Just north of Bucharest is a neat development of red-gabled houses known as American Village. It is an unlikely place to be the center of an international criminal intrigue, but on its western border is a sprawling compound, patrolled by armed guards, that belongs to the British American influencer Andrew Tate and his younger brother, Tristan. The Tates moved to Romania a decade ago to build an online-pornography empire, and American Village was where they kept their recruits.

One day in April, 2022, Iasmina Pencov was in a villa near the compound, recovering from surgery. A slender, dark-haired former psychology student, she had met Andrew Tate the previous year and agreed to move across Romania to be with him. Tate had told Pencov that he considered her his wife, and when he first asked her to strip on camera she was appalled. “I’m old fashioned and I do believe in God,” she texted him. “My body is intimate and only my husband should be able to touch and see.” But he had worn her down—“identified the objections and destroyed them,” he wrote in private messages describing her recruitment. “She never believed in god. Women never believe in anything.”

Tate presided over an online network called the War Room, in which, for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year, he promised to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” Members learned how to recruit women into “sexual slavery” in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or “Pimping Hoes Degree.” He had used Pencov as a teaching case, reporting on her subjugation over the secure messaging app Telegram. “I’ve done this with over 100 girls,” he told members. “I almost sound evil. But I’m not. I’m a shepard. Leading the sheep.”

Pencov had become an online sex worker who staged live shows through the night and posted pornography on OnlyFans. The Tates had paid to have her teeth fixed, and then to have her breasts enlarged. The words “Tate Owned” were tattooed in swirling letters across her upper arm, along with a cobra, Andrew’s personal insignia. She remained passionately devoted to him. “I love you enough to fight for you, compromise for you, and sacrifice myself for you,” she texted him.

Pencov was not alone in her devotion. The Tates used the same method to recruit all the women who came to American Village. “You have to fuck them, and they have to love you. It’s essential to the business,” Andrew explained in a video sold to War Room members. “You have to be militant with your fucking pimping.” (I have pieced together an account of Tate’s activities from thousands of private messages, internal documents, sealed prosecutorial files, and court records—as well as scores of interviews with the Tates, their associates, and more than a dozen alleged victims.)

The Tates had moved to Romania from the United Kingdom in 2015, after three British women accused Andrew of rape and strangulation, and the brothers seemed to operate there with impunity. Court records show that local police sat on at least two reports indicating that the Tates were coercing Romanian women into sex work. Andrew openly discussed bribing law-enforcement officials in War Room chats, and bragged on social media about his connections. “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Doubt me? EPSTEIN HAD ACCESS TO PUSSY. Look at his fucking friends list.”

Pencov had been entrusted with supervising new arrivals at a villa in American Village where the brothers housed sex workers. Tate called her his “mafia wife,” and told her, “it’s important you and I work together and just control them all.” She had become an eager accomplice. “We’re the power team,” she told him.

Pencov was concerned about the latest recruit: a twenty-year-old aspiring musician whom Tristan Tate had romanced on a recent trip to Miami. The musician had refused to strip on camera, insisting that she had come to Bucharest to teach Tristan piano. Pencov found her demeanor “weird and secretive”; she had caught her talking furtively in her bedroom with another reticent newcomer.

That day in 2022, Pencov heard a hammering at the front door. Another recruit went to answer it, and a voice asked if the American woman was inside. When the worker said yes, there followed a cacophony of voices, radios, and pounding boots as police stormed the property.

It turned out that, soon after arriving in Bucharest, the American had begun sending distress messages back home. “These guys are actually evil,” she had written. “They are definitely trafficking women.” The other women in the house seemed “brainwashed,” she said. The U.S. Embassy was alerted, and swiftly notified local police. A SWAT team was deployed to take the women in the villa into protective custody.

The Tates were questioned, and one of Romania’s leading organized-crime prosecutors opened an investigation into suspected human trafficking. But the brothers were quickly released, and Andrew waved away reports of the incident, claiming that it had been a prank. He had been saying for years that he was “above the law,” and he saw no reason to doubt it now.

At the time of the raid, Andrew Tate was on the cusp of becoming one of the most famous men on the planet. He’d amassed a vast following on social media, mixing posts about diamond watches, cigars, and supercars with jokes and misogynistic rants. He told alienated young men that they were the victims of a feminized society determined to crush their male essence, and urged them to get fit, get rich, and reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power.”

Often, that imperative seemed to equate to sexual violence. In one video, Tate described the “basic moves of pimping” while lying on his bed waving a machete. “Bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck,” he said. “The machete’s on the floor, her panties are all wet, and you go fuck her. That’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.”

The Tate brothers ran their online-pornography empire from a heavily guarded compound north of Bucharest.Photograph by Mattia Balsamini for The New Yorker

Tate had risen to prominence in the online realm of incels, pickup artists, and red-pill believers known as the manosphere—and he’d engineered an ingenious way to expand his reach. Not long before the raid, he had launched Hustlers University, an online school that, for $49.99 a month, taught “modern wealth creation” methods, including an affiliate-marketing program that functioned as a gigantic content factory. Members were given access to a library of Tate’s videos, and earned commissions by reposting clips to attract new subscribers. More than a hundred and sixty thousand students enrolled, pumping Tate’s content into algorithms already primed to amplify extreme ideas.

In the months after the raid, videos tagged #AndrewTate were viewed more than twelve billion times on TikTok alone, and he became one of the world’s most Googled people. His followers spread his rhetoric to millions of homes and classrooms. Teen-age boys around the world barked Tate’s slogan “Make me a sandwich” at female teachers, and reports spread of sexual aggression by his followers.

Tate’s enormous reach made him a political force. He had always been an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump—“He’s grabbing bitches by the pussy. I like that guy,” he’d once said—and he became a singularly influential proponent of masculinism: a creed, devoted to countering feminism and restoring the patriarchy, that helped unite the disparate factions of the MAGA coalition. Tate called for women to be stripped of the vote, barred from the workplace, and forced to procreate. By comparison, conservative politicians’ efforts to erode reproductive rights and roll back gender-equality laws seemed moderate. “I have shifted the Overton window heavily since I became famous,” Tate bragged.

In the summer of 2022, feminist and antifascist groups mounted a campaign to deplatform Tate, and he was ejected from mainstream social media. But the bans only enhanced his fame, with conservative pundits hailing him as a free-speech martyr. “We’re adults and Americans, and we’ll listen to anyone we want,” Tucker Carlson said as he welcomed Tate onto his Fox News show. Tate played his part adroitly. “When somebody who’s championing men’s issues like myself comes forward and finally manages to garner huge percentiles of the public support, I’m silenced,” he said.

Tate made a deal with the right-wing streaming service Rumble, which had recently received major investments from Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, and J. D. Vance, Trump’s future Vice-President. The details have not previously been confirmed, but a confidential contract shows an agreement to pay Tate at least six million dollars a year for a weekly quota of five short videos and a thirty-minute live stream. His presence inspired a forty-five-per-cent increase in active users, sending Rumble to first place on the Apple and Google charts. A few months later, Elon Musk bought Twitter and reinstated Tate’s account.

When Tate was arrested on human-trafficking charges, his allies defended him. Donald Trump, Jr., called the case “absolute insanity,” and Musk suggested that the authorities were targeting the Tates while ignoring “actual sex trafficking.” Carlson, who had just released a documentary called “The End of Men,” devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming Tate’s innocence; so did the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. The activist Charlie Kirk praised him onstage. “What he says is so powerful,” Kirk said. “Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.”

Prosecutors went on to allege that the Tates had trafficked dozens of women by using romantic relationships to lure them into sex work. Though the brothers were released from custody, they were barred from leaving Romania. Tate issued a defiant statement: “The Matrix has attacked me. But they misunderstand, you cannot kill an idea.” To fight the charges, he hired an expensive team of lawyers, P.R. operatives, and private detectives.

Tate’s representatives claimed that he hadn’t really meant what he’d said online about sexually exploiting women—he had simply been playing a character “for entertainment.” At the same time, they devised a campaign to attack his accusers with scores of legal filings, while Tate’s affiliate network harassed and smeared them online. Even one of his team members described it as “textbook victim intimidation.”

As the 2024 U.S. election approached, the team saw an opportunity. Tate forged relationships with Barron Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. In the weeks before the vote, he pumped out pro-MAGA content, mobilizing young men in such large numbers that Kamala Harris later named him as a key factor in her defeat. When the result was in, Tate posted jubilantly on X: “THE PATRIARCHY IS BACK.” After the Inauguration, he added, “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president.”

Weeks later, under pressure from the U.S., Romania lifted the Tates’ travel ban. Since then, the brothers have travelled the world, while the case appears stalled and the evidence remains sealed. When I met them earlier this year at a cigar lounge in Bucharest, they assured me that the prosecution was doomed. “It’s just garbage out of a corrupt country,” Andrew said, puffing a Davidoff and flashing pearly veneers. “Show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a girl chained up. Show me something.”

“The times I struck a woman (in passion) I never left a mark,” the Tates’ father wrote on Facebook in 2011. “Super control of the human animal. They love me still.” Emory Tate was a celebrated Black chess master who served as a staff sergeant and a linguist in the U.S. Air Force; he met their mother, a white British woman named Eileen Ashleigh, on a brief posting to the U.K. The couple married and moved to America, and in 1986 Andrew was born in a military hospital in Washington, D.C. Tristan came a year and a half later, followed by a sister, Janine. Andrew has described his father’s influence in scores of posts, podcasts, and videos. “My dad was my hero in every way,” he has said. “I feared my dad. As if he was God himself.”

Emory was brilliant, charismatic, and mercurial. In 1992, he was discharged from the Air Force after being diagnosed as having conditions that “interfere with military service,” including narcissistic personality disorder. Back in civilian life, he was convinced that he was being monitored by the C.I.A., that the family car was being tailed, and that he was under attack by assailants from Eastern Europe. “The world he lived in was a scary world,” Andrew has said. He remembered Emory telling him, “You’re a Tate. They’re going to come for you like they came for me.”

The family relocated to Elkhart, Indiana, to be close to Emory’s mother. The brothers spent hours playing around their grandmother’s house—climbing trees, building forts, and racing through cornfields—but their home life was fraught. Emory drank heavily and was prone to terrifying rages. Tristan told me that if he stepped out of line his father beat him with a belt, sometimes whipping him until his skin was striped red. Andrew has described lying awake at night in terror. “I must have been the most awake child on earth,” he said in one video. “I was so afraid of the beatdown.” In his telling, this violence was an essential part of becoming a man. “I can’t wait to kick my kid’s ass if he gets fresh,” he has said.

“Would you mind charging my drill?”

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In Indiana, Emory worked low-wage jobs—at McDonald’s, a car wash, a park—but funnelled his ferocious intellect into chess, often staying up all night drinking and practicing variations. He started leaving the family to play in tournaments around the country. He would arrive by bus, wearing his trademark trilby, and hustle for spare dollars in chess parks. A dazzling attacking player, he became a folk hero on the circuit—bringing “the flair and swagger to chess often seen on the basketball courts,” the chess writer Daaim Shabazz noted—but he lacked the discipline to reach grandmaster level, where serious winnings kick in. “As smart as my father was, chess doesn’t pay,” Andrew has said. “He also loved gambling, women, and booze. So you add all that up, we were very, very poor.”

When Emory returned to the family after an eight-week absence, Eileen confronted him over an infidelity, and he walked out again. “When you’re older, you’ll understand,” he told Andrew. “Your mother won’t shut up.” As the marriage broke down, Andrew rationalized his father’s abandonment. “You’re a better role model to your son if you barely see him and live life on your own terms,” he later wrote. “A dad is a super hero. Not a full time carer. Don’t sit and become a Bitch like the woman wants.”

In 1997, the year Andrew turned eleven, Eileen moved the children to her home town of Luton, an impoverished and overcrowded municipality north of London. They stayed in a hostel for homeless women and children. “It was a horrible place to live,” Tristan told me. Eileen got a job washing dishes in a school cafeteria, and he remembered that “her hands were always bleeding and cracked.”

Eventually, they moved to the Marsh Farm estate, a housing project plagued by crime and violent riots. The Tates went to a failing school, where they were bullied for their American accents and shabby clothes. Emory occasionally sent money, and the brothers would walk to a pay phone to call him. “My father raised me over the phone,” Andrew has written. “I was STILL AFRAID of him, 3000 miles away.”

As a teen-ager, Andrew was dogged by a feeling of unease. “I always had this sense that something wasn’t quite right about the way the world functioned,” he has said. He thought of himself like the character Neo in “The Matrix,” restlessly searching without knowing what for. When the brothers walked to school together, they sometimes saw a Ferrari drive by, and Andrew became furious. “He’s hacked the Matrix!” he said. “How does he have four hundred grand for a car? He knows something we don’t know!”

By seventeen, Andrew had left school and was working in a fish market, waking up at dawn to lug boxes of ice. He described being encumbered by a “crippling perpetual boredom” that yielded only to danger. Seeking a remedy, he enrolled in a kickboxing gym run by a former Special Forces soldier from Bosnia. Soon, he was competing, and Tristan started training, too.

Kickboxing is not much more lucrative than professional chess. The brothers initially fed themselves on canned sardines and chicken scrounged from abandoned KFC buckets. But, in the ring, Andrew exhibited his father’s gift for showmanship. He called himself King Cobra, got a cobra tattooed on his chest, and developed a patter about drinking snake blood. In one post-match interview, he was red-faced and furious, fumbling with his mouth guard. “This is not sport to me,” he seethed. “I’m in there to kill. That’s it. Pain. That’s all I know.”

As Tate’s fighting career gathered momentum, his father showed an interest. In 2011, Andrew won his first world championship, and Emory wrote online, “Destruction itself rides in his very fingertips.” He also posted musings that seemed to provide his son with an ideological road map. He warned against “enemies of alpha males,” “the Matrix,” and “the insanity of the ruling elite.” He mocked the notion of gender equality and argued that “mature men” should be allowed to have sex with pubescent girls.

Emory was still travelling between chess tournaments, and his posts were interspersed with blurry photos of hotels and dark city streets. He wrote about drinking vodka at 3 A.M. and inhabiting a state “between ennui and dejection.” At times, his tone was valedictory. “I could clone myself. I would not,” he wrote. “The better versions of me already walk the planet.” At others, it approached introspection. “Many animals are immune to their own poison,” he wrote, in 2012. “The toxic HUMAN realizes that his toxin kills even himself, toxifies his kids.” He died three years later, succumbing to a heart attack during a chess match. Andrew posted a tribute. “He created a monster,” he wrote. “As a father should.”

At the peak of Tate’s fighting career, he spent part of each year competing across Europe, and he often based himself in Košice, Slovakia, an elegant medieval city of pastel town houses and Gothic spires. During one visit, he met Bibiana Hruskova, a high-school student with hazel eyes and blond hair, who was working as a waitress. Tate has said that they met in 2012, the year he turned twenty-six and she turned fifteen. He had taken to collecting girlfriends on his travels, and Hruskova became one of them. “I had a girlfriend in Slovakia, I had a girlfriend in France, I had a girlfriend in England,” he later said. “Do they know about each other? No.”

Hruskova was besotted with Tate. “Youre the best thing ever happened to me,” she texted him. “I want babiiies and get married.” In 2014, when she turned seventeen, Tate summoned her to England. She left her family and went.

By then, Tate was a three-time kickboxing world champion, but, even at the top of the sport, he generally made only about fifty thousand dollars for a title fight; after he paid his manager and his trainer there was little left over. In early 2014, he sat down to make a list of everything he owned. It was a dispiriting exercise. He and his brother shared a run-down apartment with barely any furniture. He owed money on his car. But then he had what he considered a flash of entrepreneurial genius. “I had about five girlfriends, all smoking hot—and females are an asset,” he recalled, in a video. “Pussy is the only reason that empires were started and wars were waged. . . . I had to find a way to monetize the assets.”

Tate knew some street pimps, and he contemplated that route, but he didn’t want other men touching what he saw as his property. Opening a strip club was too expensive. Then he stumbled on an ad for a webcam-porn site. He flew all of his girlfriends to Luton and assembled them at a restaurant, where they learned of one another’s existence. “I said, ‘Listen, young ladies, I’m starting a webcam business,’ ” Tate later recalled. “ ‘This is going to change your life.’ ”

Most of the women left, but Hruskova stayed. Tate set up a profile for her on a site called MyFreeCams, which allows users to watch models for free, then pay them to perform specific sex acts or private shows. Filming sexual imagery of anyone under eighteen is illegal in the U.S. and the U.K. On camera, Hruskova became a Russian woman in her twenties, performing under the username KissofaCobra. Tate persuaded her to get a tattoo of a cobra down one side of her body and another reading “Tate Property” above her crotch.

Webcam porn, now a multibillion-dollar industry, was then a nascent phenomenon, and Tate considered himself a pioneer. “We started doing fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour days,” he said. “I’d wake up to go piss, and by the time I finished pissing I was awake enough to say, All right, two hours’ sleep, that’s enough.” He realized that he could extract bigger tips from customers if he wrote them seductive messages off camera while Hruskova pretended to type on a disconnected keyboard. “I had these guys selling their houses, life savings, loans, all of it,” he later said. “I put together an apparatus of genius behind the avatar of beauty, and we fucking conquered.”

With Tate controlling her performances, Hruskova became a fan favorite. “I think I’ve fallen in love (again),” one user wrote. For a price, Tate would have sex with her on camera. In one video, he keeps his face out of view as he penetrates Hruskova from behind, but the distinctive cobra tattoo on his chest and arm is clearly visible. “She will perform anal sex in front of hundreds of viewers, who will keep tipping to push her boundaries,” a review site noted.

Tate has claimed that, in the first month with Hruskova on camera, he made more than a hundred thousand dollars; the brothers bought an Aston Martin. That April, Andrew won the kickboxing world championship for a fourth time. But he soon stepped back from the sport to focus on expanding his webcam business, telling a kickboxing magazine that he was now a “pimp superstar.”

As Tate warmed to his new career, he adopted a motto: “There are only two categories of people—pimps and hoes.” He was quoting the infamous Chicago pimp Ken Ivy, who published a book called “Pimpology” and another titled “The Art of Human Chess.” Tate studied both volumes closely.

“Seduction is a chess game and to the victor go the spoils,” Ivy wrote, in a treatise on recruiting sex workers. “To master someone completely, they have to depend on you for everything,” he instructed. “Most hoes have low self-esteem for a reason. A pimp looks for that weakness, and if it isn’t on the surface, he brings that motherfucker out of them.”

Webcam work, unlike prostitution, is generally legal. But it is illegal almost everywhere in the world to recruit sex workers using force, fraud, or coercion—including psychological manipulation. Tate wasn’t concerned. As he started searching for new recruits, he bought a replica of the gloves that featured in O. J. Simpson’s murder trial and got the word “pimp” embroidered on the palms.

At the end of 2014, he reached out on Facebook to a twenty-year-old British woman whom I’ll call Maya Navarro. He sent a recruiting video of Hruskova sprawled on a bed, tapping on a keyboard. “Just typing to some guys is the easiest money in the world,” he said.

Navarro was living with her mother, who had worked for years in a warehouse, and her younger brother, who had learning difficulties. Her father had recently become homeless, and since leaving school she had been precariously employed. She agreed to meet Tate for coffee to find out more.

Navarro told me that Tate was “very charismatic, very confident.” He showed her screenshots of the money coming into Hruskova’s webcam account and said that he would make her rich, so that she could travel the world and help her family. “I don’t think I’d ever spoken to anybody in my entire life that had said those kinds of things to me,” Navarro told me.

Soon afterward, Tate picked Navarro up from her mother’s house and drove her to a block of apartments above a convenience store. Up a dark stairway lit by flickering bulbs, he showed her into a room with a mattress on the floor and a computer station in the corner. “It was skanky,” she told me, but Tate assured her that they would soon be moving to a penthouse. He plied her with wine and directed her to lie on the mattress, pretending to type, while he messaged customers from the computer. That first night, he let her keep her underwear on, and it didn’t feel so bad.

“For the anxiety, I’m prescribing the familiar comfort of rewatching the same series until its outcomes feel more knowable than your own.”

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When Tate picked her up for the second shift, there was a young woman, whom I’ll call Emilia Walker, in the back seat. Navarro knew Walker a little from school and felt more at ease with her there. Between stints on camera, they laughed and drank bottles of rosé that the brothers supplied. At the end of the week, Tate gave each woman several hundred pounds in cash—more than Navarro had ever held. She said that he drove them to a shopping center and declared, “You’ve got money now. Start spending it.” Navarro bought a Michael Kors watch and, after a few more shifts, a pair of Louboutin heels; it was such a thrill that she kept the receipt as a trophy. “I felt really, really proud of myself,” she said. “It was kind of, like, Oh, this is what my life can be like if I stay here.”

But Tate was already coming to resent paying Navarro and Walker a cut of their earnings. Hruskova let him keep “100% of the fucking money,” he later said. But, he complained, “once you get bigger, you start hiring girls who don’t love you.” He decided on a strategy: “I have a financial incentive to fuck as many as I can.”

Before long, Tate told Navarro and Walker they would now be working from a room in a Hilton hotel in Luton. On the second night, the women fell asleep there, and Navarro said that she woke up to find Tate behind her, touching her legs. Then, she said, he pulled down her underwear and grabbed her throat, forcing himself inside her. “You’re such a good little girl,” she remembered him saying, while he choked her until she struggled for breath. Navarro said that she repeatedly told Tate to stop, and tried to loosen his grip on her throat, but he continued.

Navarro recalls that she passed out afterward, and woke up beside Tate feeling “disgusting, ashamed, dirty.” She left and returned to her mother’s house, but resuming normal life was hard. “My crappy house, my crap bedroom, and my tiny little bed—that definitely put it into perspective,” she said. “Slowly, I was, like, I should go back, because that’s the most money I’ve ever made.” She told herself that she’d be firmer with Tate: “I was, like, Maybe he won’t do it again. Maybe he’ll just leave me alone.”

By March, 2015, Tate had moved his webcam operation to Hitchin, a market town outside Luton. He’d rented an airy four-bedroom apartment, with a roof terrace overlooking a quaint stone church and a riverbank of willows. When Navarro returned, she thought that it was the nicest place she’d ever stayed.

Tate was now calling Emilia Walker his girlfriend, and they were sharing a bed. Navarro found Walker spirited and funny, a good companion. “She kind of made the place like home,” she told me. The two women retreated to the rooftop whenever they got a break, to smoke, joke around, and get some sun.

Tate had hung up a poster commissioned from a local artist. It depicted him on a throne, holding a cane that he called his “pimp stick,” with three women leaning over him in stilettos and thongs. “Big Tate carrys a cane to keep his hoes sane,” it said, in pink bubble writing. He’d also had a poster made for his brother, who was recruiting webcam workers of his own. Tristan’s poster depicted him dressed as a buccaneer, above the words “The captain’s word is LAW.” Navarro said that Tristan would walk around the apartment wearing a tricorne hat and waving a foam sword, declaring, “I am the captain of the money ship.” There was an absurdity to it all that took the edge off the menace.

There were half a dozen women working in the apartment—including Hruskova, whom Navarro recognized from the video that Tate had sent. Tate was “horrible” to Hruskova, Navarro said, calling her “fat and ugly.” When he was around, Hruskova seemed to vie for his attention, “trying to be the alpha female in the house.” When he was gone, though, she seemed “like she didn’t want to be there, but she was scared.”

The hours were gruelling, and Navarro downed several bottles of wine during each shift, trying to stay disinhibited enough to do what customers asked. By the time she finished, she was drunk and desperate for sleep. At first, the brothers drove her home, but after a while, she said, they refused and she had to sleep over. There were only two beds in the apartment, and Tristan slept upstairs with several women he’d recruited—so Navarro ended up crashing in the bed that Walker shared with Tate.

One morning, Navarro woke up to Tate and Walker having sex next to her. She shushed them, and Walker got up and went into the bathroom. When she was gone, Navarro said, Tate put her in a choke hold and raped her for a second time. Though she clawed at his arms, he wouldn’t release his grip. “I was scared that he was going to kill me,” she told me. Then Walker emerged from the shower, and he rolled off her.

Later, Navarro said, she was working on camera when she heard strange noises and went to investigate. Through the open bedroom door, she saw Tate strangling Walker on the bed. Walker’s face was red and puffy, and her body was limp. Navarro said that she felt a strange paralysis. “I was, like, There’s nothing I can do about it,” she told me. She went back to work.

The following morning, Navarro and Walker were putting on makeup in the bathroom when they noticed clusters of red spots around their eyes. Walker searched online and saw that petechiae—burst blood vessels—can be a sign of acute pressure in the head from strangulation. The women began to panic. Hearing a commotion, the Tates came to the door. When they saw the marks, they laughed. “You’re such dumb bitches,” Navarro remembers them saying. “That’s from sleeping on the silk sheets.”

Navarro said that Tate started attacking her at random moments. Multiple times, when she slept late, he whipped her with a belt. Time became a blur, and the world outside the apartment seemed to recede. But, one day, Navarro had a moment alone, and something snapped: she walked out the door and never went back.

Walker left soon afterward, and the two women gradually began talking about what had happened. Though Walker had started sleeping with Tate consensually, she said that he had attacked her many times, choking her till she almost passed out. That summer, the women contacted the Hertfordshire police.

As it happened, Tate was already known to the authorities. The previous spring, another woman had gone to the police to make similar allegations. The woman, whom I’ll call Hannah Price, said that she had briefly dated Tate the previous year but told him that she wasn’t ready for sex. In the course of several weeks, she said, he raped and strangled her twice. Price showed police a series of messages from Tate discussing the alleged assaults. “I love raping you,” he had written to her. “Monsters are monsters.”

(Tate says that he did not strangle any of the women, and that the sex was consensual. But he has repeatedly advocated throttling women during sex as a way to assert masculine power. “Choke her so she can barely fucking breathe, tell her she’s yours forever,” he said in one podcast. “You just have to be a large enough force to program her.” Price and Walker declined to be interviewed, but have described being assaulted by Tate in court filings.)

Tate was arrested on suspicion of assault, but he denied everything and was quickly released. Back at the apartment, he arranged for several webcam workers to give statements on his behalf. “We’re going to bury this shit and carry on with our lives,” he told them. Then, before the case could move forward, he and Tristan left for Romania. “Fuck England,” Tate said. “I’m bouncing.”

The Tates’ compound outside Bucharest lies behind heavy security gates. Inside is a courtyard with an underlit swimming pool and a line of parked supercars—Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, and Bugattis. The house is a vast converted warehouse, clad in gleaming black panels, with the name “Tate” mounted on the wall in huge white letters, next to an emblem of a chess knight. A wrought-iron samurai statue stands by a bulletproof door.

When I visited, this March, Tristan showed me around. He is physically imposing—six feet four and about two hundred and thirty pounds—but his manners were polished. He ushered me into a cavernous space, where the brothers’ kickboxing belts hung on a wall, alongside a photograph of their father. Glass-topped display tables held a replica handgun, gold bullets, and brass knuckles. In a wood-panelled cigar lounge, Tristan showed me a towering safe sheathed in burgundy leather, which he said had contained “watches and millions of dollars in cash and gold” before the raid. Security cameras covered every inch of the compound, except the bedrooms. “I’ve made it into a fortress,” he said.

In 2015, when the Tates decided to leave England, Andrew’s plan was “I’ll just run around the world, and I’ll be above the jurisdiction of any one place.” Then a friend from his kickboxing days called from Romania. Sebastian Vieru ran a mixed-martial-arts company with backing from two brothers, Mihăiță and Sorin Doroftei, who were later indicted for heading one of the largest criminal cartels in Romanian history. (They deny the allegations.) Tate was fascinated by his friend’s connections. He became a partner in the cage-fighting business, and then began investing in real estate. Tate boasted in texts about how easy it was to “hide” cash in Romanian property. “Turn up with money in a bag,” he wrote. “No banks no mortgage no bullshit no tax.” He later partnered with the Dorofteis to open a series of casinos, which he described as “big time mafia shit.”

To Tate, Romania seemed like a gangster’s paradise. He bragged about bribing officials, filling his house with guns and machetes, and hiding money from the authorities through cryptocurrency. He repeatedly claimed to have used mafia and police contacts to hunt down people who had crossed him. “Please do not underestimate how connected I am in Romania,” he tweeted. “MPs Police chiefs Street thugs ANYTHING can be fixed.”

The Tates had brought Hruskova and several other women from the U.K., and put them to work in properties around Bucharest. They hired a former member of Romania’s security services, who recruited dozens of guards to protect them. Tate said that he also consulted a local lawyer about the potential implications of being accused of assaulting a woman, and was assured that without “physical evidence” she would have no case. “This is probably forty per cent of the reason I moved to Romania, because in Eastern Europe none of this garbage flies,” Tate later explained in a video. “I’m not a fucking rapist. But I like being able to do whatever I want.”

During my visit, the Tates strenuously denied that they had hurt a single woman. “I’ve never done anything wrong in my life,” Andrew told me. He insisted that none of the women he’d recruited had accused him of crimes, adding, “They’re still my friends.” By the time police raided his properties, he said, “the webcam business—which, by the way, is not illegal—had been closed for ten years.” He showed no trace of emotion as he lied.

In Romania, the Tates turned their small-time webcam enterprise into a kind of industrial operation. Their approach to recruiting resembled what trafficking experts call the “lover-boy method.” They trawled dating apps and social media for young women, blasting out hundreds of identical messages and frequently changing their location to expand their reach. Women who responded were romanced. Tate sent one a flurry of questions: Where did she want to travel? Had she ever been skydiving? Had she ever seen a Dubai sunset? Those who proved susceptible were groomed for sex work. “Every day, I sent twenty Instagrams. Every day, I was on a date. I was fucking four girls, five girls a week,” Tate said in a War Room video. “I built my business off the back of my dick.”

Tate had learned from Ken Ivy, the “Pimpology” author, the importance of having a “bottom bitch.” He needed a recruiting sergeant who could lure in other women, and he assigned this role to Hruskova. After he slept with a woman, Hruskova would come in to “sell the dream” of webcam work, he explained in a War Room video. “Before this, I was a waitress, and it was shit,” he coached her to say. “Now I do this, I make so much money.”

In fact, Tate said, Hruskova saw little of the money she generated. He reported in private chats that her live streams had made him around two million dollars, but all she got was pocket money for coffee and manicures. “She works hard to please me. To get attention,” he said. He was certain that she would never leave him. “I own her mind,” he told associates. “If I died, she would commit suicide.” (One worker from that time told me that Hruskova seemed to have lost the capacity for independent thought. “She’s not herself—she’s like an extension of Andrew,” she said. “We were all brainwashed.”)

After the initial pitch, Tate would get his target and Hruskova drunk and have sex with them. “Martinis, Martinis, Martinis. Bam. Threesome. Slam them both,” he said. “That’s how you recruit.” The compulsory group sex continued once the women were employed. “Every day after work for me was a threesome, foursome, fivesome, orgy,” Tate said. He wrote to one eighteen-year-old about a threesome with Hruskova, “You can be little sisters and hold hands while you get dick.”

The women lived in the brothers’ properties, and the most prized workers were not allowed to go out unattended or to have relationships with anyone but the Tates. Otherwise, Andrew explained, “that other person she’s fucking is going to have the control over her mind.” Each brother had a personal “harem.” Tate called the women his wives, and ordered them to address him as “king.”

Often, the recruits came from troubled homes or were living in poverty. One former member of Tate’s “harem” told me that she had found his initial love-bombing intoxicating: “You go along with it, and, before you know it, you’re in absolute hell.” Tate had a way of “casually peppering the abuse through day-to-day life,” she said. “He kind of serves it to you in a tongue-in-cheek, humorous way, but it’s deadly serious.” Physical abuse was often disguised as “rough sex.” Once, she said, Tate beat her so hard that she sustained lasting injuries to her eye and breast. “You’re a sexually violent person,” she texted him afterward. He replied, “You never told me to stop.”

In Romania, Tate rarely seemed to face consequences for his actions. In the summer of 2016, though, he risked returning to the U.K. to appear on the reality show “Big Brother.” People who had seen his early sex shows with Hruskova remembered him, and some of the footage was leaked online.

In one video, Tate lay on a bed and ordered Hruskova to show the camera her tattoo. “Why does it say ‘Tate’?” he asked.

“Because I’m his whore,” she replied.

“Why’s your ass got a bruise on it?”

“Because my daddy hits me.”

Tate picked up a belt and began whipping Hruskova as she lay in the fetal position, sobbing. “Bitch, look at the camera,” he told her, yanking her head back by the hair. “This is what happens when you don’t fucking listen.”

The Sun, a leading tabloid, reported on the footage, and Tate was forced out of the “Big Brother” house. He posted a protest online: “We were having a laugh? The sun are morons.” He said that Hruskova was an ex-girlfriend, and shared a photo of her holding a belt inscribed with the words “But I love when Andrew spanks me.”

In fact, Tate’s removal from “Big Brother” had nothing to do with the videos. The Hertfordshire police had contacted the producers to inform them of the assault allegations from Navarro, Walker, and Price. But officers apparently missed indications of another crime: child pornography. Tate said that the belt video was made in 2012, at the start of his relationship with Hruskova. That year, she turned fifteen.

As the webcam business expanded, a British entrepreneur named Naomi John was brought in to help. John had grown up in Bedfordshire, not far from the Tates, and as a young woman had opened a swimwear store called Sandstorm Boutique. The store became a sponsor of the Miss World beauty pageant, and John served as a judge for Miss Universe Great Britain, a significant recruiting pipeline for models.

In 2016, the Tates persuaded John to move to Bucharest. They had launched a recruitment agency called Model Stars, and they wanted their role in it to be obscured. Model Stars was described in promotional materials as an “all-female business,” in which “women help other women to escape the 9-5 work schedule and earn life-changing amounts of money.”

John’s job, according to sealed court filings and interviews with women who worked for her, was to help recruit webcam workers and control their profiles on streaming sites. “I don’t want them to have passwords,” Tristan texted John. “I want the money to be used by me and you, fuck them.” John directed the women on camera, telling them which positions to adopt and which sex toys to use. “She was the brain, and I was the looks,” one recruit told me. Another worker—in her late teens, with pink hair and braces—was renamed Chloe Skittles and posed in a room with jars of candy above the bed.

One of John’s first recruits, Abigail Tyson, was working in a bathroom-supply store in the struggling English port town of Grimsby when she got an Instagram message from Model Stars. Tyson told me that she spoke to John over Skype and found her “really lovely, like a friend that I’ve known for a long time.” The shop paid about three hundred pounds a week; John assured her that she would earn much more from Model Stars.

In Bucharest, Tyson was brought to a house where the brothers were staying with several other women. She’d never had a serious boyfriend, and she was mesmerized by Tristan. “I’ve never met someone who is so, so intelligent like him,” she said. They soon started sleeping together.

Tyson proved to be a relentlessly hard worker, streaming for seventeen hours straight and sometimes performing live sex shows with Hruskova. Tristan described her in private messages as his “main income,” adding that after several years she was “STILL in the dark” about how much money her streams made. According to court filings, she went on to earn him close to a million dollars. She also bore him a child.

Tyson is one of several former workers Tristan put me in touch with, saying that they would vouch for his innocence. Talking to me over Zoom, while her five-year-old daughter with Tristan played in the background, Tyson told me that the Tates were “just big, cuddly Teddy bears.” The other women Tristan recommended also rejected the idea that they were victims. But even one of the Tates’ defenders described Tristan as behaving like a “dictator,” and said that, when she decided to leave, he attacked her verbally and hacked her social-media accounts. One of his associates threatened to set fire to her car.

The Tates’ messages show that they repeatedly ordered associates to punish women by hijacking their social-media accounts and posting pornographic images of them to their followers. When another worker fled the operation, Tristan told Naomi John to log in to her Instagram account and “burn it down.”

“Cool I feel like burning stuff down,” John replied.

At the peak of the webcam business, the brothers reported, they had seventy-five women working for them; Andrew said that more than thirty women had his name tattooed on their skin. John returned to the U.K. and established a webcam house for the brothers in Hertfordshire. She couldn’t be reached for comment, and it is unclear how much she knew about the Tates’ recruitment methods. But several women who worked for the operation offered the same theory about her motivations. “Obviously, she was benefitting from it—she got her percentage,” one said. “But I’m pretty sure she was in love with Andrew and trying to please him.” At one point, Tate’s messages show, he recorded a video about “only seeing a girl part time but loving her” and sent it to nine women, leading each to believe that it was exclusively for her. The names attached to the women’s numbers in his phone included Jackass, Useless, Crazy Bitch, and Naomi.

Tate flaunted his growing wealth on social media, and a following coalesced. He showed a gift for pop-culture provocation, with posts that often went to the top of the trending charts. One of his first viral sensations started with a series of gibes at fans of “Star Wars.” “Everyone who’s ever watched star wars in human history is absolutely dirt poor,” he posted, alongside a photograph of himself on a yacht. “Even watching a star wars trailer may leave you homeless, on the street, with aids.” Tate also taunted vegetarians (“The souls of dead animals power my massive wang”), lovers of Japanese cuisine (“You know who eats sushi? Little fucking soy boys. Little fucking Democrats”), and people who preferred to drink still water (“You scared of bubbles, you little bitch?”).

His fans looked to him for entertainment, but also for inspiration. Tate projected a credo of masculine excellence that revolved around self-discipline, physical prowess, and mental fortitude. He insisted that “depression isn’t real” and told sufferers to stop complaining and start working out. For young men feeling dejected by the public conversation about toxic masculinity, Tate’s celebrations of manhood were galvanizing, and his mocking assaults on feminism felt bracingly irreverent. “The reason feminists think men are losers is because the only men that bother to interact with feminists ARE losers,” he posted.

At the height of the #MeToo movement, Tate tweeted that women should “bare some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. During the controversy that followed, his disdain for women began cohering into a political identity. He appeared on Infowars and then at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was photographed with Candace Owens, the right-wing television personality Jack Posobiec, and the far-right British politician Nigel Farage.

After the 2016 election, Tate had posted a string of pro-MAGA tweets, and he began messaging with Donald Trump, Jr. Eventually, he secured an invitation to Trump Tower. “That was the first time he had ever had any kind of interaction with anyone that big,” his former “harem” member told me. “It was like a drug to him.” After the visit, he posted a photograph of himself in a gold-embroidered blazer, clasping hands with a grinning Trump, Jr. He wrote, “The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” Tate started selling an online course called Network Brilliance, in which he declared, “I have access to the president’s son,” and claimed to know “every big person in politics on the right.”

Tate’s longest-standing political connection was to Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator whose Islamophobic rhetoric and inflammatory claims about Asian sex-grooming gangs have stoked violent unrest across several British cities. Robinson also grew up in Luton, and he and Tate knew each other well.

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Tate was intrigued by one of Robinson’s allies, the Canadian activist Lauren Southern. She had become a darling of the manosphere at the age of nineteen with a video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she argued that men were the real victims of an unjust society. She followed up with a series of videos in which she trolled women who marched against sexual violence, ridiculing their views and holding up a sign saying “THERE IS NO RAPE CULTURE IN THE WEST.”

In February, 2018, Tate asked Robinson to bring Southern to Romania to discuss a business venture. She told me that she flew to Bucharest without knowing much about Tate; Robinson had simply said that a kickboxer in Eastern Europe wanted to finance her work. When they arrived, Tate was waiting in one of his supercars, and he insisted on taking her out for lunch alone. Over steak, he told her “everything that you would want to hear as a conservative right-wing woman,” talking about the importance of family and praising her work. “You’re saving Western civilization,” she remembers him saying.

After lunch, they headed to Tate’s compound. At a long table, Southern listened as the brothers laid out their proposal: they would fund a new right-wing media venture, with her and Robinson in charge, if she would use it to pump a cryptocurrency they were planning to launch. The idea, she recalls, was, “basically, we’re going to create a European-nationalist outlet to fleece all these idiots for money.”

That evening, the Tates took Southern to a club, where they ordered bottle service. After a couple of shots of vodka, she recalls, she suddenly felt “like my consciousness was collapsing.” Tate carried her to his car, and when she came to they were on the bed at her hotel.

Tate started kissing Southern and pulling off her clothes. She told me that she tried to push his hands away, but he wouldn’t stop. Then he hooked his arm around her neck and started to squeeze. She remembers thinking, “Oh, shit, this guy actually is going to rape me.” Southern was anti-abortion, and was terrified of getting pregnant. She began pleading with him: “I know what you’re gonna do here. Please just wear a condom. Please.”

Southern remembers fading in and out of consciousness as Tate raped her unprotected and choked her. Afterward, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Don’t tell the press I raped you.” She remembers saying, “My whole brand is literally talking about how stupid bitches get themselves in situations like this. There’s nothing I can say without destroying my career. So congratulations.”

In the car to the airport, Southern said, she discovered burst blood vessels around her eyes and marks on her neck. Back in Toronto, she was examined by a nurse who specialized in sexual assault. On an assessment form, the nurse recorded that Southern had been raped and strangled by a “well known male” at a hotel in Romania and had suffered an intimate injury. She noted that Southern seemed to be experiencing “personal struggles with her belief system” as a result.

Southern told me that she tried to apply her political convictions to her experience, telling herself that she was at fault for drinking with a man she didn’t know. A month later, she texted Tate. “It was really shitty what you did that night in Bucharest,” she wrote. “I’m not going to tell anyone obviously because I was an absolute moron, but I hope you don’t do that to anyone else.”

“What did I do?” Tate replied. “I expected tons better from you. This msg is some liberal #metoo bullshit.”

“You literally strangled me when I said I didn’t want to have sex,” Southern wrote. “You literally told me in the morning ‘don’t tell the press I raped you.’ ”

“You’re absolutely embarrassing yourself,” he wrote.

Tate denied raping Southern, but he bragged to the War Room about spending the night with her, saying that he had invited her to Romania to discuss a business deal but “didn’t invest a fucking penny.”

Southern came to wonder if his proposal had been just a pretext. She thought back to her confrontations with women protesting sexual violence and felt regret. But, she told me, “I knew one hundred per cent there was no world in which I spoke about this where I got to retain my status within the right-wing world.” For years, she remained silent.

In 2019, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service informed Tate that he would face no charges from the allegations of rape and strangulation that had caused him to flee the U.K. The police had let the case lie dormant. At the time, conviction rates for reported rapes hovered at around two per cent.

For Tate’s accusers, the long wait had been excruciating. “We were just so sick of having him in our minds,” Maya Navarro told me. “It’s always there—him, and us needing to go to court and get justice. Finding out that nothing was going to happen was very defeating.” The women were not told why it had taken four years to decide not to act. But prosecutors did write to all three of them, setting out reasons why they were apparently to blame for the collapse of the case.

Police officers had searched Navarro’s and Walker’s phones for anything that might compromise their credibility; prosecutors noted text messages, sent in the months after leaving Tate’s apartment, in which they talked about feeling “hoe-ish” and discussed “dick sizes.” Navarro was baffled. “Sorry, are we never allowed to talk about dicks ever again?” she said.

The letters also cited messages in which the women worried that police would find photographs of them surrounded by wine bottles, taken while they were working for the Tates. Navarro had reassured Walker in a voice note, “We can just turn around and say that, with the alcohol, they used to get us drunk all the time.” Prosecutors appeared to view this as evidence of bad faith. They did not quote the rest of Navarro’s message: “I needed to be drunk to actually be there . . . ’cause I couldn’t take it.”

In Hannah Price’s case, prosecutors made no mention of the messages in which Tate had declared, “I love raping you.” Because she had slept with Tate again after the initial incident, they concluded that she had no case.

Finally, prosecutors noted that several women had gone to the police to support Tate’s story. One of them had produced a T-shirt reading “Tate is my daddy and I am his whore,” which she claimed belonged to Walker. Navarro told me that the T-shirt was actually Hruskova’s. “She’s just blatantly lying,” she said. Still, Navarro comforted herself that the investigation had served as a warning to Tate. “I genuinely thought, O.K., maybe this has scared him to not ever do this to somebody else,” she told me.

In fact, the C.P.S. decision had the opposite effect. “The strong conquer the weak,” Tate texted War Room members. “This is the way of the universe.” He started tweeting incessantly about sexual violence. “Only time you can beat her up without going to jail is during sex,” he wrote. “I have big hands because I was bred for violence. Like an attack dog. Do you understand?”

Tate went on to start Hustlers University, making tens of millions of dollars a year in subscription fees. He launched a podcast, “Tate Speech,” and an online show, “Tate Confidential.” He appeared on dozens of other manosphere and far-right shows. Suddenly, his face and his voice were everywhere.

Then Tate started openly taunting his accusers. In one interview, he addressed Walker. “I kept you for the money,” he said. “You weren’t all that, but you made me enough. You put the leather in the Ferrari, bitch. And now you’re sitting there broke as a joke. I’m still free.”

The women watched in horror. “Seeing him all the time, having him come back into my life unconsensually,” Navarro said. “That really pushed me to the edge.”

The Tates’ most prized project was the War Room. Andrew billed it as “the most powerful network of men in the world,” but mainly it was a series of group chats in which members learned how to make money by exploiting women. New entrants were inducted into the main group, the Great Hall, by an account called the Master of Scrolls and Decorum. They were sent a list of required reading, known as the Survival Scrolls, which included Ken Ivy’s “Pimpology.”

Tate’s Pimping Hoes Degree course was the core of the curriculum. “Some women are more susceptible to being molded,” Tate told pupils. To gauge a woman’s malleability, members were taught to dismiss her harshly after sex and then demand an act of service—buying coffee or chocolate, cooking a meal. If she complied, she was through to the next level.

Once students had found a susceptible target, they were encouraged to move up to the webcam and OnlyFans courses, where they learned methods that the Tates had honed over the years. Tate filmed the OnlyFans course from a leather chair in his compound’s cigar lounge. Beside him sat Hruskova, whom he introduced as “my not-so-beautiful assistant.” She perched on her chair in a black turtleneck and a pleated skirt, blank-faced and fidgeting slightly as he denigrated women. “Girls are fantastically lazy,” he said. “Girls have something wrong with them in their brains.”

Tate was assisted in his teachings by Tristan and several other associates, whom he called the War Room Generals. Chief among them was a California-based hypnotist named Miles Sonkin, who went by the alias Iggy Semmelweis. Sonkin billed himself as an expert in neurolinguistic programming and cultivated a mystical affect, with a ponderous gray beard; in promotional videos, he appeared in a fedora and a cape, shooting rings of animated fire from his hands. His main role was to advise on how to hypnotize women into “sexual slavery”—often by uttering incantations during sex, a process he called “installing spells.” Through his teachings, he said, members could keep women “soul-locked.” (Sonkin did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Still too cold.”

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Tate leaned into Sonkin’s pseudoscientific lexicon. He spoke about getting women to “self hypnotise” by demanding that they write him pledges of devotion, and shared screenshots of some that he’d received. One woman begged for the “honor of being your slave to serve you and worship you like you deserve . . . like a king, like a god.” He told War Room members, “This is the level of locked I enjoy. Anything else is boring.” (The chat logs were obtained by an independent journalist named Nick Monroe, who shared them with me.)

War Room members from around the world met at “summits” to compare notes. In Los Angeles, attendees were promised an evening of tutorials, including “Installing Spells & Sexual Magic,” accompanied by “the best grass-fed Steaks grilled to perfection on an outdoor grill, fine aged whiskey, smoking Cuban and Empalador cigars.” Another summit was arranged in a turreted castle in the mountains of Transylvania.

The Pizzagate conspiracist Mike Cernovich was a member, as was the far-right lobbyist Jacob Wohl, who bragged about supplying women to U.S. politicians, claiming that “these men will always want to win your good graces in hopes that you might toss them a girl or two.” Wohl was later convicted of running a voter-suppression scheme targeting Black neighborhoods during the 2020 election.

The Tates shared “receipts” of the women they’d cultivated, often including intimate photographs. Over time, their recruitment efforts became more brazen. They began reaching out to high schoolers, and hosted parties for teen-age girls at their compound. Andrew shared a video of one such event with the War Room. “16 year old hoes are all over the house,” he wrote, adding, “More girls = more money.” In a journal called “The Players Year,” Tristan documented scores of conquests, several of whom he said were teen-agers and virgins. One was wearing a school uniform. He wrote about another, “Inexperienced as she was, it caused her a lot of discomfort.”

Among the most vivid tutorials offered to the War Room was a play-by-play account of how Andrew Tate recruited Iasmina Pencov, the former psychology student. They had met in her home town of Timișoara, and Tate spent weeks love-bombing her over WhatsApp. When she arrived at the compound, though, he wasn’t there. Instead, he had deputized a blond woman named Beatrice Anghel to greet her. Anghel was a former producer for Romanian TV who had switched to online sex work after falling in love with Tate. He had texted her an assessment of Pencov: “She’s very dumb. . . . But will be good on camera.”

The Tates were now keeping many of their workers in American Village, the development beside their compound. Pencov was instructed to take her bags to Villa 67, where she would live with Anghel. Tate showed War Room members screenshots of his texts with both women, explaining that he had told Anghel that he loved her, and that Pencov was “just for cam”—while telling Pencov the same thing about Anghel. “They’re both spying on each other,” he wrote, with a crying-laughing emoji. “And when I’m home I’ll just fuck them both and make them work.” (Both women declined to speak with me, but they disputed this account through their attorney.)

In the next few weeks, Tate reported that Pencov had “lost her support networks at home” and was “talking about staying forever.” But, when he insisted that she start making pornography, she was less pliable than he had hoped. He turned to a trusted strategy: inventing a reason to get angry so that he could “tighten the screw.” Tate accused Pencov of having worked in a sex club back in Timișoara. “I literally totally made this up from the sky,” he told the War Room. “Started calling her a liar and threatening to kick her out.”

Pencov was horrified by the accusation. “I’m freaking crying alone in a room,” she texted him. “I’ve left everything and everyone behind.” He replied, “You are never going back to Timisoara even to visit,” adding, “We are together. Always.” In the War Room, Miles Sonkin urged members to “look CLOSELY at what Tate has done here,” noting that he was “taking SOLE AUTHORITY over her life.”

When Pencov texted Tate that her Christian faith prohibited her from making porn, he wrote to the group, “This is about the maximum difficulty that you experience in the business.” If she didn’t crack within a few days, he said, he’d kick her out. Then Tate surveyed the chessboard. He knew that Pencov was running out of cash. “She’s broke,” he wrote. “And she can’t leave the house.” This gave her “no negotiating room,” he reasoned. “If there’s no goodbye, there is only comply.”

The next move was for Tate to distance himself from the notion of webcam work. He texted Pencov that he didn’t want her to think that he’d moved her to Bucharest to make porn for him. “I don’t need girls to work for me. I have plenty of my own money,” he said. She wrote back, “This literally made me cry.” Then he noted that there was a way she could make money of her own: a Romanian woman named Georgiana Naghel was running an OnlyFans operation. “Her business. Not mine,” he wrote.

In fact, Naghel had been working for the Tates for several years. A former hostess at cage-fighting galas, she was tall, with an air of sleek severity; Tate thought that she resembled Cruella de Vil, and called her his “very own full time witch.” He wrote to her, about Pencov, “Get her on only fans. I want money from her.” Then he told Naghel to send him messages about how much money could be made from porn, which he passed on to Pencov.

Pencov wrote back, “I don’t know what to say. I’ve never done anything like this before.” Tate noted to the War Room that this was “a very soft rejection.” Then he went in for a “hard close,” telling Pencov that webcam work was the only job that he would allow her to do. “A normal job puts men all around you,” he said.

“You are sure you want me to do this?” she asked.

“I want to believe you’re serious about us,” he said. “We’re either together always working as a team or we’re not.”

Members of the War Room followed along in delight. “It’s all a beautiful, beautiful game of chess,” one wrote. Sonkin identified the mind games Tate was using: “7 different Reframes in play. And a shit ton of presuppositions. . . . At least 2 undermines and a bunch of Skewers.”

Pencov texted Tate once more before capitulating. “I don’t ever sit around and feel sorry for myself nor let people mistreated me,” she wrote. “I’m a badass with a good heart, soft but strong. . . . But only with people that deserve to see this part of me.” Forwarding this to the War Room, Tate wrote, “Women talk so much bullshit it’s incredible.”

Naghel reported that Pencov started posing for OnlyFans within four days of vowing that she would never make porn. Next, Tate demanded that she have a threesome with him and Anghel, and she agreed. Anghel texted a friend that Pencov had told her beforehand that she was afraid, and that during sex Tate had hit her, spat in her face, and called her a whore. But Tate also told Pencov privately that she was his “wife forever” and that he loved her. “It’s so hard to believe,” she wrote back. “I have never been loved this much before.”

Within a couple years of launching the War Room, Tate reported that at least a hundred and forty students were making money from pornography. “Everyone in here is banking 10/15k extra a month,” he wrote. Members shared screenshots of women they had recruited. “Fucking CASH WATERFALLS,” one wrote. Another, who called himself A God Amongst Men, talked about scouring college campuses across San Diego for women to “smash” and then recruit. He was hoping to “get to millionaire status this year.”

One star pupil was a Texan man who said that he was making six figures while his girlfriend streamed for thirteen-hour stretches. He posted a photograph of her bent over a stool in a grimy workspace, next to a table set with what appeared to be lubricant, wipes, and sex toys. “Got her on Chaturbate, and sleeping in the concrete floored garage with no A/C, spiders, and roaches,” he wrote. “Absolutely legendary work,” Tristan responded.

The most zealous pimp was a meaty, shaven-headed Romanian named Vlad Obuzic, who ran a webcam studio in Bucharest. Obuzic was starstruck by Tate, who he said was “way above my level.” He enthused that “using his mindset helped me ALOT at ‘exploiting’ females.” Previously, Obuzic said, he had been careful not to “mix love with business,” but, since Tate had taught him that a woman is “loyal only to the dick that’s curently fucking her,” he had started having sex with his top worker. In his estimation, the arrangement was going well. “She’s always crying because of me witch is a good thing,” he wrote. “I have control 95% over her mind.”

When another member asked Obuzic how he subdued recruits, he gave a recent example. “I took her keyboard and hit her in the head with it. She went in the room and worked 7 hours without any break,” he said, later adding that he had beaten every woman he had been with. Some users were perturbed by Obuzic’s stories. “That just sounds like abuse to me,” one wrote. But the Tates elevated Obuzic; he got his own channel, the Revenge Room, where he taught “raw, uncensored methods of pimping and handling women.” As his status grew, he dispensed lessons on handling local law enforcement. “I had multiple charges for beating people up, hitting them with bricks in the head etc and I just paid 500-1000$ and nothing happened,” he said. “If you position yourself right, corruption suits you.”

In the compound, the influence of the Tates’ father lingered. Andrew’s former “harem” member said, “His dad told him that he needed to procreate as much as possible and spread their genes.” Women became pregnant, and Andrew has said that both he and Tristan have “double-digit” children. “I’m the big gorilla,” he said. “I take the fertile females and I impregnate them.” Mothers were moved to their own apartments, where they kept working on camera. The brothers sometimes visited, and Andrew has described meting out harsh discipline. “My kids obey me like fucking soldiers,” he said. On his orders, his five-year-old son would sit for hours in silence: “Doesn’t fucking move, doesn’t say a fucking word, because he’s scared for his fucking life.”

Elsewhere in American Village, discipline was often administered by two Romanian women. Tate had assigned Georgiana Naghel to “keep the farm animals on task,” and a former police officer named Luana Radu was brought in to work alongside her. The two were a ferocious team. They issued instructions through a WhatsApp group called Suspicious Death, and punished workers who failed to comply. Women could be fined for failing to work their required hours, or for committing various offenses on camera, including crying or wiping their noses.

According to women who worked in the house, Iasmina Pencov racked up thousands of dollars in fines, effectively keeping her indentured. One day, Tate wrote her an accusatory note about her productivity, calling her a “cunt.” She replied that she had been “tired and sick,” with “too many thoughts” to fall asleep. She wrote to Naghel that she blamed herself for disappointing Tate: “I’m scared of a lot of stuff and I’m going crazy.” Another morning, when Pencov failed to meet her target, Naghel texted her while en route to the villa. “Punch yourself in the mouth till I get there, then I’ll give you 10 more, you hopeless lazy bitch,” she wrote. “I HAVE A BAD FEELING THAT INSTEAD OF BREAST SURGERY YOU WILL GO TO THE MORGUE.”

Tristan Tate wants to be known as “a clean-living, industrious, hardworking businessman.”Photograph by Mattia Balsamini for The New Yorker

At times, Radu and Naghel made good on their threats. When one woman, whom I’ll call Lorina Dobre, announced that she wanted to leave soon after the brothers funded her breast enlargement, Tristan instructed the enforcers to keep all her money and belongings to recoup their investment. “Hit her if you have to, I don’t care,” he texted, according to sealed court files. “Throw her out of the house with nothing.” The women were eager to oblige. “I want my money back or I’ll cut her tits off,” Naghel vowed.

Dobre later told police that the enforcers arrived at the villa and dragged her outside in her underwear, yanking her arm so hard that it wrenched a scar from her breast-enlargement surgery. “Georgiana wanted to kill her,” Radu wrote to Tristan. “I kept saying ‘beat her without leaving any marks, please.’ ”

“I love you girls,” he replied.

Dobre said that she waited outside for an hour, until another woman darted out to bring some clothes and her cellphone. Then she went to the police—but so did Radu, the former officer. Afterward, Radu reported that the police had said that they knew the Tates and didn’t want any trouble. (Naghel and Radu deny engaging in any criminal conduct, violence, or threats.)

The Tates were delighted by their enforcers. “There’s none of this ‘female’ team bullshit,” Tate tweeted about Naghel. “She obeys the boss.” For her birthday, the brothers threw a party at the compound. They presented her with a cake glazed in black icing, with the words “Queen of Hell” written in red letters. She cut it with a samurai sword.

In April, 2022, there was a new arrival at the compound: the young musician from Miami. The newcomer, whom I’ll call Ella Hadley, had met Tristan in Florida the previous November. She found him dashing and cultured—they talked about books, music, poetry, and art—and she felt that they were connecting deeply.

In WhatsApp messages to her mother, she wrote that she had made an “amazing friend” and sent a photo of Tristan in a crisp white shirt. He owned “beautiful homes” in Romania, Monaco, and Miami, and was building a mountain residence near Dracula’s castle. Her mother sounded skeptical. “He’s v good looking,” she wrote. “Sure he’s got girls pining all around.” But Hadley insisted that he was a “true gentleman.”

Like other women the Tates cultivated, Hadley had a difficult past. She had been sexually abused as a teen-ager, and a former boyfriend had recently died by suicide. In Tristan’s room at the Mandarin Oriental, she confided in him about her ex-boyfriend’s death. He said that he’d once lost someone he cared about, too—a girlfriend had died in a car accident—and they discussed the strange contours of grief. “You’ve made me feel things I haven’t felt in a long time,” she texted him.

As their courtship progressed, Hadley texted Tristan, “Part of me wants to do anything you ask.” He replied, “I love how submissive you are.” One night, he invited her to a bar where members of the War Room were gathered, and she played piano for them. He told her that she dazzled him. Back at his hotel, they had sex, and he choked her till she lost consciousness. “I remember when you passed out,” he texted her afterward.

Hadley told her mother that Tristan wanted to bring her to Romania and take her to visit waterfalls and cultural festivals. “Awesome plans! Makes me dream,” her mother replied. “But keep your feet well anchored.” Tristan texted Hadley that she’d live in a big house, close to his own. She would teach him piano, and he would help launch her music career. After paying for her flights, he laid out some ground rules. The first was that he would not tolerate body hair. But the most important was that she must never talk to anybody in Romania unless he introduced her. “Romania is my world,” he wrote. “No friends from outside.”

When Hadley landed in Bucharest, Tristan picked her up in a blue Rolls-Royce. On the drive to the compound, she recalled, he made a joke about kidnapping her, and she was unnerved. When he took her into his bedroom, she later told police, “I simply froze and had sex with him.”

Hadley soon learned that Tristan was having sex with several of his workers. “I did not cry, nor did I complain,” she said. “I was scared.” He urged her to start posting for him on OnlyFans, but she resisted. “I can’t show my body,” she texted him. “I want to teach you music and find a job nearby.” Still, after three days, Tristan moved Hadley into Villa 67 with the other recruits, who she thought looked unhappy and malnourished. Later, she said, she heard Naghel threatening to beat them if they broke the rules.

Hadley noticed another newcomer at the villa: a young Moldovan woman whom I’ll call Liana Vintilla. She seemed constantly upset, and Hadley decided to talk to her. At a party at the compound, she found a moment to draw her aside.

Hadley learned that Vintilla had been working as a restaurant hostess in London when Andrew connected with her on Instagram and began bombarding her with flattery. When she found videos online of him talking about pimping, he assured her that it was just “show business.” But, when she moved to American Village, he insisted that she post on OnlyFans. After several weeks of coercion and confinement, she succumbed. “Your wife goes live today,” she texted him.

Vintilla said that she was alarmed by life at the villa, where her housemates had “nightmares, spasms in their sleep.” She told Hadley that she wanted to run away, but Tate had forbidden her to leave. She was terrified of him. He had told her by text that he had mafia connections who might try to find her, and that he had the same blood chemistry as a serial killer. A few days earlier, after she wrote him that she was miserable, he had summoned her to his bedroom. There, Vintilla said, he punched her in the face and raped her, squeezing her head painfully between his hands. She said he threatened to get her pregnant and then lock her in a house—so that she would “definitely go crazy.”

That night, Hadley texted her mother, “Tristan and his brother are terrible people.” She said that she was making a plan to leave, along with “a girl who’s been stuck here.” Her mother replied, “I told you. Now try to get out of there quietly.”

Hadley booked seats on a flight to London, departing in two days. She texted Vintilla that they would have to be careful with the brothers, to “make them believe we are in love” so that they would “not suspect us of leaving.” Vintilla agreed to “play it cool.” They imagined that one day they would look back on the experience and write a movie. Vintilla wrote, “We need a fucking Oscar.”

While the women prepared to flee, Hadley texted a family friend who was a marine. She said that the Tates were keeping her in a house with other women who acted as “groomers and handlers.” Her friend, who had learned to spot signs of trafficking during his military training, concluded that her life was in danger. He called his superior officer, who urged him to report the situation to the U.S. Embassy.

When Hadley learned what he had done, she panicked. “This is super scary,” she texted him. “They will kill us.” As the raid team approached, she ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom—which is where they found her when they broke down the door.

Mateea Petrescu was at her grandfather’s funeral outside Bucharest when her phone began buzzing with news: the Tate brothers had been accused of forming an organized-crime group to traffic women, and were being held in jail. Petrescu was a P.R. consultant in her late thirties who vaped continually, dressed in couture, and swore with creative flair. She knew all about the Tates; her cousin Eugen Vidineac was their local lawyer, and he’d been asking her for advice. Petrescu looked over at Vidineac, who was weeping as the casket was lowered into the ground. “Orthodox Romanian funerals are in a league of their own,” she told me. “They try to squeeze the last ounce of pain and suffering out of you.” Vidineac seemed too distraught to deal with the news, so she told him that she’d handle it.

In Bucharest, Petrescu joined the Tates’ team as the spokeswoman. She was thrilled. Many of her clients were nationalist Romanian politicians; the Tates were global celebrities. “It was the case of the moment,” she told me, and everyone she knew was “in awe.”

One of her first tasks was responding to a report that the Taliban were concerned about Andrew Tate’s well-being. The brothers had been trying to secure residency in Dubai, and Andrew had announced that he’d converted to Islam. When the Taliban seized control of Kabul, barring women from work and girls from school, he had tweeted approvingly, “Dinner will be ready on TIME. The Taliban restores order. Inshallah.” Now the group was apparently calling for his freedom.

Petrescu’s initial counsel was “We don’t want to associate with the Taliban,” but, she conceded, “we don’t really want to upset the Taliban, either.” Privately, she thought, “Wow, this is my life now. I don’t want to upset the Taliban.”

For Petrescu, that kind of cognitive dissonance was part of the thrill of the job. She loved being the only woman on Tate’s crisis team and prided herself on being paid more than the men. While Tate was in jail, he had no access to the internet, but his “Tate Speech” newsletter and his posts on X kept appearing. Petrescu told me that she had written many of those words. She got a peculiar “amusement” from ventriloquizing the world’s most notorious misogynist, she said. But she was also impressed by Tate. “I’m absolutely fascinated by the balls he has, to say the things he says and not have an ounce of a sense of ridiculousness or guilt,” she told me.

The weeks after Tate’s detention were chaotic, Petrescu said. She could hardly keep track of the lawyers and advisers clamoring for a role in the case. “Everybody saw the goose with golden eggs,” she told me. She had expected someone as famous as Tate to have a well-structured operation, but what she encountered seemed to run on “a long chain of impulses and the deep belief that there is some sort of godlike inspiration that cannot go wrong.”

The Tates had a deputy managing their affairs while they were in prison: their cousin Luke Leilas, who had moved from the U.S. to work for them. On Andrew’s instructions, Leilas had been directing impassioned videos in which Hruskova, Pencov, and Anghel denied all the charges. “Don’t let them get lazy and wake up in the morning and look like shit,” Tate told Leilas. “No one cares what ugly girls say, they have to look amazing.”

Anghel gave an interview to Antena TV—the company where she had been a producer before Tate made her abandon her career—insisting that she was not a victim. Asked why she had Tate’s name tattooed on her arm, she said, “Out of respect.” Hruskova appeared in her own video, flawlessly made up in a fur-collared coat. “Imagine how outraged and mad would you be if this happened to your son or your brother,” she said in English. “This is just a massive, massive violation against human rights.”

Tate was pleased. “Keep going!” he told Leilas, adding, “We need the girls to cry.” But their communications created a vulnerability: prosecutors had access to transcripts of the prison calls. Tate’s lawyers were dismayed when they found out. “I explicitly said to him that EVERYTHING IS RECORDED,” one complained in a chat. “I told him not once, but 5 times and still.”

Nonetheless, the lawyers successfully petitioned the court to release the Tates, on the condition that they stay in Romania and check in periodically with the police. When Andrew got out of jail, he announced, “I believe in God, and I think that the fire of truth will eventually destroy all lies.”

Romania has long been regarded as the European capital of human trafficking, and official corruption plays a significant role in the trade. But the prosecutor leading the case against the Tates, Rareș Stan, had an unsullied reputation. He was known as a pugnacious investigator who had dismantled some of the country’s most violent gangs.

As the brothers’ assets were seized, Ferraris, McLarens, and Lamborghinis were towed through their compound’s gates. Inside, investigators discovered guns, knives, and stacks of cash. They also seized phones and computers, containing a vast trove of digital evidence that Stan’s team used to track down dozens of the brothers’ recruits.

When the police interviewed Hadley, she urged them to help the other women who still supported the Tates. “These girls are not themselves,” she said. In Romania, victims in criminal cases can be eligible for damages running to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Hadley didn’t want the money. “The only things she wants are peace and quiet,” investigators noted.

Vintilla gave a similar statement, and the two women agreed to coöperate with the authorities. They handed over their phones, underwent psychological evaluations, and provided sworn testimony. Afterward, prosecutors arranged for them to be transported to a safe house in the South of France. Hadley posted a picture of herself wearing white linen by the sea.

In June, 2023, Stan filed an indictment of more than three hundred pages, detailing evidence that the Tates, Naghel, and Radu had trafficked the women housed in Villa 67. (The indictment was sealed, but I obtained a copy, along with an extensive cache of prosecutorial records.) The same month, prosecutors raided thirteen properties linked to Vlad Obuzic, Tate’s disciple. He was arrested on suspicion of trafficking. Obuzic denied the charges, and is currently awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, Stan was building a wider case, involving at least thirty-five suspected victims—some of whom were minors. He established that Hruskova had been underage when Tate first compelled her to make pornography. He also pursued a case involving a girl I’ll call Irina Pavel.

Many of the Tates’ workers were housed in a development near Bucharest known as American Village. One said that Andrew Tate forbade her to leave, warning that he had mafia connections who knew what she looked like.Photograph by Mattia Balsamini for The New Yorker

When Pavel was fifteen, she told investigators, she had accompanied a school friend to a party hosted by the Tates, which was full of young girls. Her friend paired off with Tristan, leaving her with Andrew, who was so drunk that he spat as he talked. He pulled her into a bedroom and raped her, she said. Afterward, some of Tate’s “female friends” persuaded the girls to stick around for several days, and Tate kept having sex with Pavel. “We had normal, oral, and anal sexual relations, but I mention that the anal sexual acts were traumatic for me because I was in pain,” she told investigators. “Even though I asked Andrew to stop, he continued.”

The girls eventually had to go back to school, but, Pavel said, the Tates sent a taxi every few weeks to bring them to the compound. Tate was “often aggressive,” beating her with a belt and choking her—but he also bought her Teddy bears. Finally, he discovered that she had been chatting with a boy online and became furious, throwing her phone into the pool and kicking her out.

After Tate’s arrest, Pavel said, he took her to dinner at a restaurant called Arogant and tried to make amends. He told her that he hoped she would be “a good girl” and say nothing to the authorities, offering to pay her five thousand euros, with half up front. He also bought her a dummy phone to give to investigators, rather than her own. Pavel took the phone and the money—but ultimately decided to tell investigators that Tate had raped her. She wrote in a text, “You take her so young, you fool her and make her your slave? Fuck you.”

Ella Hadley spent a while recuperating in France, then decided to keep travelling. Eventually, she made it to Sydney. She was fearful of the Tates’ connections, and often disguised her appearance, but she liked spending her days outside, hiking and shopping at an open-air market.

A few weeks after the brothers’ arrests made the news, Hadley got a text from a former boyfriend in Florida, Marlin Fisher. He wanted to know if the man who had taken her to Romania was Andrew Tate.

“His brother,” she replied.

“Holy shit! I’m sorry,” Fisher said.

“I survived,” she wrote, “and there are other women who are now able to hopefully receive justice.”

Hadley had dated Fisher when she was seventeen and he was in his thirties. She had initially lied about her age, and the relationship had ended acrimoniously. Now his apparent sympathy didn’t last. A month after his first note, he sent a more alarming one. “I’ve been asked to provide anything I still have from when we dated,” he wrote. “What I have from that time is a backup of my phone documenting everything you said about a ton of people.”

The people asking for Fisher’s phone were allies of the Tates. In the previous month, the brothers’ team had devised a strategy to push for Hadley’s “full surrender.” Their lawyers had threatened to sue her family for three hundred million dollars if she did not recant her testimony. When that had no effect, they sent private investigators to hunt for information to discredit her. Some were former F.B.I. agents, others fellow-influencers—including a British man named Sulaiman Ahmed, who had volunteered to travel to Florida.

Petrescu told me that she was dismayed by the decision to send Ahmed. “He was dumb as a rock,” she said. “Everything was done with a big sledgehammer.” He turned up at Hadley’s family home and tried to talk to her parents, then found his way to Fisher. (Ahmed disputes this account.)

When Tate’s team learned that Fisher had alerted Hadley to the visit, they were furious, calling him a “loser” and a “highly volatile asset.” Now they had to contend with Hadley’s lawyer, who wrote to Fisher, urging him not to participate in a “conspiracy to silence” her client, and pointing out that he had slept with Hadley when she was a minor. He turned over the phone data anyway.

Meanwhile, private detectives probed Hadley’s vulnerabilities as a witness. They discovered that, when she was fifteen, she had been repeatedly raped by her fifty-seven-year-old yoga teacher, who was later jailed for molesting her and another child. In her late teens, she had become entangled in a series of fraught relationships with older men, several times lying about her age and inventing fanciful stories about her life as she sought their affection. All of it went into the dossier.

Tate’s most bellicose advocate was Joseph McBride, a lawyer who’d made his name defending several January 6th rioters. McBride was a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr. He filed a defamation lawsuit against Hadley in Palm Beach County, describing her as a serial liar and “a predator who has a long history of baiting men into sexual relationships for the specific purpose of destroying their lives.” Another one of the Tates’ lawyers filed a claim on Fisher’s behalf, accusing Hadley of entrapping him. Pencov and Anghel filed their own claims against her, through the same lawyer. The Tates also sued Hadley’s parents and the family friend who’d initiated the raid.

As the case progressed, McBride reached for a startling variety of arguments to discredit Hadley’s claims about the Tates. He accused her of playing “on age-old stereotypes” about “men of African American descent,” saying that such allegations “may have been effective weapons in courts of segregation, but they have no place in today’s world.” He maintained that Hadley must have known that Tristan liked “rough sex,” and said complaining that he had choked her was “like getting into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson . . . and being surprised when you get punched.”

To publicize the case, McBride appeared on “Fresh and Fit,” a popular podcast in the manosphere. He called Hadley “pure evil” and said that she had used sex to “lure men in” for ten years—that is, since she was twelve. “One guy is serving a sentence he should not be serving in jail,” he claimed. “Another guy arguably killed himself due to his interactions with her.” If the case went to trial, he said, “I will rip her to shreds . . . body bag, for sure.” Or, he said, she could rescind her testimony, “and the whole thing just stops.” (McBride denies engaging in witness intimidation.)

McBride published Hadley’s name, birth date, and passport number, along with her parents’ address. Then Ahmed shared a distraught voice note that she had sent to Fisher years before, after her ex-boyfriend died by suicide. The post was headed “Unveiling The Woman Who Targeted Unsuspecting Men.” Candace Owens devoted an episode of her show to unpacking the claims about Hadley. McBride arranged for Tucker Carlson to fly to Romania for a fawning interview with Tate, which drew a hundred and twelve million views. McBride later said in a private chat that it had taken him “2 years of relentless work to shift the J6 narrative,” but that he was already “75% there on completely shifting American thought on Tate.”

In the next few months, posts attacking Hadley went viral on social media, and her accounts were deluged with threats—“I’m getting a hitman,” “You deserve to die.” The Tates’ advisers warned them not to publicly take part in the smears. Instead, they proposed a “pussy” strategy: letting the affiliate network “have fun with the subject” while the brothers maintained a plausible distance.

Hadley was forced into hiding. In a court filing, she wrote, “The abuse I witnessed and experienced while in Romania was traumatizing. But the harassment and threats I have received in retaliation for cooperating with law enforcement have been even worse.” She added, “I am constantly fearful, sad, and alone.”

With the Tates’ webcam business dismantled and the travel ban holding them in Romania, they were struggling to fund their life style and pay their legal bills. They could never admit it—their brand was built on flexing their wealth—but, Andrew confided to advisers, “Nobody seems to understand we dont have money.” Without the brothers travelling to create videos and promote themselves, subscriptions to their online school were declining. “Content is stale,” their cousin Luke Leilas said. “We need Andrew and Tristan free.”

In 2024, as the U.S. election approached, Tate pinned his hopes on Donald Trump. Barron Trump had been tasked with reaching a young male audience, and Tate intended to help him deliver. Justin Waller, a close associate who has called himself the Tates’ “third brother,” agreed to be the intermediary.

In April, Waller secured an invitation to Mar-a-Lago and began courting Barron. He offered dating advice and introduced him to a tailor, who made the suit that Barron wore to his father’s second Inauguration. During the fitting, Waller later said, Barron spoke with Tate over Zoom.

That summer, after the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, Tate said that he had spoken to Barron again. “I’m very close with the Trump family,” he said. He and Donald Trump, Jr., also appeared on a live stream to promote a MAGA meme coin. “You’ve got people attacking you, as far as I’m concerned,” Trump, Jr., said.

Tate spent the day of the election live-streaming, ordering his followers to vote. “America is over if Trump loses,” he tweeted. When the results came in, Petrescu said, the Tates were overjoyed: “Oh, the celebration! Trump is now President. We’re going to be fine.”

Afterward, J. D. Vance followed the brothers on X. Then Donald Trump selected one of their lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, to serve as the White House liaison to the Department of Justice. Ingrassia, a twenty-nine-year-old associate at the McBride Law Firm, had worked on the case against Hadley. He had previously tweeted that Tate was “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence,” which was why he had been targeted by “the satanic elite that attempt to systematically program and oppress all men.” The President’s counsellor Alina Habba appeared on a podcast with Tate, telling him that she was a “big fan” and declaring, “I’ve got your back.” She said, “I think you go through a lot of the same ‘Show me the person, I’ll find the crime’ that President Trump has gone through.”

A few weeks after the election, the brothers received more good news: their Romanian indictment had been sent back to prosecutors. The Bucharest Court of Appeal had identified several procedural errors that needed fixing, which meant that the case would be seriously delayed.

The travel ban was still in place. But Rareș Stan had been replaced by a less experienced lead prosecutor, Cezar Profira, whom the Tates and their Romanian lawyers apparently considered a softer touch. (Profira did not respond to requests for comment.) The brothers told me that Profira had joked with them about Hadley during an interview, saying, “You should have bought her a handbag.” In private messages, their advisers talked about needing Profira “on our side.”

Three weeks after Trump’s victory, Romania held its own Presidential election, and again the Tates played an unusual part. The brothers had been backing a right-wing candidate named Călin Georgescu, who was a virtual unknown until he won the first round of voting. Georgescu was stridently pro-Russia, and the Kremlin celebrated his victory—but Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the result, citing evidence of interference.

The ensuing controversy gave U.S. officials a pretext for taking an interest in Romania’s internal affairs. J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and other right-wing figures suggested that liberal élites had stolen the election. Trump’s special Presidential envoy Richard Grenell accused Romania of joining a global conspiracy to silence “people and politicians who weren’t woke.”

Petrescu told me that the team had been lobbying Grenell to help the Tates, and that he was willing. “Ric was rooting for the boys,” she said. Soon after the cancelled election, Grenell met at Mar-a-Lago with a Romanian politician named Victor Ponta, who later told the Times that they had discussed the Tates’ case. (Ponta told me that he no longer remembered this and had no involvement with the Tates. Grenell denied aiding the Tates or speaking about their case with Ponta, though he has publicly affirmed, “I support the Tate brothers.”)

“It says, if you don’t have certain ingredients, you can substitute two double cheeseburgers, a fountain soda, and fries.”

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Then, Petrescu told me, the Tates’ team devised a P.R. gambit. The Munich Security Conference was approaching. If Grenell could discuss the case with the Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, they would make sure that a reporter was positioned to overhear the conversation. When Grenell met the minister, Petrescu recalled, “Ric only asked, ‘Hey, how are the Tate boys?’ That’s all they needed. It went into a media frenzy immediately. ‘The Americans are pressuring for the release of the Tate brothers!’ ”

Meanwhile, Vance went onstage at the conference and denounced Romania for annulling Georgescu’s victory. He argued that there were “entrenched interests, hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion.”

Hurezeanu, the foreign minister, told me that the government “took this criticism by Vance very seriously,” not least because Romania borders Ukraine and relies on the U.S. for its defense. He said that, when he saw Grenell at the conference, he raised the Tates’ case preëmptively. It seemed clear to him that Trump’s people were backing the Tates, because of the “electoral support” that they’d provided in 2024; now the brothers seemed to be “playing a role within the bilateral relations” of the two countries. (The White House denies this.)

After the conference, Petrescu said, prosecutors reached out to the team and asked, “O.K, what do the Americans want?” The answer was that the brothers must be cleared to travel. “Literally the next morning the restrictions were lifted,” Petrescu said. A senior Romanian law-enforcement source told me that the decision appeared to have been imposed from “outside the judicial system,” adding, “It is not normal for individuals accused of child trafficking to be able to travel freely.” The longtime Trump ally Roger Stone tweeted, “Richard Grenell secured the release of the Tates,” then hastily deleted the post.

A source who was present when the Tates learned that they were free to travel told me that the message was delivered by a senior Romanian politician—one who had recently been to Mar-a-Lago. The politician turned up at their compound at night in a black S.U.V. “The Americans are asking questions now,” he told them. “Here’s your passports back. Happy flying.”

On February 27, 2025, the Tates flew from Romania to Florida. Thousands of fans tracked their private jet as it crossed the Atlantic. When it landed in Fort Lauderdale, a crowd of journalists and onlookers was gathered outside the executive terminal to watch the brothers arrive. “They were expecting this grand tour—the martyr comes home, a free-speech hero,” Petrescu told me. There was a hitch, though: border officials seized the Tates’ phones. They were working on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, which had quietly opened an investigation into the brothers under the Biden Administration.

Tate made a furious appearance on Candace Owens’s show. “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence?” he said. “You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.” Petrescu told me, “I had never seen him so unhinged.” She felt grimly vindicated, having advised the brothers against flying to Florida, where Hadley and her family lived. It seemed to Petrescu like blatant witness intimidation. Only a couple weeks earlier, Hadley’s pro-bono lawyer had filed a counterclaim against the brothers for human trafficking, coercion, defamation, and harassment, alleging that they were attempting to silence her.

Tate embarked on what amounted to a publicity tour of right-wing America. He and Tristan were photographed puffing cigars with Roger Stone, whom Andrew hailed as the “lawfare OG.” In Las Vegas, they were greeted ringside by Dana White, the president of the U.F.C., who hugged them and declared, “Welcome to the States, boys!,” before greeting other guests, including Grenell and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director. In Los Angeles, Tate met with Kanye West. He tweeted at California’s governor, “I’m in LA. Please begin criminal charges.”

Later, he headed to the Beverly Hills Hotel to spend the night with a model named Brianna Stern. He had met Stern a year earlier, when she came to Romania for photo shoots to promote his meme coin, $Daddy. Tate’s seduction followed his familiar pattern: he said that he loved her and called her a whore, demanded that she have his baby and told her, “I want to beat the fuck out of you.” At the hotel, Stern alleges, Tate choked her and battered her head and face, telling her repeatedly that he would kill her if she ever crossed him.

Afterward, she went to a doctor, who diagnosed post-concussion syndrome. Stern waited for Tate to leave the country, then told the Beverly Hills police that he had assaulted her. She also filed a civil suit, attaching her medical report and a series of texts in which he’d threatened to beat her.

When Petrescu learned of Stern’s allegation, her reaction was “You gotta be fucking kidding me.” She said to colleagues, “We all have kinks. But can he please, please, please have some vanilla sex for six months?” Petrescu told me she was predisposed to accept Tate’s explanation that Stern was an opportunist looking for money. But the texts attached to the lawsuit made for grim reading. “There’s stuff I know about the Tates, from reading a lot of the depositions, declarations, text messages, that one doesn’t really want to know about their client, ” she said. As a P.R. person, she added, “you don’t question—you can’t.” But she began to worry that she was normalizing Tate’s behavior: “I started wondering, Is that seeping into my subconscious? Am I becoming that?”

The Tates were in constant motion in the following months, posting from pricey hotels in the Bahamas, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Still, Andrew seemed bored. “I miss human trafficking,” he tweeted. “The emotions ran high. Been chasing dopamine ever since.” His online rants were becoming increasingly extreme. He responded to the release of the Epstein files by posting that “women have become such lying whores that it’s impossible to take any of these unsubstantiated claims seriously.” Despite his mixed heritage, he promoted the great-replacement theory, declaring, “The west is collapsing because it’s full of disgusting traitors. White people who beg to be erased.”

In the American courts, Tate was enjoying a run of good fortune. The L.A. district attorney announced in June that he would not be prosecuted for his alleged assault on Stern, citing insufficient evidence. McBride claimed that he’d given the D.A. a “do-not-prosecute packet” demolishing the case; he promptly filed a fifty-million-dollar defamation suit against Stern. In Florida, Judge G. Joseph Curley dismissed most of Hadley’s counterclaim, including the allegations that the brothers had harassed her and attempted to coerce her into sex work; he, too, cited a lack of evidence. “Thank God for U.S. justice,” Tate tweeted.

There was a threat from the U.K., though. British police had been investigating the origins of the Tates’ webcam business, and had charged them with a combined twenty-one counts of rape and trafficking. But a Romanian judge ruled that the brothers could not be extradited until the local proceedings were complete—and, two years after Cezar Profira took over, the trafficking case seemed to be going nowhere. Prosecutors hadn’t even fixed the procedural errors in the initial indictment. In chats with advisers, Tristan acknowledged that he and Andrew were effectively being “protected by Romania.”

Romania has recently been rocked by a judicial-corruption scandal: a documentary called “Captured Justice” revealed that judges were being pressured to dismiss or delay politically sensitive cases. More than nine hundred judges and prosecutors have since signed an open letter warning of systemic abuses, and protesters have marched through Bucharest, demanding reform. One of the country’s most senior prosecutors called Romania a “paradise for criminals.”

This April, the Tates were released from all bail conditions relating to the Romanian indictment. The brothers were jubilant. “Case never made it past trial. Innocent,” Tate wrote to advisers. “Yeah we spin it as this. If we can,” Tristan replied. “Then when we’re reindicted they look stupid.”

Their lawyer responded with three sweating-laughing emojis. “Noooo,” he wrote. “Remember, we need cezar on our side.”

“Cezars a piece of shit I hope he dies,” Tristan wrote. “Me being nice to him has done me no favours.”

In March, Tate addressed the British government in a video posted from a harborside balcony in Hong Kong. “Come extradite me if you have such a strong case,” he said. “You know you have nothing. Everyone else has tried. Everyone else has failed.” He added, “I am the main character of Earth.”

In the political landscape that Tate helped create, women hold an increasingly precarious position. These days, the far-right podcaster Nick Fuentes will openly say that women should be kept in “breeding gulags,” and the ultra-popular Joe Rogan will host a just-asking-questions discussion about whether the feminist revolution was a huge mistake. Influential Christian leaders are calling to repeal women’s suffrage. A man was elected President after being held liable for sexual assault.

Even in this milieu, Tate’s violent rhetoric stands out. “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down,” he posted after Trump’s reëlection. “Right of way? You no longer have rights.” His influence is being felt around the world. Last year, a seventeen-year-old boy in New Jersey allegedly drove his car into two teen-age girls, killing them both, after joking on a live stream about women getting raped by Tate. In Britain, a man who had recently watched about ten of Tate’s videos raped his ex-girlfriend and murdered her, her mother, and her sister using a crossbow. British police have warned that Tate’s teachings are radicalizing young men in a “terrifying” manner and declared that violence against women is a national emergency. Reports of rapes and sexual assaults in British schools—some involving victims as young as five—have soared in the past five years, and education leaders describe violent misogyny spreading on an “epidemic scale.” Similar concerns have been reported across North America and Asia.

Yet Tate could have faced justice more than a decade ago, when Navarro, Walker, and Price accused him of assault, if British police had taken their allegations seriously. “They failed to protect the initial victims and created this problem,” the senior Romanian law-enforcement source told me.

The Tates arrive at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, in August, 2023. Andrew Tate rejected the trafficking allegations against him as “garbage out of a corrupt country.”Photograph by LCV / Shutterstock

In my reporting, I discovered something that the British police had hidden for years: their officers bungled the investigation from the start, making it almost impossible to bring Tate to trial. When Price first came forward, officers neglected to take a statement and discouraged her from pressing charges, telling her that it would be a long and difficult process. They also failed to make a digital recording of Walker’s initial statement, instead jotting her words down on paper so sloppily that Tate was at one point referred to as “Michael.” This introduced discrepancies that undermined an account she later gave on video. Multiple items of evidence were also stored incorrectly—including Tate’s phone, which was left lying around the station while the case stalled.

When the phone was eventually searched, it apparently contained important evidence—Tate later said that officers had found proof of twelve “bad things I did”—but the chain-of-custody lapse made it practically useless. Prosecutors, hoping to salvage the case, gave police a list of leads, but they failed to act on them. A longtime Hertfordshire detective blamed the malfeasance on “overworked, overstretched” officers who failed to take the women’s allegations seriously, partly because two of them were sex workers. “It was one of many cases that were completely cocked up because of poor policing,” he told me.

This spring, after I reached out to current and former officers about the investigation, the Independent Office for Police Conduct suddenly announced that it had launched an inquiry into gross misconduct in the case. The next day, the Hertfordshire police declared that they were reopening their own investigation, more than a decade after the women first came forward.

Tristan panicked. “New charging decision = new warrant,” he wrote to his advisers. “Means we’re not protected by romania at all and he can be picked up at anytime from anyplace.” In a voice note, he added, “We’re just gonna have to fucking stay in Dubai and the United States and stop traveling and fucking get some extradition lawyers.”

Navarro, Walker, and Price were already pursuing a civil claim for damages. After the brothers were arrested in Romania, the journalists Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea reported on the women’s stories for Vice News, and another woman said that she, too, had been strangled and raped by Tate in 2014. The four women launched a crowdfunding campaign to “Bring Andrew Tate to Justice in the U.K.” and filed a claim against him in Britain’s High Court.

The Tates were dismissive of the civil case. Andrew wrote to his advisers, “Nobody cares besides 50 retards,” adding, “I’m too important to give them relevance.” But when Tate checked on the crowdfunding campaign, this spring, he was shocked to find that it had raised more than three hundred thousand pounds. “Go get him,” one woman wrote under a ten-pound pledge. Another, donating five pounds, wrote, “Your bravery is astounding. We are all with you.” Looking at the total, Tate wrote, “That’s a lot of money.” Then he snapped back into character: “I don’t acknowledge my cases. . . . I ignore all this none of it’s real.”

Soon afterward, Petrescu quietly resigned. “I am not leaving because he is a misogynist. I am leaving because the tragedy has become too cringe to watch,” she wrote, in a proposal for a book that she plans to write about working for the brothers. “They lie like there’s no tomorrow,” she told me. “I stopped believing in Andrew.”

When the British civil case goes to trial, one of the witnesses will be Lauren Southern, the former far-right activist, who has since disavowed many of her past views. She told me that she’d decided to get involved after watching Tate’s other victims fight for justice. “The idea that I had evidence, I had medical records that could be added to these cases, and I was doing nothing—that was really eating me up inside,” she said. Last year, she self-published a memoir that detailed her experience with Tate. She broke into tears as she told me that speaking out was “the only way to actually heal anything.”

Tate has always relied on Hruskova to support his story. Since the brothers’ webcam operation was dismantled, she has been living in Dubai, where she has trained as a gemologist, specializing in lab-grown diamonds. She declined to speak to me, and has remained publicly loyal to Tate, but there are signs that her perspective may be shifting.

Hruskova recently launched a Telegram channel, Viviens Wonderland, which she describes as a “safe space” for women to discuss topics including recovering from traumatic relationships, sexual assaults, and leaving the sex industry. I joined the channel via a public link this January. Inside, Hruskova presided over chats with sisterly energy, dispensing reassurance, pep talks, and relationship tips.

She bristled when members asked about her past. “If any of you mention Andrew or remarks regarding him or our past relationship youll get kicked out,” she once declared. But at times her guard slipped. When one member asked her how it had felt to be in a relationship with someone who slept with other women, she replied, “Horrible, do not recommend it to ANYONE,” and added, “No woman can stomach it for long period of time.” She wrote that Tate was the only man she had ever been with, and that since leaving him she had committed to celibacy. It had taken seven sessions of tattoo removal to erase his branding from her skin.

When a group member wrote about missing an ex-partner who had abused her, Hruskova’s response was fiery. “what exactly is it you miss?” she wrote. “How you felt literally worthless? How youd cry with him every day? And then knowing how TERRIBLE you felt and he made you feel, add this—he KNEW what it would cause you and still did it. Thats not love, never was.”

One afternoon in Bucharest, Tristan met me at a surf-and-turf restaurant overlooking a lake. He wore a wide-lapelled burgundy suit and purple alligator winklepickers, made by King Charles’s shoemaker. At the table, he took off a gold Rolex and invited me to feel its weight. He ordered grilled octopus, followed by two steaks.

Tristan told me that he was determined to clear his name. “I’m Tristan Tate, the human trafficker—that’s what everyone says about me. Everyone thinks I’m a horrible person. Everyone thinks I commit crimes against women. Before my daughters grow up, I need to prove that I’m not that guy,” he said. “My life has been destroyed, and this should not be my story.” He denied using calculated seduction to recruit women, but acknowledged that he’d had sex with many of his workers. “I’ve got beautiful, naked women in my house,” he said. “What do you think is going to happen?”

The whole webcam business was a distant memory, he insisted. “I learned a lot about the nature of men, how perverted and weird they are,” he said. “It made me like men a lot less. It certainly made me hate pornography and understand that it’s a toxic influence.” When I asked about his own proclivity for choking women, he scoffed. “ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is the most popular female book ever,” he said. “The idea that this book sold hundreds of millions of copies, and that there aren’t women who will ask a tall millionaire who likes to wear suits to choke them during sex like it’s my idea, is a wild leap of faith.”

“Remember, it’s illegal to use your phone while driving. Instead, use the giant iPad built into the car.”

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After lunch, Tristan beckoned for the bill and refused to let me pay—“I’m a misogynist. You’re not allowed.” Outside, a bodyguard led me to a waiting Aston Martin, and Tristan nosed the car out onto the street. As he sped across town, he told me that he retained high-placed connections in Romania who were “very apologetic” about the case. We pulled up outside a Davidoff cigar emporium. Inside, Tristan breezed past the front desk, calling out, “A big one for me, a small one for her,” before leading me into an elevator. When the doors closed, he quipped, “Now you can’t leave.” A few floors up, they opened to reveal a low-lit lounge with heavy green curtains and black leather armchairs.

Over cigars, Tristan brought up Ella Hadley, the young woman from Florida. “She has drastically altered the course of my life,” he said. “I should be known as a sportsman, a clean-living, industrious, hardworking businessman.” When he thought of Hadley, he said, his mind was “clouded by the fog of war.”

He wanted me to interview Hadley, as well as her pro-bono lawyer. “I hope you get in touch with these retards,” he said. “I super-duper-duper hope they talk to you, because I will use your article to get more money out of their asses in court.” He also urged me to include a “tribute” to Hadley’s ex-boyfriend who died by suicide. (Hadley, who has never spoken to the media, declined to be interviewed.)

The elevator door opened, and Andrew Tate walked in. “The bad guy, the bogeyman,” he said, grinning, as he shook my hand. He was dressed casually, in a green suède jacket and black sweats, but his watch was heavily iced with diamonds, as was a chain around his neck. “Kill the music,” he told Tristan. “I’m low on time, so let’s go.”

Tate started by telling me that his reputation as a misogynist was “completely unfair.” He explained, “What I am is a realist who has certain world views on how men should act, which is with honor and duty, and they shouldn’t be hurting women in any way. Of course, on the internet, you use hyperbole, and you exaggerate sometimes for comedic effect.”

He told me that the case against him had been cooked up by his political foes. “What they’re trying to do is to attach heinous allegations to my name so that people talk about the allegations instead of my ideas,” he said. “The Western world’s on the edge of collapse, and they’re very afraid of that.” Both brothers dismissed the War Room messages as “unmoderated chats,” and claimed that the thousands of incriminating texts filed in court had all been mistranslated from English to Romanian.

When I asked how the travel ban had come to be lifted, Tate denied that Donald Trump had personally intervened, but said he had learned from powerful people in Bucharest that the restrictions were removed because of American pressure. “Romania just overthrew its election. Too many people are looking at our processes,” he said he had been told. “It’s too messy. They want you gone.” Now he was certain that the case would fail. “The chance of this getting to trial is zero,” he said.

Tate deflected most of my questions with well-worn arguments, but when I asked about Hruskova he seemed caught off guard. “If I’d ever hurt her, why has she released all those videos defending me?” he said. Soon, he announced that he needed to leave. He bumped into my photographer on the way out, but refused to stick around for pictures. “I didn’t like some of her questions,” he said.

With his big brother gone, Tristan settled into an armchair under a gold spotlight and posed for photos with apparent contentment. “Supermodel, huh?” he said, puffing on his cigar. Then he was struck by a thought. “You know who ruined the ‘I don’t need to rape women because I’m handsome’ excuse?” he asked. “Ted Bundy.” He went on, “Ted Bundy ruined it for fucking everyone, because he was a psychopath and he killed a bunch of women and he was handsome and charming. If it wasn’t for him, that would still be a plausible reason.”

When the photo shoot was over, Tristan headed for the elevator. Then he suddenly turned back. “Come on, give me a hug,” he said, striding toward me. In the moment before his arms encircled me, there seemed to be no choice. ♦