UPDATED: See end of story. Pizza box thing not true.
It’s been a rough couple of days for musclebound professional misogynist Andrew Tate. Yesterday, his attempts to troll environmental activist Greta Thunberg on Twitter backfired spectacularly, inspiring widespread ridicule. Then, today, his Romanian villa was reportedly raided by the police in connection with the alleged kidnapping of two young women.
We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, l’affaire Thunberg. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, the 36-year-old Tate decided to tweet at the 19-year-old activist, boasting about his enormous collection of cars. He told her he’d provide “a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions” if she sent him her email address.
Thunberg replied:
Some ten hours later, Tate reacted a bit like Margaret Dumont in an old Marx Brothers movie. “How dare you?!” he tweeted.
He then released this rebuttal video, in which he declared that she was the one with the small dick, not he. Yes, it apparently took him ten hours to come up with that one.
Today, he was more than just owned online: His Romanian villa was raided by the country’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, and he and his brother were detained for questioning, according to the Daily Mail
The raid is related to an ongoing probe into alleged human trafficking. According to Semafor,
the suspects allegedly used a “loverboy method” to lure victims into relationships and then sexually and mentally abused them to perform in exploitative videos, authorities said.
This was the second police raid on Tate’s villa. The first took place last April after it was claimed that a woman was being held at the mansion against her will. “As the probe continued,” the Daily Beast reported at the time, “it escalated to include ‘crimes of human trafficking and rape.'”
Tate said then that the original raid was just a SWATting attempt gone wrong. Seems like that might not have been the case. He also claimed he moved to Romania partly because the authorities there would be less likely to take rape charges against him seriously. Apparently, not so much.
I wish Tate only the worst. If he’s guilty of the crimes he’s suspected of–he has yet to be charged, much less convicted–I hope he rots in a Romanian prison.
UPDATE: The speculation about the pizza box giving away his location turns out to not have been true, so I removed it from the piece.
UPDATE 2: The cops are now holding him for 30 days.
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Not sure I agree there; rich assholes treating women as trophies and playthings is bad, but giant megacorps trying to control the use of their products post-sale is also bad. In this instance I’d say they deserve each other, but many of those giant megacorps use similar contract terms and tactics, and often also copyright and patent law, to punch down at the poorer classes; see Monsanto and John Deere vs. farmers, Lexmark vs. home offices and small businesses, textbook publishers vs. students, Apple vs. developers, Apple, Deere, Lexmark, *and* others vs. independent repair shops, Microsoft vs. freaking everybody … Tesla does it too, but like Ferarri, mainly against the slightly-less-rich, acting like an upscale version of Deere.
Body shaming is always wrong. Take down people’s disgusting views and personality, things they can change. Not their weight, genital size, or orientation (etc).
@Alan
Wait, what happened to the exchange rate here???
@ big titty demon
Maybe it was that week Liz Truss was in charge. At that time the exchange rate could have changed whilst the sentence was being typed.
But other sources have it as €300,000 ($352,000) in compensation and €25,000 ($29,000) costs.
@Alan:
I mean, there was the Lamborghini LM002 SUV back in the late 1980s. which rather quickly became known as the ‘Rambo Lambo’. I was in University when that became a thing and I remember seeing a bit about it because some of the others in the dorm were regular watches of various auto shows. Lamborghini has actually done military vehicles.
@ jenora
Yeah, it was their attempt to compete with the Humvee. The main problem was though that the military aren’t even that keen on Humvees (the USMC swapped a load of theirs for Land Rovers); so there just wasn’t a market for them. They are eminently collectable though. They go for upwards of $250,000 even second hand.