Heidi Blake writes:

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.”

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.” [Continue reading…]