Andrew Tate is frequently spotted online posing with stunning women, large sums of money, and a collection of fast cars. It’s a way of life that has brought him millions of online followers.
However, this cigar-smoking, gun-toting, champagne-drinking kickboxer from Luton is best known for his aggressive and repugnant opinions on women, rape, and manhood, and he is accused of having a negative influence on a whole generation of young men.
When Tate made an appearance on Channel 5’s Big Brother in 2016, the public first learned about him—and his nasty side. After videos of him using a belt to beat a lady and asking another woman how many bruises she had surfaced, he became the first housemate to be booted from the reality TV series.
Later, he claimed that these were a part of BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) sex play, and he used the fame from Big Brother to establish an online presence.
Tate gained notoriety as the internet grew due to his incendiary remarks about women on platforms like YouTube and later TikTok.
He claimed, in one horrifying online tirade, that women “must carry some culpability” if they placed themselves “in a position to be raped.” In a different one, he declared that “my sister is the husband’s property.”
The advice given to men who are being accused of infidelity by their girlfriends is to “knock out the machete, boom in her face, and hold her by the neck.” Shut up, b***h.
His audience, especially teenage boys, increased exponentially as a result of social media algorithms manipulating his videos more and more as they became more controversial.
He is currently the most well-known person on the planet to people under 30 thanks to his staggering 12.7 billion social media views and more Google searches in the past month than either Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.
Due to this, social media juggernauts are frantically trying to stop the online content of the man known as the “King of Toxic Masculinity,” but thus far they have been unsuccessful.
Tate, 35, earned the unpleasant distinction of being the most well-known user to receive a permanent ban from the Big Four social media platforms TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube last week.
But despite that, hydra-headed duplicate accounts and an army of “Soldiers,” or supporters, who are willing to wage battle for him, are springing up all over the internet, scarcely making a dent in his online presence.
A search on the platform turned up at least 20 fan accounts with more than 10,000 followers each that were only focused on promoting Tate videos days after his TikTok ban.
Tate made a final “goodbye” video last week, insisting that he is “not the number one villain on Earth” and that he has been “unfairly vilified.” Tate is conceited and gauche.
So how did this man come to have such reprehensible opinions on women, and how did he become so well-known?
The son of Emory Andrew Tate Jr., a U.S. Air Force sergeant who went on to become an international chess master, and Eileen, a catering assistant, Andrew Tate was born in Chicago.
His mother, now 61, relocated to Luton with her three kids after his parents’ divorced, where she reared them all by herself.
She currently calls a terrace house on Marsh Farm, Luton’s most impoverished neighbourhood, home.
It contrasts sharply with her son’s affluent lifestyle because it is a notorious crime hotspot where gang shootings and arson attacks are common.
The former employee of the neighbourhood Roman Catholic secondary school, Mrs. Tate, strikes one as a true pillar of the neighbourhood.
She frequently donates to organisations that fight cancer, end child poverty, and support children’s hospitals. Her social media site also features pictures of her children when they were small. She was unable to respond to her son’s misogynistic beliefs yesterday, and a neighbour remarked, “She’s been through enough.”
Andrew began kickboxing in Luton and during the course of his teenage and twenties, he went on to win the world championship four times.
At the age of 56, Andrew’s father passed away unexpectedly in 2015. The next year, he made his disastrous Big Brother appearance, and in 2017, not long after spending two days in jail as police looked into charges of abuse against him, he relocated to Romania.
He has said that “40% of the reason I relocated to Romania” was because the country’s rape laws are less strict. In one now-deleted video, he remarked, “I’m not a f rapist, but I like the concept of simply being able to do what I want.”
His Bucharest compound was searched by the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism in Romania in April of this year. The U.S. Embassy had informed them that a girl was being held against her will at a residence owned by Tate and his brother Tristan.
According to media reports in Romania, they allegedly discovered a young Romanian woman and a 21-year-old American who were both being detained without their will.
Additionally, this week the Mail was informed by police sources that there were two more Romanian women inside the facility. Tristan Tate, however, has previously disputed that there were women there against their will that were discovered by police, claiming: “No girls were located in my residence, and nobody was detained.”
According to the sources, the home was jam-packed with cameras and was being utilised as a webcam studio by the police.
Following claims of unlawful deprivation of liberty, the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation, which was later expanded to include allegations of rape and human trafficking. The Tate brothers, meanwhile, assert that they “have never been arrested.”
The internet is still buzzing with appearances by Andrew Tate.
His “dangerous misogynistic and homophobic abuse” was condemned earlier this month by primary and secondary school teachers in Britain, who also noted that “young boys seem to be the most influenced” by him.
Teachers in Australia claimed that Tate, who they referred to as a “toxic male influencer,” was to blame for the rise in sexual assaults committed by boys against girls in private schools, and teenage girls are frequently seen posting on the internet that Tate is to blame for their boyfriends’ animosity toward them.
Tate’s alleged self-made money and his assurance that everyone who follows him can amass comparable wealth are key components to his cult image as a hero who understands “how to be successful as a man.”
He claimed earlier this year that he was the first trillionaire in the world. “I made my first million when I was, perhaps, 27, and I had 100 million by the time I was 31. Then, pretty recently, I became a trillionaire.”
Hustlers University, an online “community where me and dozens of War Room troops will teach YOU exactly how to generate money,” is Tate’s primary commercial endeavour.
Due to outrage against Tate’s opinions, the company’s website has already gone through two modifications. However, this week, Tate returned with Hustlers University 3.0, bragging that “our youngest student is 13 years old.” He earns more than $10,000 every month. Age therefore has no bearing.
Nearly 130,000 people, many of them British schoolchildren, spend £39 per month to learn copywriting, e-commerce, and cryptocurrency trading from “12 multi-millionaires.”
Bu Tate’s carefully constructed “rags-to-riches” image and boasts that he is a “trillionaire” have drawn criticism. Although the exact amount of his riches remains a secret, online estimates range from £16 million to £300 million.
Whatever the case, the Mail found some unexpected information. Financial records submitted to the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance reveal that Talisman Enterprises SRL, one of the Tate brothers’ businesses, had assets of £468,000, debts of £732,000, and a turnover of £344,000 at the end of 2020. What other businesses Andrew Tate owns and their levels of success are unknown.
With a home theatre, pool, and neon “Tate” signs bearing Andrew’s distinctive chess knight logo, the brothers’ “Tate HQ” estate in the affluent Pipera neighbourhood of Bucharest is widely thought to be worth at least £25 million.
However, the average price of a luxury property in Romania is £1 million, and even the most costly ones are valued at less than £10 million. Additionally, Andrew Tate’s personal finances seem out of line for a man who prides himself on his business savvy given the extravagant lifestyles that the self-described “Beast of Bucharest” and his 34-year-old brother Tristan depict.
There are multiple County Court Judgments (CCJs) against Andrew Tate for unpaid debts. Andrew Tate is a director of a company named The Cannon Run Ltd, which is registered to his mother’s council home in Luton and runs driving trips throughout Europe and sells old sports vehicles. Three CCJs totaling £3,962, £268, and £270 have been issued against him since 2018 under his full name, Emory Andrew Tate III.
Additional CCJs totaling £4,518 and £1,416 against The Cannon Run directly are yet unpaid as of last year.
The UK government also provided the supercar industry with two £50,000 Coronavirus Bounce Back Loans, intended to help struggling companies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lawmakers in Austria were compelled to file a lawsuit against him after he didn’t pay a £280 parking fine.
The Tate brothers reportedly “received a hotel in Thailand from their father, through which they would have collected millions of euros,” according to Romanian media, rather than being self-made millionaires.
In response to claims that he had fabricated a false impression of excessive riches yesterday, Tate claimed that the debts against his name pertained to “an old credit card payment.”
However, it wouldn’t be the first time if he and his brother had intentionally established an online reality that was twisted for financial gain.
One of their oldest businesses is their Romanian webcam girl operation, which Andrew Tate boldly referred to as a “scam” earlier this year. An investigation conducted in March revealed how the brothers run a studio where 75 lingerie-clad models answer calls from fans who pay £3.40 per minute. Men who fall for the ladies’ false sob tales about their life frequently mistakenly feel they are in a relationship with them.
Despite claiming that the business was lawful, Andrew told the press that it was a blatant hoax. In order to hook men, he said, “I have real professionals who are fluent in English behind the scenes finding out their interests, the name of their dog.”
According to reports, a man who was lured in by such a “scam” surrendered his £20,000 inheritance.
Without sarcasm, Tate states on one of his websites, “I am an authority on all male-female relationships,” adding, “I’ve been running a webcam studio for nearly ten years. 75 girls have worked for me.
“More than half were truly my girlfriends at the time, and NONE of them worked in the adult entertainment business before they met me,” the author writes.
But he is adamant that none of his actions are wrong. Any accusations of crimes, he asserted, “are simply untrue; otherwise, we would be in jail.”
Tate announced the creation of “The Tate Foundation” last week in an hour-long video, possibly in a last-ditch effort to improve his reputation. The organisation pledges to assist individuals with mental health problems and women who are victims of domestic abuse.
This is an opportunity for me to devote all of my social media to my philanthropic work, he stated. In exchange for Instagram restoring his account, he pledged to “donate the 1.2 or 1.3 million dollars” to two as-yet-unidentified charities.
Tate acknowledged that he “had some responsibility to bear” but claimed that “not a single woman has come forward and said I raped her or hurt her, not one.”
Only time will tell if he regains access to his social media accounts, if his opinions have actually changed, and what the results of the Romanian authorities’ investigation will be.
However, as Dr. Joe Mulhall, director of the anti-hate group Hope Not Hate, noted: “I think the harm that has been done in the last six months by Andrew Tate online is going to take years to unpick.”
