Front Burner - How Andrew Tate made abuse a business

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Andrew Tate – the controversial British-American influencer, and self-described misogynist – has millions of followers around the world.He often tells young men that they’re victims of a feminized society and that they need to reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power”.Tate became even more famous after he and his brother were subject to a police raid on their Romanian property in 2022, due to suspected human trafficking. In the years after, they’ve also been investigated for rape and sexual assault. The brothers deny all wrongdoing.Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker that meticulously peels back the industry that Andrew Tate built up: from an online porn empire, to a so-called educational network for men to learn how to recruit women into “sexual slavery”. She walks us through her findings.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This episode contains accounts of sexual assault and misconduct. Please listen with care. Hi, I'm Elaine Chow. In for Jamie. The controversial British-American influencer and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate has millions of followers around the world. He often tells young men that they're victims of a feminized society and that they need to reclaim their, quote,

natural masculine imperative for power, unquote. Tate became even more famous in 2022, after he and his brother were subject to a police raid on their property in Romania. As part of a human trafficking and rape investigation, Mr. Tate was arrested, as well, his brother, Tristan. The brothers insist that they are not responsible for any criminal wrongdoing. In the aftermath, videos tagged hashtag Andrew Tate reviewed more than 12 billion times, just on TikTok. Andrew Tate is a defining figure in the Manosphere and a recent investigative report. in the New Yorker meticulously peels back the industry he's built up. From an online porn empire to a so-called educational network for men to learn how to recruit

women into, quote, sexual slavery, unquote. Heidi Blake is the journalist behind Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse and interviewed the Tate Brothers on this story. Hi, Heidi. Hi, thank you so much for having me on. So you talk about Tate's different ventures as a, quote, empire of abuse. And I want to talk about each of them today, starting with the webcam porn business that's really at the heart of it. And this all started in the UK around 2014.

And what the Tate set out to do at the time? So one of the things that's kind of extraordinary about the story is that Andrew Tate has, in his own words, described how he built this empire. The exploitation, as we've called it in The New Yorker, because he sold a number of long videos to this online men's network. called the War Room, in which he described how he set up the operation. And so, you know, I was able to kind of piece together an account of what he had built, both from internal documents, many, many messages I was able to get hold of that he'd exchanged with his associates, but, and also prosecutorial records, but also from his own account that he's given to members of the war room. And so Andrew Tate decided in around 2014 that he was going to set up this online, this, this,

this webcam porn business. He at the time was an international kickboxer. He won four world titles, but kickboxing doesn't pay super well. And he was frustrated by his lack of burning power in the sport. And so in his own telling, he sat down with a piece of paper and decided to write down all of his assets and try to figure out how he might make more money. But then in his own telling, it dawned on him that he had a number of girlfriends in different countries around the world. that he'd accumulated during his travels for kickboxing tournaments. And in his words, females are an asset. And he decided that he needed to find a way to monetise those assets.

That's the way he puts this. And so he launched this webcam pornography business. And what that entailed in the first instance was persuading a number of these girlfriends to come to the UK where he was living in Luton with his brother and telling them, you're going to start working for me online on webcam. Most of the women refused to do it and left, but there was one woman, a Slovakian teenager named Bibiana Hirshkava, who was only 17 at the time. She was a minor, but she agreed to start staging sex shows online for Andrew Tate from his pretty dingy little apartment that he was living in at the time with his brother in Luton. And she was his very first recruit.

And from there he began to recruit other women to come join the operation. He tended to reach out to women on social media and offer them the chance to come and make money by working for him online. But he quickly realised that if, as was the case with his first worker with Bibiana Hushkuba, he recruited women who were in love with him and were therefore willing to surrender all or most of their earnings to him without really demanding too much of a cut that he was going to make a whole load more money. And so he set about using this kind of method of romancing women and kind of then converting them into sex workers and putting them to work for him online. And that is how he began to build this webcam fortune. And he even branded them, right?

I think in Ruscova's case, she has a tattoo saying that she's Tate owned. Yeah, that's right. He kind of habitually branded these women with tattoos. So a lot of the women who work for him have tattoos that say things like Tate property or Tate owned. A lot of them are also branded with a large Cobra tattoos because he calls himself King Cobra. That was his kickboxing moniker and it kind of continues to be his personal insignia. His brother Tristan also branded a lot of the women who worked for him, Talisman Tate, which is his nickname. And the way the two brothers kind of operated was that they each established what they called their own harum of women.

so they would recruit women. These women would then work for them on webcam. They would sleep with these women. They would require that these women participated in group sex with them regularly. And they would each maintain their own coterie of female workers. They've said that at the height of their webcam business, they had 75 women working for them all at once. The operation when it was in the UK was fairly small scale.

And it really became, I think you described it as, like it became an industrial operation once they moved the business to Romania. And this happened after being accused by three British women of rape and strangulation. And they built a compound in Romania. And I noted you actually visited. And what was it like there? They built this large, sprawling compound just north of Bucharest. They hired dozens of armed guards to patrol the property and to protect them.

And when I visited them there this March, Tristan Tate, described the place to me as a fortress. Every inch of the compound is covered by security cameras, apart from the bedrooms. And he ushered me through a bulletproof door, where into a large, kind of cavernous warehouse-like space. So the property is a converted warehouse. It's clad in gleaming black panels. It has the name Tate mounted overhead in huge white letters. Inside the courtyard, there's a large underlit swimming pool, a row of supercars. They have a huge garage space where they keep many, many, many super high value cars. And then inside is their kind of command center where they have this large bank of computers where they ran for years,

their online photography business, subsequently ran their other online enterprises, including the War Room and Hustlers University, which they later rebranded the real world, these various enterprises that they, through which they en masse to large kind of army of male followers. And the place is kind of, it's kind of done up like a sort of gangsters paradise. Like they have, they, you know, they kind of have all of the trappings of a certain kind of wealth and prestige. They have this wood-panelled cigar lounge, um, where Tristan Tate showed me like a human height, safe sheathed in burgundy leather, which he told me had contained, um, like hundreds of millions of dollars of cash and gold bars. The place also, when police raided it, was full of machetes

and other weapons. So, you know, they kind of established themselves in this way that was intended to signify that they were men with connections all across Romanian society. And men with wealth, right, like as a means of flaunting that wealth as well. That's right. Absolutely. I mean, you know, their whole brandry is about flaunting. and flexing their wealth. And you take, kind of, develop this brand, which was all about mixing posts about supercars and cigars and private jets and yachts and diamond watches with rants about masculinism and misogyny and assaults on feminism.

In the world we live in today, being a normal man or below normal is going to be terrible. Even to just find a woman you can reproduce with, it's becoming more and more difficult. Women can complain and women can protest and women can riot, but nobody gives a fuck. Because when women complain, it's called an inconvenience. And when men complain, it's called a revolution. And he kind of appealed really to, particularly to very young men. And his whole lifestyle is sort of like a teenage boy's dream of what it might be like one day to be a man in the world. And yeah, and he really, really played into that.

But all of that wealth was off the back of these women who, for years, the brothers, recruited and, you know, treated in this very exploitative manner. You spoke to a number of women who were involved in the Tate Brothers' online porn business. And, you know, you spoke about this earlier, but tell me more about kind of the conditions they were under, like, were they being compensated in any way? And tell me a bit more about the both the physical. and psychological toll that these women have undergone. These women were kept in properties owned, or leased by the Tate Brothers around Bacrest and in the UK.

They were generally not allowed to leave those properties unless they were chaperoned. They were not allowed to associate with other men. They were generally pretty isolated from their friends and family, discouraged from having any connections outside the Tate Brothers Circle. And you can see, again, you can see that in their text messages with these women where they very clearly tell them that they don't want them to go out. They don't want them to associate with anybody else. Forbid them, you know, from doing so.

These women were kept in the dark about how much money the Tate Brothers were making from their, from their webcam work. So the brothers and their enforcers, their associates would set up the profiles that these women used to stream online, would control their passwords, would control the accounts, so that they didn't. have access to those accounts. They couldn't see how much money they were really making. And so if they ever left, they would have no access to the source of their income. And the brothers very explicitly talked about doing that in order to make it impossible for these women to leave or to become independent or to make any money independently. It was really a story of women being being worked extremely hard. They were made to work very, very long hours. You know, Andrew Tate himself has said he made women work 17 hours

stretches without a break. Other women who I spoke to who described working under those kinds of conditions. You know, women talked about needing to be extremely drunk in order to go through with the things they were being asked to do online for male customers. And, you know, they were, they were doing this very, very grueling work for very little reward while the Tate brothers got extraordinarily rich off the back of their work. I just want to literally read from your piece. You know, one of the women told you that Tate had a way of, quote, casually peppering the abuse through day-to-day life. He kind of serves it to you in a tongue-and-cheek, humorous way, but it's deadly serious. You know, she spoke about how physical abuse was often

disguised as rough sex. Once she said Tate beat her so hard that she sustained lasting injuries to her eyes and breast. Afterwards, she texted him, you're a sexually violent person. And he replied, you never told me to stop. Yeah, that was a really, powerful account by that particular woman who was a very central part of Tate's sort of group of women that he kept close to him for a number of years. And what she described eloquently, captured the experience of many of the women that I spoke to and also the evidence of Tate's conduct towards these women that I saw in the text messages of his that I reviewed. You could see how he reeled women in with promises of an extraordinary life together with flattery, with affection,

with playfulness and then gradually over time, ratcheted up a level of emotional abuse that became more and more extreme, in a way that just gradually normalised it. And it was chilling for me to read his messages with women and to see that happening over the course of multiple relationships, often in parallel, often happening at the same time. And he's telling these women, you know, I'll marry you and have babies together. And then also telling them, you know, I'm going to beat you black and blue.

going to punish you, I want to rape you, things like that. And these women, you know, often in the messages I saw would initially push back, would defend themselves, would say, I don't want to be spoken to like that. And then over time, you saw them gradually getting worn down and resisting less and less, and then kind of going along with the things that Tate was demanding of them more and more. And it was, it was really chilling to see that happening. A history of the United States in 100 Objects is a brand new podcast from 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. Each week, we're looking at a different object from across American history with a unique story to tell about who we've been, what we've built, and what we've allowed ourselves to forget. Some of these objects are well known, many are not, but all of them carry the story of how we got to this moment.

Find a history of the United States and 100 objects on the 99% of visible feed wherever you get you. your podcasts. And how have the Tate Brothers responded to all of this? Because obviously they, they are quite open and flaunt this behavior also. Yeah, it's a peculiar thing in dealing with the Tate Brothers on this story because they're, you know, that as I say is a very large amount of evidence of them online prior to their being raided by Romanian police in 2022, in which they describe how they built this webcast business. They've been. bragged about it copiously in many different places. And even on public podcasts, you know, not only in videos and courses that they sold to their own followers and supporters. And yet now

they deny doing any of those things, despite having freely admitted to doing so in the past and the fact that many women say they did and the fact that there is a large amount of documentary evidence that supports that. So, you know, when I met with them, they both strenuously denied exploiting anyone. Andrew Tate told me that the webcam business had been closed for 10 years before they were even raided by Romanian police, which is just demonstrably untrue. You know, like the business hadn't even been started 10 years before he was raided by police.

It was just like, it was such an obvious lie that it was kind of striking to me that he would even try and make that argument. But yeah, they now completely deny that any of this happened. And Andrew Tate issued me a kind of challenge when we met. He said, you know, if any of this is true, show me a victim, show me a hurt girl, show me a single person, I hurt. And so, you know, I went away and I spoke to any of these women and gathered a lot of evidence. There's been alleged recruitment of teenage girls as well, right?

And can you walk me through a bit of the evidence around that? he talked about hosting parties at his compound in Bucharest with Tristan Tate, in which they deliberately invited teenage girls. He described having 16-year-old girls all over the house at one point to members of the room and posted pictures and videos of a party where there were obviously very many young girls present and said that, you know, he described them as hose and said that, you know, more girls is more money for me. So he was very clearly talking about that. And he even tweeted about how he was deliberately recruiting teenage models to his webcam business. Of course, again, now he denies this, but this is something that he was very brazen about

at the time. And he and Tristan would send out dozens, if not scores, of social media messages, Instagram messages, you know, messages on dating apps each week to young women, often teenage women, and yeah, and follow their usual recruitment methods. Some of the most distressing, I think, parts of the evidence that I read related to a teenage girl who was 15 at the time she was invited to one of the parties hosted by the Tate brothers. She subsequently went on to tell investigators in Romania that at the party, Andrew Tate dragged her into a room and raped her. and that she was then persuaded by the brothers and their associates to stay for several days rather than going back to school. And she described being repeatedly raped by Andrew Tate over that period of time in a way that kind of gradually led her to develop complicated feelings towards him,

as is often the case with victims of childhood sexual abuse. and she described how he would beat her, he would choke her, but he would also buy her teddy bears and tell her that she would be his wife when she grew up. Of course, he denies all of this. This is all set out in witness statements that she gave to Romanian prosecutors. You mentioned a few times throughout this conversation, kind of this online network called the War Room. Members would be able to access tutorials that Tate called his PhD,

his Pimping Ho's degree, and basically teaching people to do. what he does. And what kind of impact has that had? Like, how big is this network? It's in many ways in a community as well as, you know, subscribers. The war room was established to be a kind of elite network of men around the Tate brothers. They charged around $8,000 a year. And so, you know, it was a fairly high price of entry. I've made it into Andrew Tate's War Room, where 100 of his biggest fans have flown in from all across the world, each paying $5,000 to have their manhood tested by the one they refer to as commander. None of us know what he has in store. I welcome you all to the test.

There is a cage fighting event, and every single one of you has been paired against a professional fighter. You will fight in the cage on national television, and it's a real fight. There are two paths you can go down. You can agree to fight, or you can decide that it's not for you. You have one hour to think and make a decision. Andrew taught members what he called his Pimping Hose degree, which was a lesson in how to recruit women, subjugate them into a state of what he described freely in the group as slavery and then compelled them into doing sex work.

And he then had other courses, a webcam course, an only-founds course, the different ways that you could monetize the women you had recruited in that way. he said himself that there were about 140 men in the group who were making large amounts of money from the methods that he had taught them. But then in terms of scale, the way he scaled his online presence was really through a second organisation he founded called Hustlers University, which was much bigger. So Hustler's University was an online school which charged 4999 a month in Northern. for members to enroll and Andrew Tate promised to teach them modern wealth creation methods.

The main thing Hustlers University was really was a huge content factory for Andrew Tate. It had this affiliate marketing program where members could sign up and they could make commissions by clipping up and reposting Andrew Tate's own videos. And he himself has said that the school had about 168,000 members by 2022, which was when he was rated. But those members started pumping out his content in huge volumes into social media algorithms that were already primed, as we now know, to amplify misogynistic and extreme messages. It's like a massive distribution network for his content, essentially. Exactly that, exactly that. And so this message of hatred towards women and just utter

contempt for women was suddenly disseminated to an incredibly wide audience and showed up in, you know, dinner tables and classrooms and, you know, family homes all around the world. And that's really what we're contending with today. And as, you know, in that rise to fame, he accumulated political allies along the way. And after Donald Trump's election in 2016, Andrew Tate started posting, you know, more pro-Maga tweets. He started messaging with Donald Trump Jr. and tell me a bit more about kind of the connections to the Trump family and Amiga more broadly and what has that enabled.

Yeah, so Andrew Tate really quite assiduously courted the Trump family. Going all the way back to Trump's election initially in 2016, he began cultivating ties with Donald Trump Jr. online, posting a lot of pro-Maga content. And shortly after that, at the height of the Me Too movement, he, posted a series of provocative tweets, including one that said that women should take responsibility for being sexually assaulted, which caused an inevitable firestorm of controversy, which he capitalised on to kind of begin to turn his latent disdain for women into something more like a political identity. He started appearing at a conservative political action conference, and he deepened

those ties with the Trump family. So when in 2022, um, he came to be arrested. He had a lot of allies on the right. He'd spent time really building those connections. And he had by then really become a leading voice for masculinity. This kind of dominant ideology now among the sort of in the MAGA world, which is all about reasserting patriarchal power and rolling back the gains of feminism. And he'd become such a powerful voice for that and had such an enormous audience

that he had no end of political allies. So as I say, after he was arrested, he was defended by Elon Musk, by Donald Trump Jr, by Tucker Carlson. You know, the right-wing podcast at Candice Owens devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming his innocence and defending him. And in the run-up to the 2024 election, he, I think, was very keenly aware that he had a huge amount of leverage

in the form of this huge audience of young men. And so, you know, Baron Trump had been, tasked by the Trump campaign, Donald Trump's youngest son, with delivering young male voters to the campaign. And Andrew Tate cultivated a relationship with Baron Trump via a close associate of his. And Andrew Tate then went out and spent the months in the weeks in the lead-up to the election, blasting out pro-maga content, doing everything he could to get out the vote for Trump, telling his supporters America is over and it's lost if Trump doesn't win. And in the end, he delivered, young male voters to Trump in such huge numbers that Carmelah Harris singled him out in her memoir

as a key agent of her defeat. And pretty immediately afterwards, Andrew Tate started saying both openly and privately to his associates that Donald Trump is the president and now I will be free. This case against me is going to go away. And, you know, it was only a couple of months after the election that Romania eventually succumbed to pressure from the US and release the Tate Brothers from their travel ban. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that brings us to kind of the various investigations into the Tate brothers. You know, there have been investigations in three different countries, Romania, the UK, and

the U.S. As you've, you know, mentioned, Romanian authorities arrested Tate a few years ago, like on accusations of forming an organized criminal group, human trafficking, including of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor in money laundering. They have denied all the wrongdoing. But then there were some procedural issues and a second investigation was started. But, you know, you report that this April, the states were released from all bail conditions relating to that indictment. And then separately, UK prosecutors who confirmed 21 charges that the brothers would face when they returned to the UK, which include rape, bodily harm and human trafficking. And that was laid down in May 2025. what is the status of all of these various investigations? Where do things stand? Yes, this is such an important question and really was part of what drove me to want to investigate this in the first place, was that I saw, after the Tate Brothers were released from their travel ban,

they were traveling around the world freely, insisting that they were innocent and saying there was no evidence whatsoever against them and that all of these cases were crumbling. And I wanted to really get behind that and see, well, what is the evidence, what is happening with these cases. And what I found when I dug into it and was able to obtain a lot of sealed prosecutorial files from the Romanian case was that the evidence is voluminous. It's true that in the original case, in which the brothers were indicted after being arrested in 2022, there were some technical problems with the indictment, which caused a judge to send it back to prosecutors and they were told to fix those problems and resubmit it. But really, the case against the brothers, as political pressure from the US is mounted, has stalled.

There is a second investigation, which followed from that first one, involving a number, dozens of women who were their brothers were alleged to have trafficked. But both cases have been pretty much in a state of stasis since the Trump administration came to power that second time. And the brothers discussed in private messages with their advisors that I obtained, how they were effectively being protected by Romania while the case remained stalled. And the reason for that is that the British investigation that you mention, you know, there's an extradition warrant out for the brothers, but Romania, the Romanian courts have ruled that the brothers cannot be extradited to the UK until the Romanian case has run its

course. And so all the while the brothers are technically under investigation in Romania. they can't be extradited to Britain to face these very serious charges that have mounted up against them in the UK. But meanwhile, the Romanian case appears to be going nowhere. And so there are real questions, I think, about whether they are ever going to face justice. And that was why I really wanted to put as much of this in the public domain as I possibly could so that people can see the extent of what these two men have done over the last 10 years. while at the moment they are being allowed to travel freely with something close to impunity and continue to amass further wealth and spread their influence further,

you know, while there are a lot of women in multiple countries who are yet to see justice. You know, Andrew Tate, along with everything that we've talked about, has also called for women to be stripped of the vote, barred from the workplace, forced to procreate and, you know, his video rants have tremendous reach to the degree that British police have warned that they're actually radicalizing young men in a terrifying manner, was the exact way that they put it. Undoubtedly, they have tremendous influence. Are you seeing any pushback to that? You know, there are a lot of people who strongly oppose what the Tate Brothers stand for,

but I think that in conservative circles, particularly in the U.S., at the moment, they enjoy pretty broad support. I mean, there certainly are there of figures on the right in the US. People like Ben Shapiro, for example, the conservative commentator who have broken away from that and said that, you know, and strongly condemned what the tape brothers stand for. I think there are questions for people within MAGA circles

about how it is that they can look at this evidence and continue to associate with these men and continue to benefit from the, the huge reach that they have. And in the UK, as you say, there have been a number of reports, really disturbing reports of real world violence against women and girls as a result of their teachings. And so I think this is a story not just about what the Tate Brothers have done,

but about the kind of poison in the culture. You know, and in relationships between, you know, women and men, and boys and girls all around the world as a result of what they have taught. Heidi Blake, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for having me. That's all for today. I'm Elaine Chow.

Thank you for listening to Frontburner. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.com.