros to learn from the Tate teachers how to use women or make fake passports and free themselves from “socially induced incarceration.”

He insists and Anna* accepts to come visit Romania.

Tristan waits for her at the airport, picks her up in his Rolls, and takes her to the Tate brothers’ villa on Drumul Bisericii (translators’ note: Romanian for Church Road), in Voluntari. He tells her that if she tries to leave, he can find her and bring her back. Armed men are waiting for them at the gate. 

On the first evening, Tristan informs her he’s brought her to Romania for sex. “These were his exact words, that we will have sexual relations. As he was uttering those words, I recalled that Tristan had actually strangled me on that night in Miami. (…) It was already too late.”

It was their last night together in the USA, Anna* then recounts during the hearings. She describes everything with awe-inducing lucidity: During the sexual act, Tristan strangles her “with both hands.” Anna* gets to tell him she doesn’t want to be manhandled, then faints. When she wakes up, she doesn’t remember what happened, but her neck is bruised. Tristan says she had asked to be choked. He makes grand statements, buys her plane tickets, and invites her to visit him in Romania. The 21-year-old woman decides to come over in April 2022.

On her first night in Voluntari, she realizes she’s fallen into the trap of human traffickers, but is paralyzed with fear. She sits, observes, collects her strength. Tristan is pressing her to make porn videos for OnlyFans. She is moved into the American Village house, together with the girls who are doing such work for the brothers. She learns that they are their girlfriends. They can’t talk to each other about this, or Georgiana Naghel will threaten to beat them. 

She sees a message from Andrew on one of the girls’ phones, in which he’s asking her to self harm, in order to prove that she loves him. Another woman tells her she would be capable of killing herself, should her boyfriend Andrew ask her to do it. “Andrew wants to impregnate several women, whom he will subsequently lock up. Everything that goes on is real. These women are being brainwashed. (…) They are not themselves,” the US woman states before the prosecutors. 

“They use the bodies of young women for financial gains, and the girls do it because they really believe they are in love and they’re scared. I’m ashamed that I accepted to be treated this way. I’m ashamed I witnessed so much and didn’t have the courage to speak up sooner about what was going on.”

She isn’t allowed to get out of the house either. She talks to Natasha* and learns that she also wants to run away. They both buy plane tickets and plan on leaving in secret. 

On the evening of April 11, 2022, knocks are heard on the door of the American Village house. Anna* runs upstairs and locks herself in the room. She thinks she hears a British accent and believes it’s the brothers. She’s afraid that they will beat her up or kill her. In fact, it was the police. They had received a phone call from the US Embassy in Romania. An American citizen had alerted them – his friend was being held against her will in a house in Voluntari. 

“We wanted to put the evidence together after leaving the address, because we didn’t want to let on that we were the ones who had told everything. Now we’re in danger, because we told everything that happened,” Anna* confesses after her release.

She isn’t asking for damages in court, because “I don’t want it to later be said that I made this statement for financial reasons. The only things I want are peace and quiet.”

“The brothers Tate have threatened that they will publish my real name, my parents’ names, the phone number that I use. They’ve done this before and they will do it again.”

She tells prosecutors that she is terrified of the moment she leaves Romania, “because the brothers Tate have connections all over the world.”

During their hearings, the brothers and the girls who work for them say the girl lied out of jealousy. 

Eight months later, in December 2022, the Tate brothers’ attorneys try to pressure Anna* into dropping her complaint. They threaten that, should she disobey, she and her parents risk paying $300 million.

Another flight

Natasha* and Anna* are the only ones of the brothers’ Tate victims who were rescued by the police. There were, however, other girls who tried to flee the American Village house. Two of them were Ukrainian women from Odessa, who had arrived a short time after the war in Ukraine had started. The girls who were living at the house back then say that, one morning, they were simply gone without a trace. 

Sofia* was threatened and hurt in the fall of 2021, at the brothers’ Tate webcamming house, by their accomplices Georgiana and Luana. 

One of Andrew Tate’s girlfriends had convinced her to also work for the brothers “by telling me that I will be earning large amounts of money, and that, should the brothers Tate see I was hard working, they will offer me holidays and other rewards.” Tristan even told her there are girls who make up to $40,000 each month. And he asked her to tattoo his name on her body – “Tristan’s Girl,” “as a guarantee for a future breast augmentation intervention.” The gesture would have meant “that I care about him and respect him.”

Sofia lived at the American Village house for three months, together with the other girls, during which time she was photographed and filmed for OnlyFans on a daily basis, “in underwear or naked, in pornographic contexts, sometimes even using sex toys.” For all of this, she never saw a single penny, she later told prosecutors. 

She was also not allowed to leave the house unaccompanied (“a rule set up by Georgiana Naghel”). Because she had no freedom and also didn’t receive any money, Sofia* decided to call it quits. Tristan Tate and Georgiana Naghel refused to let her leave, unless she paid them “various amounts of money, representing expenses they incurred on my behalf.”  At first it was €2,000, then €5,000. 

One evening, she works up her courage and packs her clothes. She is summoned to a conversation in which she is asked for money again, including €2,000 for “the time wasted with me” by Luana Radu. She bursts into tears and says she’ll go to the police. Luana assures her she doesn’t stand a chance, because she’s a former police officer and is well connected. 

Sofia* goes up to her room to pack her bags, “point at which a very angry Georgiana walks in on me, grabs me by the throat, and pushes me under a desk, asking me ‘Where do you think you’re going?’” Andrew Tate’s assistant forcibly throws her out of the house, nearly naked. She refuses to return her laptop, cards, clothes, and jewelry.

The frightened Sofia* goes to the police. Her close ones and relatives see several photos and videos of her naked on her Facebook account. Sofia* then learns from Luana that Georgiana Naghel used her laptop to access her account and take revenge.

The following day, Sofia* returns to the Voluntari police for questioning. The police officer tells her he’s a former colleague of Luana’s and advises her to drop her complaint. The woman doesn’t give in. Then, there is silence. 

In January 2023, The Ilfov County Police Inspectorate initiates an inquest into the way the Voluntari police officer handled Sofia’s case*. 

The sexploitation handbook

Andrew Tate has often spoken of his path to the pinnacles of success.  

“Beautiful women work for me and make me millions of dollars. They obey me because they love me. They clean my house and make me coffee and get naked on demand. That’s how I make over 300k a month. I own a webcam studio,” writes Andrew Tate in the “Laws of the pimp game” chapter of The Tate Bible, a collection of inspirational stories from his own experience as a pimp.

“The girls who loved me and worked for me, my main girlfriends, they get probably around 20% of their money. I’d keep 80% of the money they made. So they basically work for free. They worked for my love and attention,” Tate continues in the “Growth of the Empire” chapter. 

This advice only costs €23 (€9.9, if you buy The Bible for Kindle). For £337 (down from £778), you could’ve joined Tate’s PHD that teaches you also how to make money off of girls. The “Pimping Hoes Degree” course was available on Andrew Tate’s website, but is no longer on offer, just as other variations on the same theme, such as the “TATE WEBCAM Program,” which promised attendees to turn “beautiful women into COLD HARD CASH.” They have all been saved, however, to the memory of the Internet.

Boys and men all over the world have been taught by Andrew Tate how to exploit their girlfriends. “My job was to get women to fall in love with me. Literally, that was my job. My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say,” Tate wrote on his website.

“Welcome to OnlyFans Fortunes! (…) The reason I started this course is ‘cause a lot of people have been asking me, Tate, how do you get girls to work for you on Only Fans?,” a relaxed Andrew Tate explained in another video course, which has also been deleted in the meantime. “[Women] are incompetent and they are very, very lazy. And they’re stupid,” which is why they need a man to put them to work. That’s the intro. 

But if you want to be up there with the best, you need to purchase access to the War Room where ”we have a specific group for webcam and OnlyFans, and inside the War Room there are over 90 guys making money with webcam, another 50 guys making money on OnlyFans, and all the guys who make money with this systems are in a chat room and talking in real time time, helping each other all the time.” The brotherhood of exploitation, from California to Singapore.

The method employed by the Tate brothers and their disciples is actually the classical loverboy tactic. According to the eLiberare NGO, “recruiters prefer the loverboy method, because once the victim has fallen in love and is convinced that her future is with the trafficker, she is far easier to manipulate and control. (…) For them, the victim is not a living being, with the right to live her life as she sees fit, but ‘goods,’ an ‘item,’ which they use for financial purposes.”

What the Tate PhD candidates learned, among other things: 

”If you wanna make it in this game find a girl/girls and brainwash them into becoming full time camgirls.”

”The one’s who made me the most money had their dads dead, lived in fucked up neibourhhood etccc.” 

”Convince them they gotta sacrifice. Only way you’ll make big money. 171h hours online in 14 days. 12+ hours a day. It’s very important that they work weekends (…) Good models extend their shift and work.”

Practice beats theory

In July 2021, a Romanian woman messages Andrew Tate on Instagram to “stop bragging on social networks.” The man asks her to go on a date with him several times. At first,  Adela* turns him down, then she accepts, and slowly falls for the social media celebrity. He insists that “I should give up work and move to a house where several girls lived, telling me that there’s no need for me to go on working and that everything will be great for me and for our relationship,” the woman recounts her relationship with her trafficker before the prosecutors. 

She doesn’t move in right away, but she visits often. She is there on the evening when Sofia* tries to leave, but is brutalized by Naghel. “I’m not an idiot to have beaten her up and left marks,” she hears Naghel say after she aggresses Sofia*: she raises her arm to inflict pressure to her recent breast augmentation surgery. Adela* watches her kicking Sofia* out of the house nearly naked and coordinating the revenge operation a few hours later.

“The whole situation made me realize there was no escape for me.” She was terrified by the two accomplices’ violence and also knew that the Tate brothers “owned guns and swords.” 

She is pressured by Tristan into getting “Talisman Tate” tattooed onto her neckbone. The girls living at the house insist that she also goes live on TikTok and poses for OnlyFans, as a sign of love for Tristan. 

After her first week, Georgiana and Luana force her into working ever longer hours – both she and the other girls have to perform in live videos for 12 hours a day, with a single five minute break. Otherwise, they are penalized. They also wind up owing money if they tear up during the lives or wipe their noses. Half the amount she earns on TikTok goes straight to Georgina. The other half is used to pay fines. She doesn’t know how much money she makes on OnlyFans. Georgiana has the passwords.

Both Georgiana and Luana “used to verbally aggress us and threatened to beat us up if we didn’t do our jobs.” Adela* told the prosecutors that she would have left sooner, but was afraid that she would meet the same fate as Sofia* and that her parents would receive nude photos of her.

Because her father falls ill, Adela* works up the courage to announce she is leaving. She didn’t give in, even though Tristan insisted that she stays on. She believes they let her leave because she paid Georgiana her ‘debt’ and because the Tate brothers wanted to avoid another complaint filed with the police.

A history of violence

After the December 2022 arrest, new victims surface. A UK woman told the BBC in February 2023 how she wound up being exploited in Romania. She says Andrew Tate picked her up on Facebook. He convinced her to come visit him in Bucharest several times. He slowly starts asking her to work for him. “If you love me, you’ll do it.” 

She half-heartedly agrees, afraid not to lose him. She receives half the money, but then the fines are introduced, as well as more and more violence. “He used to strangle me, to the point I passed out once,” the woman told the BBC. “He likes to feel completely in control of the woman and feel like he could take their life away at any second.” 

The underbelly of the internet also conceals two videos of the early years of the Tate empire.

In a video published in 2016, Andrew Tate is filming a dark-haired woman, her pants around her ankles, whose bruises left by a belt he’s counting. “One, two, three…” The woman runs away and locks herself in a room. “Open the door, you fucking whore! You knew I was gonna beat the fuck out of you. If you behaved, I wouldn’t have to hit you, would I? Get out. You can’t stay in there forever,”

In another video published that same year, a Slovakian girl is beaten up by Andrew Tate. The fighter, wearing a t-shirt from Storm Gym, the club he was a kickboxer for, slaps her across the face, grabs her by her hair, tosses her onto the bed, and smacks her with his belt. The woman is crying and screaming “No!”

“This is what happens if you don’t listen to me.” 

The same woman is then featured in another video. She says that it was all actually just a sex game and that Andrew Tate wouldn’t hurt anyone. In a photo shared by Tate himself, the woman dons a “Tate property” tattoo. In her recent photos, the tattoo is no longer visible, but a green-eyed cobra wraps around her thigh, all the way up to her waist. 

In a video, Tate recalls he convinced a 15 year-old girl from Slovakia to move in with him in England, in order to start his webcam business– “If you don’t have a webcam company, you need to look into it, ‘cause as soon as you have a couple of girls in love with you, it’s the easiest money in the world..” The girl back then is the woman with the cobra, Tate’s totemic animal.

Years later, she is featured in Tate’s masterclass on how to make money on OnlyFans, as an assistant to the master, who explains the rates she charges on the adult content platform.

She emerges once again, this time after the brothers are arrested, in the campaign that demands their release. She says that the two of them are victims of human rights violations.

Meanwhile, she informs her Instagram followers that she’s selling property in Dubai, the paradise where Tate has already moved several of his businesses. 

In 8 years, the Tate brothers claim to have made $11 million out of webcamming alone. 

What did the brothers do with this money? A few possible answers in the next episodes of the RISE Project investigation on the Tate brothers’ Romanian businesses.

Author: Luiza Vasiliu
Additional reporting: Bianca Albu, Victor Ilie
Editor: Daniel Bojin
Fact-checking: Roxana Jipa
Translation: Ioana Pelehatăi
Illustration: Andy Sinboy

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