The Current - Andrew Tate's web of abuse

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Andrew Tate built an empire based on the idea of female subjugation and hyper masculinity. His message to men, particularly young men, is that they are victims of a feminized society. Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania in 2022, along with his brother Tristan, for human trafficking. He's also accused of sexual assaulting multiple women — and is facing investigations in Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States. Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter at the New Yorker and recently wrote a detailed and deeply reported story titled "Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse." She joins us to talk about how Andrew Tate built a business based on abuse, the charges he's facing, and Andrew Tate's influence on the MAGA movement. 

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Andrew Tate is accused of many things. The British American Manosphere influencer built an empire based on the idea of female subjugation and hyper-masculinity. His message to men, particularly young men,

is that they are victims of a feminized society. Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania in 2022, along with his brother Tristan for human trafficking. He's also accused of sexually assaulting multiple women and is facing investigations in Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter at The New Yorker and recently wrote a detailed and deeply reported story with the headline, Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse. And Heidi Blake joins us from the United Kingdom. And just a warning, this conversation includes accounts of sexual assault.

Heidi, good morning. Good morning. You met Andrew Tate earlier this year at a cigar lounge or something like that. And he introduced himself to you as the bad guy, the boogeyman. Who is Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate is a British-American influencer. He rose to prominence initially as a kickboxer and later appeared on the Celebrity Reality TV show Big Brother in the UK. But he quickly realized that he wasn't making enough money doing those sorts of things.

And so he pivoted to a career in webcam pornography and made a ton of money recruiting women to work for him online as online sex workers. And having made a ton of money doing that, he kind of paled that fortune into a major following on social media. He developed this kind of brand, which was all about extreme wealth. And so he developed a really devoted following on social media. And kind of over time, he had devised an ingenious way to turbocharging. his fame, which was to set up this online school that he calls Hustlers University, in which he enrolled about 160,000 students. And he used it as a gigantic content factory.

So what he would do is give the students access to a huge library of his videos in which he would, alongside posting about all of these trappings of extreme wealth, also post misogynistic rants and kind of masculinist pep talks, talking about how women needed to be systematically oppressed in order for men to reassert what he called their natural imperative for power. And the students who enrolled in his university could earn commissions by clipping up and reposting those videos. And so he launched that in 2022 and that summer his fame exploded. His videos were viewed more than 12 billion times on TikTok alone. And all of a sudden he was on the phone screens of teenage boys and young men all around the world.

and that message was everywhere. You get into this in great detail in the piece, which is what makes it so gripping and also just really disturbing. Some of the things that he has said about women are hard to repeat. And so without getting too graphic, what are the ways in which he talked about women?

Well, Angie Tate was pretty open in styling himself as a pimp and talking about how the only value that women hold in society is basically a sex object, as sexual assets. assets. And he openly coached his followers to try to assert their dominance over women to control women absolutely and to treat women as property. He has advocated for women to be stripped of the vote,

to be forced to procreate, to be banned from the workplace, and has really argued for a society in which men hold absolute power and women are effectively slaves. And he referred to the women in his own life as slaves and to the women who worked for him as slaves. And when he talked about this natural masculine imperative for power that he holds is so important. Really what that often seemed to equate to in his own content was sexual violence. You know, there's a famous video of Tate reclining on his bed, waving a machete and talking about how to threaten women with violence, with a machete, and forced them into having sex.

And he described that as the basic moves of pimping. So there was this very overt discussion of sexual. dominant sexual violence of women, treating women as property, which all kind of amounted to this kind of methodology he set out for how men could reclaim their power in society. You mentioned the webcam porn business that he started up and you spoke with some of the women who worked for the Tate brothers. What did you learn from them about how the brothers lured those women to work for them and how the women were treated once they were in their staple? Once Tate and his brother Tristan had decided to launch this webcam,

porn business, what they decided to do was to initially recruit women who they were already having sexual relationships with to come and work with them. And Andrew Tate said pretty openly that when he recruited women who loved him, they could be coerced into giving him all of their money and he got to keep everything. And that was the way he liked it. So they devised a methodology which was all about luring women into romantic relationships in order to wear them down and then compel them into sex work and control all of their earnings, isolate them from their friends, and family, prevent them from having contact with other men, control all of the accounts they used and make sure that they knew nothing about how much money they were really making.

And so really these women were living in a state of total subjugation and control by the Tate Brothers. And the ones I spoke to you really talked to me about feeling, you know, when they ultimately managed to get away that they'd been brainwashed, that they'd really lost themselves. They'd lost their way. They couldn't even really quite understand how they'd ended up in that position. They'd felt so bamboozled by, the techniques of psychological manipulation and control that the brothers very deliberately honed and also taught to other men.

And they were the subject of extraordinary, harrowing violence, but he also branded some of these women, is that right? That's right. Many of the women described are being subjected to absolutely appalling sexual and physical violence. He also, both brothers, branded the women who worked for them with tattoos, so they would have their names tattooed onto the women's bodies, or sometimes the women would have the words tape property or tape owned, tattooed on them in large letters.

Andrew would also have large cobra tattoos. A cobra is his kind of personal insignia. He would have that tattooed onto the bodies of his workers. And they would also, these women would be put through various cosmetic procedures to make them sort of conform to certain beauty standards before they went online. And so there was an element of kind of mutilation that went on here. These women's bodies were not their own anymore. After the brothers were accused by three women in the UK of rape and

strangulation, they moved to Romania and they recruited women there. You describe what happens in their compound as kind of like an industrial operation that they believed operated above the law. What did you hear from the women there about what their life was like in their Romanian compound? Once they got to Romania, the brothers really seemed for a long time to operate with impunity. They bragged openly, as you say, about being above the law. And it seemed the brothers felt that they were untouchable in Romania. And that seemed to emboldened them in the way that they operated. So, you know, some of the women I spoke to you who were there at that time really talked about outrageously abusive behaviour. You know, one woman who was part of what Andrew Tate referred

to as his personal harem talked about how he would casually pepper pretty extreme psychological and sometimes physical abuse through day-to-day life in a way that kind of made it ultimately seem normal. And so she lost her bearings and her sense of what was acceptable and what wasn't during her time with him and it had taken her years of therapy to really begin to extricate herself from that kind of thinking. But they also, you know,

once they got to Romania and became increasingly confident, began very systematically targeting teenage girls to come and work for them. You know, the very first webcam worker, Angie Tate recruited, was underage at the time that she was first put on camera. It's illegal in the UK where this happened and also in the US and many other countries

to make sexual images of anybody under 18. She was branded online as a Russian woman in her 20s to get around that. But they then systematically did go on to target school girls in Romania. They would blast out hundreds of Instagram messages or messages on dating sites and other social media sites, kind of romance these girls, invite them to parties at the compound where they live in just outside Bookerrest, and then recruit them into the webcam business. And when women tried to leave the compound, the Tates would essentially try to destroy their lives, right?

Right. So there, you know, many women spoke about pretty, extreme retaliatory measures being taken against them when they tried to leave. And one of the notable things when I spoke with the brothers was that Tristan Tate assured me that he could put me in touch with, you know, most of the women who had been listed by prosecutors as among their victims and that they would all attest to his innocence. But, you know, when he did put me in touch with those victims, I spoke to many of them who were, you know, still pretty close to the Tate brothers and I think under a pretty high degree of influence by them.

But even one of those women, who was there to defend them, told me that when she tried to leave, Tristan Tate had hacked into her social media accounts as punishment and that one of his associates had threatened to set fire to her car. You know, this is one of the women who's being put up to to defend them, but other women described really, really serious violence against them threats. And I could see in the text messages that Andrew Tate had sent to some of these women that he was telling them constantly that he had mafia connections, you know, that Romania was a dangerous place, that they would be in danger if they tried to get out of the compound or out of the properties that he kept them in.

And so these women really lived in a constant climate of fear. We'll be right back with more of the current podcast. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is, until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix, the truish story about,

about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. One of those women that you spoke with who accuses the tates of sexual assault, the Enter Tate in particular, is a Canadian activist, Lauren Southern, who people might know because in 2015, when she was 19 years old, she was embraced by the far right for her videos, including one called Why I Am Not a Feminist.

There's another one where she held up a sign saying there is no rape culture in the West. What did Lauren Southern tell you about her experience with Andrew Tate? Yeah, so Lauren Southern's story is fascinating and terribly sad. And she talked about how during that time when she was kind of very immersed in the right and in pretty extreme far right views, she came to be introduced to Andrew Tate by Tommy Robinson, the far-right agitator, who he actually knew from growing up alongside one another in Luton in the UK. Tommy Robinson brought Lawrence Southern to Romania, where Andrew Tate kind of courted her and picked to her this idea that they could start

some kind of far-right media venture together. But then that evening, she described that he had taken her back to a hotel room where he had brutally raped her in a way that follows a cleopat and that other women have described, you know, that many of these alleged assaults involve choking and strangulation to a point where women pass out or can't breathe and then suffer injuries to their eyes or to their faces afterwards. Lawrence had then described exactly that same thing. And she actually said that the following morning, Andrew Tate said to her, don't tell the press, I raped you. She then got out of Romania. She went back to Toronto where she was examined by a nurse who

specialized in sexual assault. And she shared those medical records with me. And on that form, in which the nurse recorded details of what she said had happened. She recorded that Lauren Southern had suffered intimate injuries in this assault and that she had been raped and strangled by a high-profile man at a hotel in Romania a few days earlier. There are also text messages that Lauren Southern sent to Andrew Tate in the immediate aftermath of this alleged assault in which she accuses him of raping her and of saying, don't tell the press I raped you. And he replies, you know, this is some liberal me-to nonsense and tells her she's embarrassed. herself. You know, this whole episode caused Lauren Southern to have a real collapse in her

belief system. You know, she really reflected on how she had trolled and mocked women protesting sexual violence in the past and really changed those views. And she ultimately made the really courageous decision to speak out about this and is now assisting other women who are attempting to bring Andrew Tate to justice in the UK and elsewhere by offering her testimony and the evidence that she gathered of her own assault. When you spoke with Andrew Tate, what did he say to you about these accusations and the criminal charges that he's facing and the suggestion or the allegations that he's involved in human trafficking, sexual slavery, etc?

So Andrew Tate strenuously denies any wrongdoing. He actually said to me, I've never done anything wrong in my life, which I think is a pretty tough claim for any of us to make. He says that, you know, that his webcam business was totally above board and that none of the women who ever worked for him have accused him of any wrongdoing. I mean, that is demonstrably untrue. Many of these women have accused him of wrongdoing. I've spoken to them personally, and I've read the witness statements of many more. But the account that the brothers give is that they are the targets of a liberal smear campaign, that he's styled this whole case against him as

what he calls a matrix attack. And he says this is because the powers that B don't like his speech, don't like the influence he holds, don't like the message that he propagates about masculine power and the feminization of society. You know, I must say that in making that argument, Andrew Tate, made a number of claims that are clearly and demonstrably untrue and did so apparently without compunction. But, you know, it was still kind of felt important to me to be in the room with them and to hear it directly from them. That narrative has been taken up by people in the MAGA movement in the United States.

Donald Trump Jr. called the case against the Tate's absolute insanity in his words. Elon Musk suggested the authorities were targeting the Tate's while ignoring, in his words, actual sexual trafficking. People like Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk praised Andrew Tate. How do you understand that connection between Andrew Tate and the MAGA movement? I think Andrew Tate's enormous following, particularly of young men, has made him into an important political force for the far right and for the MAGA movement. And he's really become a defamation. finding figure and proponent of this masculinist ideology, which is all about reasserting

the patriarchy and rolling back the gains of feminism, which has become a uniting force in what is otherwise a kind of fairly incoherent coalition around Donald Trump. So I think for figures like Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump Jr. or, you know, the Trump family, he has been instrumental in mobilizing young men behind that movement. You know, in the 2024 election, Baron Trump, Trump's eldest son, was tasked with mobilising young male voters and Andrew Tate really stepped up to the plate, formed a relationship with Baron and ultimately went on to mobilize young men to vote for Trump in such large numbers that Carmelah Harris singled him out in her memoir as a key agent of her defeat.

When he was charged and indicted with sex trafficking, people like Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, as you say, were very quick to line up and immediately attribute this to you know, to the sort of woke liberal attack on someone who was simply championing traditional masculinity. And they did that, it seems to me, really without any reference to the evidence whatsoever. And so what I wanted to do was, you know, to write a piece that was not about speech, that was not really about what Andrew Tate says or represents, but that was simply about what he has done over the past 10 years. And the impact of that is still felt today. I mean, after Donald Trump won in 2024, you read about this.

Andrew Tate posted on social media, I saw a woman cross. in the road today, but I just kept my foot down. Right of way, you no longer have rights. And you say, in the peace, in the political landscape that Tate helped create, women hold an increasingly precarious position. How do you make sense of that? About his influence in this moment right now? I think that in many ways, Andrew Tate has been instrumental in shaping the political

landscape we live in today. He's celebrated the fact that he has shifted the Overton window heavily since he became famous, and I think he's right. I think he has. And I think, you know, when you have someone out there openly advocating violence against women, more, you know, more sort of standard conservative calls to erode reproductive rights, for example, to roll back on equality laws seem kind of moderate. I think also, you know, we can see his influence on young men around the world today.

And I also think that Tate has created a world in which other far right figures, like, for example, Nick Fuentes in the US, can talk. openly about how women should be held in breeding gulags. You know, these kinds of extreme public positions that are being taken, you know, leading pastors in the US calling openly for women's suffrage to be repealed. These are sort of unthinkable positions to take in even sort of five or 10 years ago, but all of a sudden this is the world we live in. And I do think what we have Andrew Tate to attribute that to, to a really significant extent. Can I ask you just finally about how you end this piece. It's a remarkable, harrowing, incredibly difficult piece to read, but really important

as well. And as I said, part of this is that you met Andrew and Tristan Tate earlier this year. And you write about how when, was it Tristan Tate headed for the elevator and then turned back? And he said to you, come on, give me a hug. And you wrote, in the moment before his arms encircled me, there seemed to be no choice. Why did you end with that? this was something that I gave a lot of thought to you and spoke deeply with my editor about and it felt to me important really as a matter of kind of honesty but also because it felt so resonant with the rest of the story to put my own experience of being in the room with them into the story in a way that kind of captured what it is to be a woman alone in a room

with a man like Tristan Tate with everything you know about him and with all the the power he holds sort of physical and otherwise. And even for me as a woman, you know, there as a reporter for the New Yorker with all of the sort of power and social capital of its own kind that comes with that, there's still a moment where, when, you know, a sort of six-foot-four, two hundred and thirty-pound man with the history that Tristan Tate has strides towards you in a darkened room and says, give me a hug, you freeze and you think I don't know what to do. And that was my experience and I guess I wanted to put that there because also I'd spent so much time speaking to other women for this story who didn't really know how to explain how they had ended

up in the position they ended up in, how the Tate's had so completely asserted control over their lives and I suppose for me that single moment gave me a tiny, tiny glimpse of what that's like and how that begins. It's a remarkable piece of reporting. As I said, really hard to read, but really important as well. Heidi, thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me. Heidi Blake, there's an investigative reporter at The New Yorker and the author of a story called Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse. You can read it at New Yorker.com.

She was in the United Kingdom. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.