A chilling new story in Vice reports that Andrew Tate, currently occupying a jail cell in Romania, “was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015 while he and his brother were running a webcam sex business out of the UK, VICE World News can reveal.”
Unfortunately, UK police dragged out the investigation for four years before handing the case over to the Crown Prosecution Service, which declined to prosecute. Now two women who were the alleged victims in the case are talking to Vice News, telling the news outlet that
they were violently abused – one raped, the other repeatedly strangled – by Andrew Tate, and that UK police and the Crown Prosecution Service mishandled their case, leaving him free to rise to global fame on the back of his unchecked misogyny.
Tate denies the charges.
Had Tate been convicted of these alleged crimes, the world would have been spared the spectacle of Andrew Tate, role model to teenage boys and poster child of toxic masculinity–and his alleged human trafficking in Romania would never have taken place.
According to the two women, Tate’s modus operandi for manipulating women into doing webcam pornography was the same in both the UK and Romania: he would convince the women that they were his girlfriends and then move to put them on camera through what Romanian officials say was “physical violence and mental coercion.” Vice notes that Tate essentially bragged about doing something akin to this (minus the bits about violence and coercion) on now-deleted pages of his own website.
“My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality. Get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together,” the website said.
One of the IK accusers told Vice News that Tate was often violent with his “employees.”
Tate repeatedly assaulted the women who worked for him, said Sally, choking her on at least five occasions, while she witnessed him do the same to her co-workers at least 10 times. The attacks were in keeping with the dominant, controlling “pimp” persona he cultivated …
The alleged abuse took other forms as well. “I saw him smack girls with a belt. I witnessed him doing it to one of the girls I was staying with, because she wanted a lie-in….”
On another occasion, she said she witnessed Tate rape her friend Helen.
The two women left Tate’s webcam business shortly after the alleged rape and went to the Hertfordshire police–only to see the investigation stalled and their case ignominiously dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.
The Vice News story has many more details and is well worth reading in its entirety. Vice is also preparing a documentary on Tate which will include interviews with both women.
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Tater’s stuff will only be sold off if he’s found guilty. They’re basically keeping it as evidence — so he can’t liquidate it or find someone to clean up incriminating stuff at the sex slave houses. Like Alan said only gooder than me.
I think “defund the police” was the wrong slogan. It scared people. The idea is to make it so that cops aren’t the only response to trouble. Take away their military vehicles and balance the money out between the cops to do their takedown and investigation of actual crime, and put more money into social services to prevent things like cops killing mentally ill people who have a freak-out on the street.
@Cyborgette: Same thoughts I have (white, disabled). More cops everywhere is scary to me, and I used to volunteer with my local PD!* Particularly, as you said, with their high rates of DV, alcoholism, etc.
Having more mostly-white drunk/hungover men with anger issues and a God complex walking around fully armed is… not a pretty picture.
*The traffic division, which — good lord, it’s California, we need them. And they didn’t have a quota. They were more likely to give people in ordinary cars a warning, but come down hard on luxury cars. Heh.
Dalillama, preventing police violence against Black women is a cause I’m already behind. It’s allowed to be talked about. The Black femicide rate is the highest femicide rate in the USA (highest in the world iirc), and it’s not the police killing us at that rate, believe me. And it’s a taboo topic. Would you believe that Rosa, founder of the non-profit Black Femicide, receives regular death threats from Black people for the work she does trying to bring awareness to the issue?!?! Hmmmm… wonder why that is?
That’s why these old revolutionaries like Davis with their talk about “community networks” really triggers me. Black women have no damn community in the USA. You mean to tell me that instead of calling cops on our rapists, abusers and murderers we’re supposed to feel sorry for them and turn to “the communitah” that tells us to shut up and “hold a brotha down”?!?! Miss me with that b.s.
@GSS ex-noob
“Defund” doesn’t have to mean “remove any and all funding”, but… IDK slogans. I’m bad with slogans.
@Dali
You’re clearly just triggering her at this point and mostly preaching to the choir otherwise, so maybe just stop? Please?
@Love is All We Need
I… have very different views, but this is making me think a bunch about stuff I’ve seen (with all the caveats implied) in my own experience of leftist movement brokenness. In this case, specifically, leftist spaces handling misogynistic abuse by Black and Indigenous men really badly. I can’t give details because confidentiality, but I’ve been witness to some pretty shocking stuff before I burned out of activism. And I’ve felt a lot of times like part of the problem is these spaces denying any shared experience of womanhood, and assuming racism is always “more of a problem” than misogyny, which… feels related to what you’re talking about (though obvs I can’t speak to the misogynoir aspects).
Cyborgette, thanks. Dalillama it’s ok, I know you mean well and you’re not triggering me – the out of touch old revolutionaries are. I’m very familiar with those ideas (which had a time and place – like 45-50 years ago). Now we live in era where the complete opposite approach needs to be taken by Black women (if white women are safe enough to still play revolution roulette then good for them). I mentioned before how Gen Z doesn’t fall for the okey-doke like Gen X did, right? Well this young Youtuber has a fantastic idea – Black women, go down to your local police station and introduce yourself to the cops. Build rapport, cement bonds. They aren’t the ones killing us every 5.5 hours (yes that’s the stats). When and if you run into danger, you’ve got a friend.
@Crip Dyke
What if we want people to be punished? I want people like Tate punished.
You know, whenever I bother to chime in on a WHTM comment thread, I immediately regret it, so like, there’s a lot I could say in response to everything but I’m going to try keeping this short (I seem to say this all the time, too, to no avail…).
I get that there’s a systemic problem in progressive movements where women, and especially darker-skinned women, end up doing the bulk of the work. Something like this as an answer, though, is just asinine. It’s actually making me angry. It’s just cruel and wrong on so many levels (for those not keeping track, this was in response to being confronted with not having any evidence that the policy that she praised accomplished what was advertised). Again, I could go on, but it would be a waste of time, clearly.
Between this and the Small Dick Discourse in the past couple of weeks, I’m “happy” to report that my personal red flag radar has been proven absolutely correct on several counts. I always think that maybe I’m a little too distrusting of people and it’s adversely impacting my ability to get a job, form lasting non-shitty relationships, etc. etc. and then people pull this shit over and over and over and are not even an iota repentant.
Maybe this is triggering to people, but apparently that’s the fucking flavour of the month on this goddamn site. I don’t care anymore.
@Love is All We Need
The idea of introducing myself to the local cops (especially out here in the ‘burbs) makes my skin crawl, but then as white woman (trans or not) I guess the devil I know is not so bad; there’s a lot of privilege in being in so few situations where the cops have been the less bad option.
And my socialist side hears you loud and clear – if we’re going to have a state, better that it be there for people who can’t go anywhere else, with force of arms to protect them if necessary. TBQH I feel that as a Jew as well, on less personal level. (Maybe see also the history of proletarian and petit bourgeois antisemitism, and why a lot of Jews in Europe preferred monarchs.)
@Love is All We Need:
It sounds like you are willing to hurt yourself and other black women if doing so will also hurt black men. That seems … misandrist. It’s certainly negative-sum and won’t help anything in the long run. And … really? You’d rather your neighborhood be flooded with lots and lots of armed, mostly white, mostly men, all of them with itchy trigger fingers? It’s not like the cops have been very good to women of color either. Breonna Taylor springs to mind.
Plus, the suggestion that the solution to black women’s woes is to submit to a bunch of armed male protectors doesn’t sound very feminist. In fact it sounds a lot like patriarchy.
Clearly there is a problem with women bearing the brunt of unpaid labor in community-building and related tasks. That problem is patriarchy, and cannot therefore be solved with more of the patriarchal thinking that caused it in the first place.
What seems needed here is an activist movement (or many) that are militantly egalitarian. Everyone expected to share in the work. No-one accorded any special status. The problem people described in that informants article all got special status by being seen as “organizers” or “leaders” or having better academic credentials or similar. It does make sense to use talents, aptitudes, or specific expertise as a basis for assigning certain tasks to certain people. But as soon as people with some particular talent, aptitude, or expertise get accorded special status and permitted to contribute less (relative to their overall demonstrated capacity) and to cause more trouble than the allowances granted a generic member — as soon as anyone, in other words, starts getting treated as a “VIP” — the organization is already fatally compromised in its ability to advance the interests of the left. Because it has internalized some sort of a class distinction within itself. That, too, is trying to solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. We can’t fight class by recreating class; nor patriarchy with patriarchy; nor racism with racism; etc.
@Surplus to requirements
I may not agree with everything Love Is All We Need has said but I genuinely don’t see what she has said that would harm me or herself. Am I missing something?
Well, for starters, her “more stop’n’frisk in our neighborhoods, please!” recommendations would likely result in a thousand more Breonna Taylors … plus, see the bit about how women appealing to a bunch of tough strapping armed men for protection would take them backward.
@steph
Then the philosophy of prison abolition is not your philosophy, and lucky for you no one is compelling you to think or say otherwise.
That said, the idea that prisons are a place where people are made to suffer rather than a place used only as necessary to keep people safe and which provides growth and rehabilitation support to the folks imprisoned has resulted in tremendous expense while providing less safety.
Even for folks who like the idea of inflicting suffering on others that they deem to be bad people (or people who have done bad things), the empirical facts that are system doesn’t actually work and is far more expensive than alternatives ought to give people pause.
Love is rightly concerned about the number of Black women murdered, and I’m not saying that she must or should support defunding police or prison abolition, but if she did come to that conclusion, she wouldn’t be the first to do so not because she believes philosophically in the movement, but rather because the priority is safety, and the HOW doesn’t much matter to a lot of people.
As a last point, I absolutely concede that just because this particular system of intentionally inflicting suffering isn’t cost effective and doesn’t reduce crime doesn’t mean that there’s no system possible that makes infliction of suffering a priority yet also is cost effective at reducing/deterring crime. But someone is going to have to show me what that system is, with the stats to back it up.
Otherwise the question before us isn’t merely, “Do you want Tate to suffer?”
The question before us is, “Do you want Tate to suffer if the process by which we inflict that suffering is statistically guaranteed to cause more suffering for innocent people and to cost us more money than a system that produces less suffering of innocent people?”
Do you so much want Tate to suffer that you’re willing to move forward with public policies that cause a general increase in suffering as well as wasted money?
If you live in a democracy that’s certainly your choice. Feel free to argue for and to vote for such systems. But for me, my desire to see Tate and similar people suffer isn’t sufficient to allow me to tolerate a system that causes increased harm to others.
It wasn’t intuitive to me to support shifting funding away from cops and toward social services. Supporting prison abolition wasn’t simply a matter of somehow hating the idea that rapists might suffer. There’s actual research on both these points showing that certain steps make communities safer while using fewer dollars and I support those steps.
It helps that I’ve been raped and have empathy for anyone who is victimized, even criminals raped in prison, but it wasn’t required.
As for whether Tate himself will be the subject of the intentional infliction of suffering, well, I don’t know. It will depend on the Romanian justice system which is not a topic I know anything about.
Stop-n-Frisk was controversial however there are conflicting studies on it’s effectiveness. I don’t know that random frisking of individuals is necessary, although again, the dread vibe in high crime areas goes a long way to preventing petty crimes which domino effects larger crimes. My idea is that even just a hands-off presence of cops is enough to instill dread and give pause to crime. So cops can just sit in their cars and keep an eye. Circle around the blocks regularly. Take a stroll now and then.
Probably the best “community activism” Black women can do is befriending their local cops.
@Steph
I’d very much like for men like Tate to suffer, but my vengeful sadism does not make for good policy. Good policy is whatever prevents these guys from existing and prevents them from victimizing people when they do turn up – and right now we’re failing massively on both counts, with e.g. over 15% of men being serial rapists and the majority of those never convicted.
I can’t speak to the racial justice side of things, but as a woman I can tell you (including from personal experience) that what we are doing is not working.
Let me point something out here. Pages back when Surplus To Requirements wrote
I responded with;
In response to that Dalillama posted links to a video of Angela Davis and the Abolition Journal website.
The response was odd given that cops are not killing Black women every 5.5 hours in this country. Nor are prison guards. But isn’t it curious that when a Black woman brings up Black femicide, it’s assumed she’s talking about cops?
Then suggestions are made for activism that Black women can do to further the abolition cause. Interesting. Again, completely missing the point of that needling, inconvenient 5.5 hours statistic.
And then, when I make suggestions on how Black women can keep themselves safe in the interim period between now and whenever the Abolition Utopia manifests, I am called a “misandrist” by Surplus to Requirements.
This is a very common typical experience for Black women. Very, very common.
@Crip Dyke.
“Suffer” is your word. I said “punished”.
If it’s merely removing them from the general populace but in altogether comfort then no, that’s not punishment to me.
(There are also some people who I don’t think should ever be released.)
I don’t think it’s either/or. I think you can punish and rehabilitate.
@Cyborgette
Not sure where this has come from but I definitely did not say “suffer” not “vengeful sadism”
@Love is All We Need
*Thumbs up*
“Broken windows” policing? Doesn’t work. Well, unless your goal is to oppress minorities rather than to actually reduce violence.
Flooding black neighborhoods with cops won’t reduce the rate of black women being murdered by non-cops, and it’s a sure bet it will increase their rate of being murdered by cops.
Flooding black neighborhoods with money, investment, and opportunity, on the other hand …
Yes it will, provided Black women stop listening to “the communitah” who tells us “snitches get stitches” and “girl you a rat if you call the cops on yo man” (like the idiot in the above video) and actually call the police on their abusers and carry through with charges.
A relationship of trust must be established between Black women and law enforcement and that starts by us reaching out and building rapport. There are enough Black women police officers in cities so that we can build that rapport with them first, before white male officers. There’s some really good cops out here.
That can happen too but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Besides, men aren’t starving in the hood. If anything the obesity rates are high and ever-increasing. It’s not poverty that’s driving these criminals to rape, abuse, murder. It’s pure hatred. Hatred for Black women.
I’m going to hazard a guess that this person was recently kicked out of at least one BIPOC-centered space and that’s how she made her way to what looked like an anti-sexist website that was friendly to liberals. ‘Cause jesus hell I will not be putting a descriptor on what she’s clearly doing here
Why so triggered? Are Black women not allowed to utilize the same legal system that white women use? Everyone’s happy that Andrew Tate got arrested and his victims might finally see justice but Black women are expected to just roll over and die?
They SHOULD be able to utilize it in the same way. But the system is built for white women. And even more so for white men. A lot of changes need to happen before black women can use it the same way. Your idea is only good in a vaccum.
“A lot of changes need to happen before black women can use it the same way. ”
What do you suggest a Black woman do when her home is getting broken into? When her partner is beating her? After she’s been raped?
Something other than your suggestion.
https://www.aclu.org/news/womens-rights/black-women-and-black-lives-matter-fighting-police