Transcription
The Jeffrey Epstein files have become a defining issue for Trump in his first year back at the White House, stoking allegations that his administration is covering up for the most notorious sexual predator in recent American history and his accomplices.
But something that's flown under the radar is the story of how this man and his brother, two of them there, both facing charges of rape and human trafficking in Romania, were suddenly allowed to return to the United States and how the Trump administration might have been involved in that. One of those men, Andrew Tate, is one of the most proudly violently misogynistic influencers in the world with an enormous following online, particularly among young men and even teenage boys. And in his online content, he and his brother have bragged about their recruitment and exploitation of women to make pornography. Both brothers have repeatedly denied criminal wrongdoing.
Well, now the New York Times, in a remarkable investigative report, finds that they were released from Romanian custody only after Trump administration officials intervened. An official in the White House told the Times that it was not involved in Tate's legal matters. But the Times reports that six days before Trump's inauguration, Andrew Tate wrote in a text, quote, "I had word from the Trump administration that they're on top of things. I've been told I'll be free soon."
And here is how the Tate brothers reacted when, in fact, they were freed and they boarded their flights back to the States the very next month.
"Know you are Andrew. You know what we are? We are back. We are so back. No one has ever been more back than we just got."
"It's true."
"And we never really left."
"So now we're back."
"Never left, but we're massively back."
Megan 2 is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times. One of the reporters who broke that story, and she joins me now. It's great to have you here. This is phenomenal work.
"Thanks for having me."
I say that to you a lot because it's always, uh, true. So, first, I guess, just for folks that don't know who Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are, like, can you just give us a sense of who they are and what kind of content they made and what their message is?
"Sure. So, they are huge stars in the so-called manosphere. Um, Andrew Tate in particular has built a massive audience of mostly young ma, young young men, um, uh, by preaching, uh, brazen masculinity and chauvinism. And he, they have also taught courses on how to date women and exploit women and make money and have also very notably run a porn business, uh, for about a decade in which they kind of bragged about basically dating women and then steering those girlfriends into making content online, sexual content, in which they take most of the profits."
If I'm not mistaken, I think one of the courses they offered was like a pimp, pimping course, right? It had the acronym PIMP.
"Yeah, it was a PhD, short for Pimping Hose Degree."
Yes. And and the whole idea was, and again, they would say this is, "We will teach you how to find women, uh, create some sort of what appears to be romantic connection with them, and then use that to manipulate them into, um, them making sexual content that you profit off of." Right?
"Yeah, that's exactly right. And they, um, they were born in the United States, um, uh, but grew up, uh, spent much of their life growing up in Britain. And so they launched this, uh, porn business, if you will, around the mid-2010s when they were based in Britain. And then in 2015, they moved to Romania. We found out Andrew was actually under criminal investigation then for alleged assaults of multiple women. Um, and, uh, as he tells it, thought that Romania, you know, was a place where you could get away with a lot of stuff that you couldn't get away with in the West."
I think he even said that.
"He even said that. Yes. Get away with. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so they move, they, they basically relocate to Romania. And so they're running this business out of both, like, Britain and Romania. They're growing it into into a variety of platforms with a variety of women. And so they're doing all these things simultaneously. They're doing the porn business. Then they're teaching the online courses in which they're basically saying, "We'll teach you the lessons we've learned from this."
And there's some of the, like, the, you know, the MMA stuff, fighting and working out and they're like, he's super ripped and all that, like, all of that stuff adjacent to the sort of?
"Exactly, like super fitness. I mean, Andrew got his start as a professional kickboxer, so he's really maximized that image."
So they have this huge following now. So that's sort of uncontested, right? That part of it, like, that they, that this is what they're about and they've said it and they've talked about needing to treat women like slaves and you need to dominate them and you need to treat them like a dog that you say to them, you give them orders, right? And that you have to condition them the way you condition a dog. That's all stuff they've said. There are a variety of criminal allegations against them. Let's start with the Romania case. That was the reason they couldn't leave the country because they were under indictment.
"That's right. Well, it actually, um, the the reality is that they're actually under criminal investigation. Sorry, criminal investigation. It's a different process."
It's a different process.
"So, they have been since, uh, late 2022, they have been under criminal investigation in Romania. And the allegations are there that they have coerced dozens of women into their porn business and to what amounts to trafficking. Um, and that Andrew has raped one of those women. And, um, they also, there's accusations that he, um, you know, had sex with and beat a 15-year-old."
And so those?
"I want to just say that again. There's an accusation that he had sex with and beat a 15-year-old."
"Correct. And so this case, as, as the prosecutors have been building this case, they have repeatedly sought to keep these guys confined. Um, and so they had been prohibited, uh, from leaving the country as the prosecutors are building this case, with the prosecutors saying that they posed a public danger, um, and a flight risk."
I want to read some of these texts that you have gotten in the, uh, uh, article. Uh, this is a woman who says, "Do you want me to be your slave or your wife?" This is a woman who, again, he's sort of, it seems to be recruiting kind of quasi-romantically and then maybe trying to move into something else. "You'll do whatever I tell you, which is the same thing. I'll choose a woman to be my wife. She'll love me enough to let me tell her what I feel like. I will decide if she's a slave." And then this is a text exchange, uh, with, in a text chat titled "Pimps." This is two associates along with Tristan, the brother, discussed how to punish a woman who said she would no longer work for them. "Tristan Tate, the move now is as follows. Okay. Both of you go get her out of the house. Okay. Hit her if you have to. I don't care. Don't let her take her things. Thanks. Okay."
"You're right. Those are, those are among the text messages that the prosecutors have gathered. I mean, we've been pouring through hundreds of pages of court records from Romania in which they've gathered together and spelled out what they say is like a long pattern of this behavior with a variety of women."
There are other criminal charges in England. Am I right?
"Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, in, in Britain, prosecutors have authorized charges. They're not just under investigation. They have been, they've authorized charges of trafficking and rape against both brothers there. And that, those are charges that they'll have to face when the Romania case is complete. They'll have to go to Britain and face those there. And we also realized, one of the things we discovered in the course of our reporting, um, I, I worked on this with my, uh, colleague, uh, Isabella Quai, and what we found was that here in the United States, since 2022, anti-trafficking agents at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as federal prosecutors here in New York, the ones who eventually convicted, you know, won a conviction of, um, Sean Combs, have been investigating the Tate brothers. We should also note that almost immediately upon return, a girlfriend of Andrew Tate's accused him of assault and rape. He denies those charges. She has now sued him. He has countersued her for defamation. Right. So that happened immediately after it came back. Now."
Everyone, I think, has a picture of these individuals at this point.
"They were in Romania. It's very clear from your reporting, even though the Trump administration has tried very hard to run away from it and deny it, and Romanian officials have tried to deny it, that there was some pressure put by the Trump administration to get these guys back to the US."
"Yeah. Yeah. Well, what we found was that their release from Romania was really the culmination of like years-long efforts by Andrew Tate in particular to forge very strategic alliances with prominent figures on the American right, media figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, um, people in the Trump family, first Don Jr. and then Barron, um, and then eventually some of his supporters, uh, who were very public with their support and defense of him and their criticism of the Romanian criminal case, ascended into the Trump administration."
Alina Haba has talked about him. Richard Grenell, who has a kind of freelance portfolio and in fact admits that he discussed the case with a, a Romanian official.
"Right. So, right. Exactly. Um, Pauling Gracia, who, uh, actually served on Trump's legal team. He, he ascends into the administration as well. And so after the re, after, you know, this new administration comes in, Richard Grenell in particular, we found had discussions with at least two Romanian officials about the Tate's case. Um, one at Mar-a-Lago in December of 2024, the second in February at a conference, an international conference in Munich. And what we also found was that within days of that second conversation, um, an order from the highest levels of the Romanian government came down to the prosecutors in the criminal case saying, 'You got to meet, you got to, you got to strike a compromise with the Tate brothers.'"
And they did not. And they were unhappy.
"They were very, they were, they were outraged, but they did follow through with ultimately lifting their travel bans, which the Romanian prime minister believed was going to appease the Trump administration. It's truly like, it's really a shocking set of events and incredibly scrupulous reporting about all this. And people should check it out, uh, at the New York Times, where you can read some of these texts and you can read, uh, more about some of the allegations, uh, against, uh, Andrew Tate and his brother, which the men deny. You should definitely check it out. I can do it."