Romania pushed by Trump admin to lift travel curb on Andrew Tate: Reports
WASHINGTON − The Trump administration is pushing Romania to lift travel restrictions on Andrew Tate, a right-wing influencer and Trump backer who with his brother is facing a cascade of charges and investigations over allegations of human trafficking, money laundering and rape.
Richard Grenell, a close advisor to President Donald Trump, told Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu during a Munich meeting last week that he "remains interested in the fate of the Tate brothers," Hurezeanu told EuroNews Romania on Tuesday.
U.S. officials also brought up the case against the Andrew and Tristan Tate during a phone call with the Romanian government last week, and a request was made to give the brothers their passports back and allow them to travel until their court cases wrap up, the Financial Times reported.
Grenell told the Financial Times he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu. “I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets,” he told the newspaper.
What charges are the Tates facing?
Tate, who attracted notoriety online for his misogynistic comments about women, was released from house arrest last month. Officials arrested him and his brother and raided their home near Bucharest in August amid new charges against the brothers and four other suspects for trafficking and having sexual intercourse with a child. They face separate charges filed in a British court.
As authorities raided their Bucharest home, the Tates jumped on X to film an "emergency meeting" to respond to "slanderous lies." They claimed officers robbed them and stole their filming equipment, and that they were falsely accused.
Last week, a woman from Florida who cooperated in the Romanian investigation countersued the brothers after they accused her in a 2023 lawsuit of defaming them, calling her "a serial extortionist and blackmailer who preys on successful men."
The woman, who remained anonymous, alleged the Tates forced and coerced her into sex trafficking. After documents from their suit against her were leaked onto social media, she faced online abuse and harassment, Paste BN reported.
A first batch of charges filed by Romanian prosecutors alleged the pair lured multiple women to the country, where they were forced make pornography for the brothers' enrichment and suffered physical and sexual abuse. Those charges were sent back to a Bucharest court in December after the Tates successfully filed an appeal.
Tate brothers run in right-wing, pro-Trump circles
The brothers have denied all the accusations, calling them "baseless." As the charges mounted, they turned to their right-wing, heavily male, online fan base for support.
That fan base revolves around opposition to feminism and a tagline – "escape the Matrix" – that encourages young men to forego traditional life paths and instead focus on making as much money as possible through unconventional, mostly online means. To that end, Tate advertises a $50-a-month course that promises students can "Scale from Zero to $10k/month quickly."
Online spaces that attract Andrew Tate fans often overlap with other right-wing influencers who support Trump, like Elon Musk, now a top official in Trump's administration in charge of a mass purge of the federal workforce.
Tate declared his support of Trump after the election, writing on X on Nov. 6, "I'm moving back to America."
X, the platform Musk bought in 2022, often amplifies influencers like Tate that criticize "wokeism" and, in Tate's case, spout misogyny. Tate's content encourages physical and sexual violence of women, according to experts on extremism.
The Tates also overlap with other right-wing figures in the cryptocurrency world – the brothers market their own cryptocurrency token. Trump joined the fray days before his inauguration with the release of his own cryptocurrency coin. And Argentinian lawmakers filed impeachment charges against President Javier Milei, another far-right world leader with broad support in online right-wing spaces, for marketing one of the tokens before dropping it as the price plummeted.
Who is Andrew Tate?
Andrew Tate, a former kickboxing champion, first entered the public eye in 2016, when he was forced out of the house on the reality TV show Big Brother after a video showed him hitting a woman with a belt and telling a woman to count the bruisers he allegedly gave her.
He exploded in interest online through increasingly inflammatory statements, especially claiming women were partially responsible for being raped.