By Luiza Ilie and Jeff Mason
Washington: Internet figure and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan arrived in Florida from Romania on Thursday, shortly after prosecutors lifted a travel ban related to criminal charges against them.
The Tate brothers were arrested in late 2022 and formally indicted last year on charges they participated in a criminal ring that lured women to Romania, where they were sexually exploited. Andrew Tate was also charged with rape. They deny the allegations.
Andrew (front) and Tristan Tate arrive in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on Thursday, after Romanian authorities lifted the brothers’ travel restrictions.Credit: AP
“We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet, ever,” Andrew Tate told reporters as he left the Florida airport on Thursday, saying he and his brother were innocent and the victims of lies.
He did not respond to reporters who asked why the brothers had come to Florida, or whether US President Donald Trump had helped get their travel ban lifted.
On Thursday, Trump said he knew nothing about the Tate case in Romania while speaking to reporters alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Tate, who gained millions of online fans by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle that critics say denigrates women, planned to return to Romania at the end of March to fulfil a judicial control obligation, a source told Reuters.
Andrew Tate being led by police in to Romania’s Court of Appeal in Bucharest in March 2024.Credit: AP
Referring to the charges against Tate, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters that his state was “not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct in the air”, and that the Florida attorney-general was looking at what jurisdiction the state had to “deal with this”.
However, people close to the Trump White House have expressed support for the Tate brothers in the past.
Richard Grenell, a US special envoy from the Trump White House, is suspected to have brought up Tates’ case with Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the recent Munich Security Conference, according to London’s The Telegraph. Hurezeanu said this month that a US official in the Trump administration had expressed interest in the brothers’ case at the conference.
Grenell said he supported the Tate brothers “as evident by my publicly available tweets” but had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu at the event, the Telegraph reported.
Lawyer Paul Ingrassia, who now serves as Trump’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, represented the Tate brothers in a civil claim against one of their accusers in federal court in Florida, and has repeatedly praised the Tates on social media, The Washington Post reported.
“The brothers’ one and only real crime is this: a message of self-discipline and ability to think freely,” Ingrassia wrote on his Substack in July 2023, The Post reported.
On social media, Ingrassia praised Andrew Tate as an “extraordinary human being” and the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence”.
And the Tate brothers appear to have an affinity for the Trump administration.
After Trump was re-elected, Andrew Tate posted “THE PATRIARCHY IS BACK” on social media. He also said women should not be allowed to vote, The Washington Post reported.
Tate further predicted the case in Romania would be dismissed.
Romania’s anti-organised crime agency, DIICOT, said in a statement on Thursday that prosecutors approved a “request to modify the obligation preventing the defendants from leaving Romania”, but that judicial control measures remained in place.
The control measures include the requirement to “appear before judicial authorities whenever summoned,” the statement read.
The agency didn’t say who had made the request.
Andrew Tate, 38, and Tristan Tate, 36 – who are dual US-British citizens – were arrested in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, in late 2022 along with two Romanian women. DIICOT alleged the four defendants formed a criminal group in 2021 “in order to commit the crime of human trafficking” in Romania as well as the US and Britain.
They were formally indicted last year. In April, the Bucharest Tribunal, part of the country’s justice system, ruled that a trial could start but didn’t set a date. All four accused deny all the allegations.
In December, a court in Bucharest ruled that the case couldn’t go to trial because of multiple legal and procedural irregularities on the part of the prosecutors.
The case hasn’t been closed, and there is also a separate legal case against the brothers in Romania. They have denied those charges as well.
Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer who has amassed more than 10 million followers on X, has repeatedly claimed that prosecutors in Romania have no evidence against him and that there is a political conspiracy to silence him.
The Tates brothers’ legal battles, however, aren’t limited to Romania.
Late last year, a UK court ruled that in a separate case against the brothers, police could seize more than £2.6 million ($5.2 million) to cover years of unpaid taxes from the pair, and froze some of their accounts. Andrew Tate called it “outright theft” and “a co-ordinated attack on anyone who dares to challenge the system”.
In March, the brothers appeared at the Bucharest Court of Appeal in a separate case after UK authorities issued arrest warrants over allegations of sexual aggression in a case dating back to 2012-15.
The appeals court granted the UK request to extradite the Tates, but only once legal proceedings in Romania have concluded.
AP, Reuters
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