The other Tate brother

For Jane*, a 20-year-old aspiring musician from Florida, the stranger’s attention was compelling.

After several abusive relationships, she’d joined SeekingArrangement, a website dedicated to pairing young women with wealthy, older men.

“I like your American accent,” the stranger messaged her. “I think you’re the most interesting person I’ve met in a long time.”

His profile name was Vladimir. But in fact, the stranger was Tristan Tate, the lesser-known younger brother of the controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate. Unlike Andrew, whose online content is filled with aggressive messages towards women, Tristan was initially charming.

“You may say it’s crazy,” he wrote. “But it sounds like you’re exactly what I’m looking for.”

Jane didn’t know it then, but these syrupy messages were the first stage in an alleged criminal scheme to gain her trust. Six months later, she and another woman would be rescued by police from the Tate’s Romanian compound as suspected victims of human trafficking.

According to unreleased legal documents obtained by the Observer, Jane wasn’t an isolated case. Romanian prosecutors allege that the younger Tate used the same “loverboy” method to entrap no fewer than 30 other women.

The technique is used by criminals to manipulate vulnerable people into romantic relationships before exploiting them in the sex industry or for other illegal activities.

Tristan – even more than his infamous older brother – is accused of using the tactic to target young, at-risk or grieving women before pressuring them into making sexually explicit content for websites such as OnlyFans.

Prosecutors say the 36-year-old threatened some of the women with violence, kept much of their income for himself, and prevented some from leaving the Romanian complex that has been the Tate brothers’ base since 2017. One of the alleged victims is a refugee from Ukraine.

Tristan Tate denies all wrongdoing.

Andrew Tate, a 38-year-old former kickboxer, has 10.7 million followers on X including JD Vance, the Vice President. Millions of young men follow his podcasts and videos which promote fitness, ostentatious wealth and the rejection of feminism. He has claimed that Rumble, a right wing video platform financially backed by Vance, pays him $9 million a year. In a statement, Rumble said, "no such contract exists". 

The influencer’s misogyny has been cited as a factor in influencing a number of crimes, including the murder last year of BBC racing commentator John Hunt’s wife and two daughters by Kyle Clifford. But while Andrew is one of the most Googled men on the planet, Tristan, is far less well known. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Today Tristan’s central role in the brothers’ alleged criminality can be revealed for the first time.

They face serious legal challenges in three countries: a mixture of civil and criminal claims have been brought against them in the UK, the US and Romania.

In December 2022 they were placed under house arrest in Romania and charged with trafficking seven women. The brothers have so far successfully blocked that case from going to trial. Prosecutors have since announced a new investigation involving more than 30 further alleged victims, including a woman who was 15 at the time.

Both Romanian investigations centre around the Tates’ webcamming operation, which they launched in about 2014.

An 'empire'

For several years, the brothers operated a stable of women in the UK and Romania, setting them up with accounts on pornography subscription websites such as MyFreeCams and OnlyFans and then taking a share of their profits.

Andrew has boasted that his “big empire of webcam girls” ran from many locations and brought him millions of pounds a year.

However, interviews with lawyers and prosecutors in the US and Romania, as well as an examination of hundreds of pages of unreleased court documents, suggest that Tristan played a central role.

“Some people might see him as the second in command,” said Jill Roth, a lawyer representing an alleged victim of Andrew Tate. “I see him as equally in command. Andrew spends a lot of time being the face of their mission. But Tristan is the one who is actually calling the shots and doing the hard work.”

In a confidential document setting out the crimes Romanian prosecutors believe the brothers committed in their second, most recent, investigation, Tristan is suspected of coercing 28 women into online sex work using the “loverboy” technique. Andrew, by contrast, is linked to only seven cases of alleged human trafficking.

“Tristan’s role was to recruit and then coordinate the women,” a source with close knowledge of the investigation said. “He was working under his older brother, but he had a leading role.”

Three months after he first messaged her, Tristan persuaded Jane to visit him in Romania, telling her she could teach him music. Just as she was about to get on the plane, however, his tone hardened.

“Three rules,” he wrote her, according to messages published in a civil suit Jane brought against the brothers. “No body hair. This is not progressive America. 2. You’re teaching me music. Most important, you never talk to anyone unless I introduce you. Romania is my world.”

Once Jane arrived in Romania, Tristan picked her up in a blue Rolls-Royce. But, she says, from that point, she barely saw him.

According to her civil suit, Jane observed multiple women “working on OnlyFans [who] appeared to be working very long hours, often in the middle of the night until early in the morning. They appeared malnourished and unhappy.”

When she met another woman who she thought was being mistreated by Andrew Tate, she messaged a friend who was a US marine. He reported the Tates to the police. In April 2022, their compound was raided and the women were “rescued”.

The Tates deny any mistreatment of Jane. But messages between Tristan and two alleged female accomplices, quoted by Romanian prosecutors and seen by this newspaper, appear to show how Tristan countenanced violence against women in the compound.

“Hit her if you have to, I don’t care,” one message from Tristan says. “Don’t let her take her things. Throw her out of the house with nothing. You’ve seen me do this 10 times before.” One of the women later replies: “I kept saying ‘beat her without leaving any marks’.”

The documents also reference an audio message sent by Tristan in July 2020 in which he allegedly said: “I’m going to make them do even more hours, and hours and hours. I work these whores like slaves. Minimum 10 or 12 hours a day.”

The legal documents also disclose messages between Tristan and a girl who tells him she is only 16 years old. “I was afraid of telling the truth [about my age],” the girl messages. “You know in Romania the legal age for sex is 15 right?” Tristan replies. “I wouldn’t have been so scared.”

He then says he needs to “punish” the girl for lying to him and tells her that she must submit to anal sex the next 10 times they sleep together. “OK,” the girl replies. “I deserve it.”

The brothers appear to have made significant sums from the alleged victims’ sex work. According to prosecutors, Andrew Tate made $1.52m in “patrimonial benefits” just from a woman known as “Vivian”, who he has previously described as “my whore”. On separate occasions, Vivian has denied being abused by either Tate brother.

Neither Tate brother nor their lawyers responded to a detailed list of questions. In the past they have repeatedly claimed the Romanian prosecutors have no evidence against the brothers, that they are innocent of all charges, and that there is a political conspiracy to silence them. Several women named as “victims” in the Romanian documents have made public statements in support of the Tates. Tristan has denied all of Jane’s allegations and has sued her for defamation, which she denies.

The quiet brother

Growing up, Tristan seemed comfortable living in Andrew’s shadow. Like Andrew, he practised kickboxing at the Storm Gym in Luton and enjoyed fast cars and many girlfriends. Both brothers made it on to reality TV programmes: Tristan appeared on Shipwrecked in 2011 and Andrew was a Big Brother contestant in 2016.

Today, the younger Tate has 3.4 million followers on X and helps his brother run their online communities such as the War Room and the Real World. Friends say the brothers are inseparable.

“Some say it’s weird my bro and I are always together,” Andrew tweeted in 2019. “How can brothers be any other way? Who’s going to run into the fire to save you? Your wife? Your kids? Only your brother.”

Raised in Chicago, the pair moved to Luton when Andrew was 11, where they were brought up by their English mother, Eileen. Their father, Emory Tate, stayed in America. A champion chess player who was at once aggressive and distant, he was a seminal figure in the boys’ lives.

In a now deleted Twitter thread, Andrew described how Emory could go “from silence to SCREAMING out of nowhere”.

On one occasion when Andrew came back from a haircut, upset at how it had turned out, Emory became enraged. “You’re raising my son to be a bitch,” he shouted at Andrew’s mother. “Crying about his haircut? What the fuck are you doing?”

“Females fucking around with haircuts,” he told Andrew. “You won’t be raised into a little bitch.”

Emory Tate, who was visiting the boys in the UK for the first time in a year, marched the 13-year-old Andrew to a barber shop where he paid to have his head shaved. “I sat in the chair holding back tears,” Andrew wrote.

According to Romanian prosecutors, Tristan was arrested in 2014, aged 25, on suspicion of assaulting a woman. Andrew was accused of rape and physical assault in 2015. Charges against Andrew were dropped by Hertfordshire police in 2019.