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Journalism of Courage
A day after engaging in a Twitter fight with climate activist Greta Thunberg, controversial internet personality and former kickboxer Andrew Tate was detained in Romania on Thursday (December 29) along with his brother on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organised crime group.
Tate has faced other accusations of anti-women language and hate speech in the past. Reuters reported that his brother Tristan will also be detained for 24 hours alongside two Romanian suspects, quoting a statement from the country’s anti-organised crime unit that raided their properties in Bucharest.
What are the allegations, and how did Tate become one of the most famous online personalities today?
Reuters reported the Tate brothers have been under criminal investigation since April. They declined to comment but their lawyer confirmed they had been detained.
“The four suspects … appear to have created an organised crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialised websites for a cost,” prosecutors said, alleging “They would have gained important sums of money.”
The authorities found six women who had been sexually exploited by the suspects.
Tate runs a website called CobraTate (as he refers to himself as King Cobra), which states he is a 36-year-old American-British kickboxer. His titles include an ISKA Kickboxing world championship crown, and he is also a commentator for Real Xtreme Fighting, a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) promotion company in Romania.
In 2016, he appeared on the UK reality show Big Brother but was removed after an earlier video emerged of him appearing to hit a woman, which he denied.
He has been steadily gaining popularity through his particular style of self-help advice (which he calls ‘Tate speech’) in the areas of career, finances, personal life and mental health, targeted at a male audience. Teenage boys also form a significant part of his audience. Tate is perhaps the most popular of other similar personalities, usually from the West and called ‘Men’s Rights Activists’, who have claimed to empower men in the last few years via numerous YouTube channels and podcasts.
Of late his content has gained massive popularity, and by June of this year, he was googled more often than Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Parts of his videos or interviews are turned into short clips (of usually less than a minute’s duration) and then posted on TikTok or as Instagram Reels videos, where they are seen by millions of people, all over the world.
Though it’s difficult to give an exact reason, a big appeal of influencers like Tate is that they seem to identify some of the genuine problems that many men seem to be facing – what it means to be a man or to be masculine in the present day, questioning one’s self-worth and identity, and frustration because of a sense of aimlessness in matters of career or personal life.
Tate hooks viewers in through the mythology he has created around himself. On his website, he states, “In a previous life, I lived 5,000 human years atop Wudan mountain. I remember every lived second. Life is competition. Competition is violence… If you do not struggle to become an exceptional man. You are a nobody. And every female will prove to you – you may as well not exist.”
He frequently invokes quotes from the famous US sci-fi film series The Matrix, which talks about people rejecting a world where their life isn’t theirs to control. But in offering men a feeling of community and the secrets of wealth creation, Tate further drills the idea of people being worthless if they are not “successful”, with a successful life only limited to gaining immense power.
Further, Tate has said that if a woman ever cheated on him, “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her up by the neck,” and that women who report sexual harassment and rape bear some responsibility for the crimes. He was banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for such comments, only to be reinstated on Twitter once Elon Musk took control.
People like him, who preach these ideas, frequently end up pushing stereotypical and outdated ideas about society, where men are the only providers in a household, and women are to only focus on raising a family. Young men being charmed by his philosophy and programmes (as there is no age limit on enrolling for his courses) has, therefore, been pointed out as a matter of concern.
Fans claim such an image does not truly depict Tate and his positive influence, and that the clips often quote him out-of-context. But large platforms banning him and now an arrest, together with the unprompted Twitter attack on Thunberg, might weaken that argument.
