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- [00:00]
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Campside Media Announcer
Campside Media.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
From sony music entertainment and campside media, this is infamous. And I'm vanessa grigoriadis.
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Natalie Ropoved
I'm natalie ropoved.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
So today we're going to be talking about a topic that is slightly darker than we normally do, but we think it's an important one and a really significant part of our culture that we cannot shy away from. And yes, we know sometimes this show gets pretty hardcore, but we're the kind of people who believe that the world deserves inspection and analysis, not looking away from things. And you're smart and savvy and want to know about this stuff, too.
- [01:19]
Narrator/Host
Today we're talking about social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate, two of the main figures within the misogynist online community known as the Manosphere. After we recorded the interview you're about to hear, the Tate brothers were arrested this weekend in Miami and now await extradition to the UK where they face a new slew of charges, including multiple counts of rape, sex trafficking and child pornography. In addition to the existing charges they
- [01:48]
Podcast Announcer
already faced, Andrew Tate now faces more than 30 counts stemming from alleged offenses between July of 2010 and August of 2017. His brother, Tristan Tate, also faces multiple counts. They both deny any wrongdoing.
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Narrator/Host
It's a huge development in this story for more charges to have been brought against the Tates. For the Tates to have been arrested on American soil and now face extradition to the uk this is really serious stuff and we're going to get into all of it and its origins today.
- [02:20]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
If you don't know Andrew Tate, or maybe you've heard the name, tried to block him out of your consciousness. He's that social media personality who was around a lot a few years ago. He's got a shaved head, a dark like sort of mustache, beard, weird combo. He's one of the main architects of the Manosphere, being the retrograde online community that claims feminism has hurt men's rights. He pushes a very narrow idea of What a quote unquote, real man is, Namely, predicated on the belief that men should be dominant, wealthy, maybe controlling over women.
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Podcast Announcer
All I'm doing is saying that every the shit that everyone thinks and isn't allowed to say. So that's the reason I'm all big on the Internet.
- [03:04]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
So Andrew Tate is a YouTuber, he's a kickboxer, he's a businessman with an online school called Hustlers University. And he is also an alleged rapist who, according to an absolutely bonkers, deeply distressing recent article in the New Yorker magazine, built an online pornography empire by systematically exploiting women while also teaching the people following him how to be a pimp. It's maybe one of the most intense true crime stories of our day, actually, even though it isn't often covered that way. So who is Andrew Tate, really? How did he come to play such a powerful role in society? And what exactly has he been accused of? Heidi Blake, an investigative reporter at the New Yorker, spent months investigating him for this story called Andrew Tate's Empire of Abuse. During her reporting, she went to Romania and she actually met Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. She read thousands of private messages, sealed court files, interviewed more than a dozen alleged victims, and she is here to talk about all that and more. So, Heidi, welcome to Infamous.
- [04:20]
Heidi Blake
Thank you so much for having me on.
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Natalie Ropoved
For people who aren't familiar, can you explain a little bit about who Andrew Tate is? I mean, where is he from? How did he grow up?
- [04:31]
Heidi Blake
Absolutely. So, Andrew, he's a British American influencer. He was born in the US to a white British mother and a father who was a really celebrated black chess master, as well as being a linguist in the US Air Force. One of the things I uncovered in my reporting is that his father was actually extremely abusive towards him and his brother. And they were raised in an atmosphere of pretty horrifying violence and emotional and psychological abuse, which I think has really fed into the characters that we see now looming so large on the world stage. But they. They moved to Luton in the UK when they were about 11, when their parents marriage broke up. And Andrew Tate, in his teens became a very successful kickboxer. So that was his first taste of fame. He won four world titles as a kickboxer, then appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, a reality TV show in the uk. And it was around that time that he decided that he was not making enough money in kickboxing. It's not a particularly lucrative sp that he was going to try and find another way to get rich. And that was when he launched this online web pornography business, this webcam business, in which he recruited young women to come and perform online for him. But at the same time as developing that, that webcam business, which made him extremely rich over the years, he also developed a big online following, mainly by flaunting the trappings of his wealth and his success. So he kind of developed this brand, this social media brand, which is all about mixing up posts about diamond watches and supercars and private jets with kind of misogynistic rants and masculinist pep talks, urging his young male followers to resist the sort of dominant progressive ideals of the day and kind of join him in reclaiming what he calls their natural masculine imperative for power.
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Podcast Announcer
Females are barely sentient, even the good ones. Females don't have independent thoughts. They're just empty vessels waiting for someone else to install the programming.
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Natalie Ropoved
Just to go back a little bit to the kickboxing. I mean, it feels to me almost too on the nose that this kid who got beaten up by his dad and was afraid of getting a beat down and that his dad would hit him with a belt, whipping him until his skin was striped red, that a kid who experienced that would then get into kickboxing to learn how to put the beat down on other people. And he actually seems to have been pretty good at it. And likewise, somebody who grew up very poor. And I think when he moved back to the uk, you report that him and his single mom and his brother stayed in a hostel for homeless women and children. Like somebody who was in a position of that little power would wind up wanting to exert so much power over other people.
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Heidi Blake
I think in some ways, the sort of. Some of the root of Andrew Tate's appeal is that he gets what it is to feel powerless, like he gets what it is to feel poor and downtrodden and forgotten about. And that that's part of his appeal to young men, is that he says, I know you feel alienated and you feel pushed aside, and I will be your champion, I will be your superhero. He's spoken in the past about, as a kid growing up in grinding poverty in Luton, that he would see some guy drive by in a Ferrari and just feel absolutely furious and feel like this guy has hacked the Matrix. How does he know how to make that kind of money? And we're so poor. It doesn't make any sense. And he kind of developed this dog eat dog worldview, which was all about, I will do whatever it takes, I'll break whatever rule, rules. And, you know, he's kind of got this saying, which he adopted from a notorious pimp who is a kind of hero, that there are two kinds of people in the world, pimps and hoes. Basically, you're either exploiting someone or you're being exploited. And, like, that's the way it goes. And I think that is his kind of credo. But, yeah, he's absolutely fixated on power, on dominance, on coming out on top in a way that I think does derive probably from his sense of having been victimized as a child. He really talks about, and so does his brother Tristan, this abuse that they suffered at the hands of their father as having been, for them, formative and important and a kind of essential part of becoming a real man that you have to kind of, like, go through that wall of fire and experience real violence and real fear.
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Natalie Ropoved
So he starts a webcam business, and I just want to read a little bit from your story. So at the time, I mean, he's in a bad place. He's sharing a rundown apartment with his brother. They have no furniture. He owes money on his car. And he has what he considered a flash of entrepreneurial genius. Quote, I had about five girlfriends, all smoking hot, and females are an asset, he recalled in a video. I had to find a way to monetize the assets.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
And you say also, Heidi, that he flew these different women that he was seeing to Luden, and he assembled them at a restaurant where they learned of each other's existence and said, listen, young ladies, I'm starting a webcam business. This is going to change your life. I mean, is this true that he somehow had stumbled on an ad for a webcam porn site and figured out I should monetize my different women?
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Heidi Blake
I'm seeing quite a big part of my job in reporting this was to go through everything they'd said and kind of cross reference that against the experiences of women who I spoke to, who had been recruited by them and were reporting having been horribly exploited. The details I was finding in, like, prosecutorial files that I was able to obtain their own communications and messages and documents that I got hold of from other sources and to kind of try and piece together exactly what parts of this account they'd given were true and, you know, what parts weren't, and to try and kind of put forth this narrative. And, yeah, you know, the way they described the start of their business is that Andrew Tate had all of these girlfriends and flew them all into the UK and said, hey, come on, and, like, come join me and start this webcam. Business. By his own account, almost all of them left, but one stayed behind. And I was able to confirm the identity of that woman who was, at the time, underage. She was 17 years old. She was a Slovakian teenager who Andrew Tate had met during his kickboxing travels. And she did indeed move to the UK at that time and start working for him on webcam in circumstances that were clearly extremely exploitative. I mean, just for starters, it's illegal to make sexual imagery of anybody under 18 in the UK and in the US. But online, Andrew Tate made a profile for her where she was presented as being a Russian woman in her 20s,
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
and he, you know, apparently persuaded her to get a tattoo reading Tate Property on her body.
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Heidi Blake
That's right, yeah. He had the words Tate Property tattooed right above her crotch and a huge cobra tattoo all the way down the side of her body, which is his personal insignia. His kickboxing nickname was King Cobra. So a lot of the women who I found had been recruited by them and were working for them had these kinds of tattoos. There were dozens of women who were tattooed like this. In the end, this was kind of practice of branding these women as property, which is actually a. Is something that pimps and traffickers have done for a long time. It's a hallmark of trafficking.
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Natalie Ropoved
Yeah, I mean, Vanessa and I, we made a whole podcast, and Vanessa reported extensively on. On nxivm, which was a cult here in the US that obviously was incredibly notorious, where branding was a key part of it, and the women within the subset of it were branded with. With the leader, Keith Renery's initials. So, I mean, it's just shocking to hear that this was happening and being displayed on screen in real time, you know, in these and these videos and being recorded. He starts recruiting more and more women to work as cam girls for him in what you report are terrible conditions, like a room with a mattress on the floor and computer station in the corner. And meanwhile, he's really leaning into this image of himself as almost a cartoon pimp. He gets a poster that he commissions from a local artist that depicts him on a throne holding a cane that he called his, quote, pimp stick, with three women leaning over him in stilettos and thongs. And that Tristan, his brother, would walk around the apartment wearing a hat and waving a foam sword declaring, I am the captain of the money ship. But as you say, there was an absurdity to all of this that took the edge off the menace.
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Heidi Blake
That's right. And I think that's a kind of huge part of the way Andrew Tate operates. And his enduring appeal to his fans is that he blends slightly absurdist humor with actually these very kind of menacing and socially dangerous positions he takes, where what he is really preaching often is explicitly violent misogyny. But he manages to kind of mix it up with these kind of absurdist jokes, and it kind of makes it feel a little bit safer.
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Natalie Ropoved
I think that's a really incredibly important point, because I've been wondering, just reading your story, looking at this, like, how is this still going on? How have people still been supporting this guy despite all the absolutely insurmountable evidence against him? And it really strikes me that it's what you say, this combination of comedy and exaggeration. But that's an incredibly Internet phenomenon, you know, where it's reality tv. Like, you talk in absurdisms and everything seems acted out. And then because it all seems like exaggeration, you think, oh, well, he's not actually doing that stuff. But then it turns out he is actually doing this stuff.
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Heidi Blake
It's a weird case with the Tates because they've been bragging online about being pimps for years now. They've been charged with pimping and trafficking, and they're saying, oh, that whole thing was just a performance. We were just playing characters on the Internet. It's not real. It was just for laughs. You know, we were exaggerating for comedic effect. But then when you. When you get behind this, you look at the evidence, you speak to the people who they have harmed, their actions map directly onto the things that they've said, or vice versa. And, yeah, that was what was kind of shocking to me, is that he's actually. Andrew Tate has, in plain sight, been describing what he's been doing for years. I think the reason he has done that for such a long time is that he fled to Romania in 2015 after facing several allegations of rape and strangulation from women in the uk. And when he got to Romania, he boasted extensively about having established for himself a network of criminal, political and law enforcement connections which basically placed him above the law.
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Natalie Ropoved
So, as you've just said, after Andrew Tate is arrested on suspicion of assault and other charges, he flees to Romania. And we should say at this point that Tate says that he did not strangle any women and that any sex that he had was consensual, but they go to Romania, which, incidentally, is considered the European capital of human trafficking. So can you paint the picture of the life they start living in Romania?
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AT&T Business Wireless Advertiser
Yeah.
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Heidi Blake
So when they. When they left the uk. Their webcam business was still relatively small. They had about six women working for them, and they. They decamped to Romania after this police investigation, took some of those women with them. And when they got there, they. They already had a good friend in Romania from their kickboxing days. And he had connections to a couple of brothers in Romania who have been accused by Romanian prosecutors of leading one of the biggest criminal cartels in the country's history. Andrew Tate was fascinated by those criminal connections. He'd started styling himself as a gangster pimp and saying that he was a mafia boss. And he kind of seemed to treat Romania as a bit of a gangster's paradise. So he. He built himself this compound outside Bucharest where he lives with Tristan. When I visited them there, Tristan told me that they'd made it into a fortress. It has bulletproof doors, it has security cameras covering every, every inch of the property, apart from the bedrooms. It has this kind of huge, like, walk in safe, sheathed in burgundy leather that he was full of gold bars and expensive watches and millions of dollars in cash. They filled the property up with guns and knives and other kind of weaponry, which they. Which they bragged about over the years. And they hired for themselves a former government security officer who hired for them dozens of armed guards who then patrolled the compound, supported them wherever they went. They bought an enormous fleet of supercars, and they just lived a life of extraordinary luxury and opulence, flying around the world on private jets, building a property empire in Romania and then beyond. And they did it all by really ramping up their recruitment of women to work for this webcam porn business. So they took it from having six women working for them when they moved over there to, by their own description, about 75 women working for them at one point.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
Oh, my God, this is so insane. In this compound.
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Heidi Blake
The women were kind of scattered around different properties around Romania to begin with, and then the brothers moved to this compound. And next to this compound is this residential development called American Village. It's sort of very like Stepford Wives. It's these kind of like red gabled houses along, like, perfectly manicured streets. And this is where they kept a lot of their recruits. So it was kind of directly adjacent
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
to their compound, and it just happens to be called American Village, even though there's no connection to America there.
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Heidi Blake
That's right, yeah. That's just coincidentally what it's known as. And it's kind of. I guess it's kind of modeled on, like, an American suburb, but yeah, the women would be housed in these properties, they'd each have their own bedroom where they'd be expected to stream online for, by some accounts, sort of up to 17 hours a day. There were strict systems of punishment and fines if women didn't meet their streaming requirements. And the Tate brothers also recruited a number of women who worked for them as enforcers and would ensure that the women in these properties streamed for as long as they were meant to stream. And they controlled these women's activities on a WhatsApp group they called suspicious death, where women would be threatened with violence, with penalties of all kinds, if they didn't do what they were told, basically, by these women working for the Tate brothers.
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Natalie Ropoved
Yeah. And their approach to recruiting the women in the first place resembled, as you report, what trafficking experts called the, quote, loverboy method, where Andrew and his brother Tristan would essentially troll dating apps and social media for young women and then blast out hundreds of identical messages and frequently changing their location to expand their reach. They basically try to hook these women in and then once they've got them, keep them there. Just to underscore really awful stuff is going on here. Some of them are getting pregnant. The brothers are paying for the women to have breast augmentations. I mean, they essentially set up a harem in Romania with a compound where the women live, and they're controlling them and forcing them to do things.
- [19:11]
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- [20:12]
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- [20:41]
Podcast Announcer
you're listening to Infamous from Campside Media.
- [20:45]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
When you go to Romania, you know, you say Tristan meets you at a surf and turf restaurant overlooking a lake, takes it off and invites you to feel the wait. He orders grilled octopus and two steaks. I mean, so you, you know, I assume we're working on this for quite a while. You arrive in Romania, you've got a photo shoot that you want both Andrew and Tristan to participate in. Just tell us the story of meeting them and how they struck you.
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Heidi Blake
Well, I was hoping from the beginning of reporting this, you know, that I would get a chance to sit down with both of them because I really did want to understand their perspective on all of this and kind of hear it directly from them and get a sense of them. You know, they've put out a lot of theories about why they feel they're being persecuted by prosecutors in Romania, in the UK and elsewhere, including that this whole thing is a kind of MI6 setup. I invited them from the beginning. I wrote to their lawyers and to them and said, like, I would love to see any evidence that you have for any of these claims, please, you know, I'm here, I'm listening. Please provide it to me. I mean, none of that was forthcoming. But actually, in the end, although my kind of initial efforts to engage with them weren't that fruitful, Tristan then reached out to me after I had begun to contact some of the women who were listed in prosecutorial files as their victims to ask to speak with them. And a number of those women, I guess by the nature of this situation, remain heavily under the Tate brothers sway and are very close with them. And so some of those women had reported to the brothers that I contacted them. And so he contacted me, and he said to me that he would be able to put me in touch with a lot of women who would defend him and Andrew and assure me that they had done absolutely nothing wrong. And so that was kind of how our interaction began. And I did speak to several women. Tristan put me in touch with some of whom. Well, all of whom said to me they didn't recognize the description of themselves as human trafficking victims. Although one of them did say to me that Tristan had behaved like a dictator, had verbally abused her and hacked her social media accounts when she tried to leave, and that one of his enforcers had threatened to set fire to her car. This is one of the women he's put up to defend him, which I thought was kind of interesting. But I spoke with those women and spent time speaking with Tristan and kind of hearing him out, and eventually he agreed that I could come to Romania and meet with them. It was kind of always a bit touch and go as to whether Andrew was going to join us. But I had this lunch with Tristan first, and then we went to this cigar lounge, and Andrew did turn up for about an hour. It was very interesting to be in their presence, I think, partly because it's interesting to me the extent to which these guys will kind of adapt their narrative depending on who they are talking to. Andrew insisted that he's not a misogynist in any way, and that depiction of him is completely unfair. And, you know, he just believes that men should treat women with honor and gentleness. And, you know, it was kind of like that's very much not what he says when he's talking to, like, Myron Gaines on Fresh and Fit, but he really kind of dons a different skin suit depending on who he's talking to. And he sort of deflected all of my questions with pretty well worn arguments about how this is all a matrix attack and so forth. He was a little caught off balance, I think, when I asked him about the young Slovakian woman who was the very first woman who was recruited to his webcam business because she had been underage when he first recruited her. And he got visibly kind of agitated when I asked about that, and then very quickly said he was going to leave and refuse to. To stick around for photos. So it sort of felt like that question had touched a nerve. But Tristan was, you know, he's very physically imposing. He's. He's like 230 pounds and like 6 foot 4. He's a giant, gigantic guy. His manners are very polished. He's kind of suave. You know, he was kind of at pains to be very courteous and charming, but still kind of acknowledged that he had had sexual relationships with many of the people who had worked with him over a long period of time, although he insisted that these had all been consensual and that, you know, it was a perfectly natural thing to have happened.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
How did they treat you?
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Heidi Blake
Tristan was polite. He refused to allow me to pay the bill in the restaurant because he said, I'm a misogynist, you're not allowed. He made various kind of quips along the way. So when we got to the cigar lounge and we got into this lift, just me and him, he kind of, as the doors closed joke, now you can't leave things, things like that. So he's kind of aware, I think, of that dynamic and that, you know, perhaps a female reporter would be a little bit nerv about being in close confines with him, given the things he's been accused of. But also he, you know, as he kind of relaxed into the occasion, he made a number of pretty startling jokes, including saying to me that he said, you know, do you know who's. Do you know who ruined the whole kind of I don't really need to rape women because I'm so handsome excuse? Which is kind of his whole point. He's like, why would I need to, you know, assault anybody? I'm so good looking, I'm a millionaire, and women throw themselves at me. He was like, you know who ruined that was Ted Bundy. Like, Ted Bundy really ruined that for the rest of us guys because he was charming and handsome and he raped and killed a load of women.
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Vanessa Grigoriadis
That's a really crazy thing. And, you know, he also says, okay, look at 50 Shades of Grey. Tell me women don't want to be choked by a millionaire. I mean, he's really just sort of bringing out all sorts of crazy things to say to you. So tell us about the criminal cases, because it's not as though people are not trying to take these guys down, although it seems like the survivors are the ones who are truly putting the pedal to the metal. The women who have been, you know, the targets here, who have made them all the money, like, we should be clear. Any women who participated in this webcam business, Almost all the money went to Andrew or Tristan. The women didn't make money from running these businesses on their own. So there is case in the UK, it's an assault case, right. In 2019, Britain's Crown Prosecution Service informs him that he's not going to face any charges from these allegations of rape and strangulation in the uk. And you found that the British police had bungled this case from the beginning.
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Heidi Blake
Yeah, that's right. So back in 2015, right at the very beginning of the webcam business, two of the women, the very first women after the first recruit who came over from Slovakia, the brothers recruited a couple of British women on Facebook to come and work for them. Two of those women went to the police and accused Andrew Tate of rape and strangulation. It then transpired that another woman the previous year had made very, very similar allegations against him. And so he was arrested in relation to those three women, but that's when he skipped the country and went to Romania. The police then just kind of let the case lie dormant for, like, four years. They didn't properly download Andrew Tate's phone, they didn't really follow up any lines of inquiry, they didn't properly interview the women, they didn't properly take witness statements. The whole thing was a total mess. And ultimately the Crown Prosecution Service decided four years later that no action was going to be taken. And that really, I think, emboldened Andrew Tate. That was a point at which, around 2019, was really a point at which he started to really build his online profile and brag and, like, develop this brand that he was the gangster pimp online. And, you know, I spoke to law enforcement sources, both in the UK and in Romania, who said to me, that was a real inflection point and that, you know, had the police got to grips with this then and taken action then, that we really wouldn't be in the position we're in now with Andrew Tate and his massive role in the manosphere and the hugely pervasive influence of the violent misogyny that he preaches on young men all around the world. But there was that case in the uk, and actually, interestingly, soon after I started asking questions about some of those failings in the investigation, the police in question announced that they were reopening that case. All of a sudden, 10 years later,
- [28:40]
Natalie Ropoved
just totally coincidentally, who can say?
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Heidi Blake
But the timing seemed striking. And also that there's now a Standards investigation into gross misconduct in the way the case was handled. So that is now happening. Meanwhile, Tate had gone to Romania, and there a Romanian investigation was launched in 2022 after a US citizen reported to friends and family members that she was being held, you know, near the compound in Romania, in one of these houses in American Village, and that she was being trafficked by the Tate brothers. The property was then raided by armed police. A number of women were taken into protective custody, and investigators in Romania ultimately charged Andrew and Tristan with trafficking, with forming an organised crime group to traffic women and various other offences. But then what happened was when the administration changed after Trump was elected, and, by the way, Andrew Tate was enormously instrumental in mobilizing young men in America to vote for Trump. And very soon after that, under pressure from the Trump administration, Romanian prosecutors released the Tate brothers from their travel ban, which they were being held under in respect of those charges. And so since then, they've been freely traveling the world. And when I met them, they said to me, the case is doomed. It's not going anywhere. And the whole thing seemed to have stalled. Nothing was moving in the Romanian case. Meanwhile, in the uk, the brothers had been separately charged in relation to totally different victims. Another 21 charges of rape and human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain. But the Romanian courts had ruled they couldn't go to the UK to face justice until the Romanian case had run its course and the Romanian case had stalled. So all the while, the Romanian case was open and ostensibly kind of lived, but not really going anywhere. The brothers were kind of protected. And in some of the text messages I obtained, they were talking openly with their advisers about being protected by Romania. Since the article was published, Romanian prosecutors seem to have started moving again. They've just added another 10 charges to that case. And the investigation seems to be expanding and has again become dynamic, so we'll have to see what happens. And they were talking pretty openly in the chats I obtained about how, you know, if it seems like this protection they feel they're enjoying in Romania starts to crumble, that they'll just op it to the US or Dubai and hire extradition lawyers and fight any attempt to return them to the uk. So I think their plan is certainly to avoid going to the UK to stand trial.
- [31:05]
Podcast Announcer
The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Hulu and hulu on Disney July 27th.
- [31:11]
Heidi Blake
There are three victims we know of.
- [31:12]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
The suspect is female, white, late twenties.
- [31:15]
Wayfair Advertiser
Female.
- [31:16]
Heidi Blake
Serial killers kill for power control.
- [31:18]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
I believe there is a deeper motivation here.
- [31:21]
Podcast Announcer
You have no idea who you're dealing with and you are going to end up dead.
- [31:25]
Narrator/Host
I've been waiting for you.
- [31:27]
Podcast Announcer
Watch the Hulu original series Furious on July 27. Streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply.
- [31:35]
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- [31:51]
Podcast Announcer
This is infamous from Campside Media.
- [31:54]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
And you know you went to a web group that was run by the woman that you mentioned earlier, who was 17 when she got involved with Andrew Tate, and she's not somebody who has necessarily spoken out publicly, he still cites that she is, you know, his fan. And how could he be such a horrible person if this really key woman that he was involved with is still supporting him? But you found that, indeed she was saying that she had had the tattoo removed from her skin. It had taken seven sessions, and she seemed to really be empathizing with other women who were talking about missing ex partners who had abused them and things like that. What happened there?
- [32:42]
Heidi Blake
Yeah, it was really poignant to see her interacting with other women in this group, which she's established after the Tate brothers webcam business was dismantled in the wake of this Romanian prosecution, she's finally free to live her life. She's retrained as a gemologist specializing in lab grown diamonds in Dubai and established this telegram support group for other women, a lot of which is focused on helping other women think through leaving the sex industry or abusive relationships and recovering from sexual assault and topics like that. She's very reticent to discuss her relationship with Andrew Tate directly, although she does on a few occasions. But she talks about how awful it was for her to be with somebody who was having sex with so many other women at the same time, because his modus operandi is that he's sleeping with everyone who's working for him. And she talks really movingly about recovering from abusive relationships and kind of coming to terms with the fact that not only has somebody inflicted terrible pain on you and made you feel utterly worthless, but that they did it knowingly. So I think it sounds like she has arrived at a place of some insight. But she, you know, absolutely refused to speak to me for the story and at least sort of publicly has not broken with Andrew Tate. So he does. He does still claim that she supports him. And, you know, yeah, she. She has, from the sort of earliest days of his webcam business, kind of released videos defending him. You know, when the charges were brought against him, she released a number of videos defending him and saying that the allegations were made up, although it later emerged in some of the. Some prison calls that I obtained some transcripts of, that Andrew Tate had actually been directing those videos via an associate of his and instructing these various women to make videos and telling them exactly what to say. So, I mean, it's kind of complicated with these women because you have these women saying, I'm not a victim, and these prosecutors have labeled me a victim, and it's not fair. And then behind the scenes, you also have the Tate brothers telling them to say that.
- [34:33]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
What do you think is going to happen here? You know, will they be put in prison or one of them put in prison? What do you think the likeliest outcome is and where.
- [34:43]
Heidi Blake
I think it's pretty hard to call it, I think that, you know, the Romanian case. What I'm hearing from sources is that that case is now moving apace again and that it's likely that a new indictment will be filed in relation to the trafficking, not just of the initial victims that were identified by prosecutors, but by several dozen more victims who've been named in, in court filings, things. I'm told that the case against them in the UK is very, very strong and prosecutors here are very confident. I think all the while the story is in the public eye and there's kind of scrutiny. They seem to be more motivated to move on it. And so I hope people keep talking about this. Really grateful for the chance to talk to you about it.
- [35:24]
Vanessa Grigoriadis
Thank you so much for being with us and telling us all about this story. Really just disturbing, nightmarish, you know, not even enough words to describe how affecting I thought it was. So everybody should go read, you know, the source material that we've been discussing. Heidi Blake's story, Andrew Tate's empire of abuse.
- [35:44]
Heidi Blake
Thank you so much for having me, guys.
- [35:52]
Narrator/Host
After we recorded our interview with Heidi, Andrew and Tristyn Tate were arrested in Miami. They are currently being held in a Florida jail and now face extradition to the uk. A lawyer for the Tates said they would fight that extradition. Quote, they've done nothing wrong. They shouldn't be extradited for crimes they didn't commit, end quote. The head of the Special Crime Division at the UK's Crown Prosecution Service said the new charges came about following receipt of a further file of evidence and that the total number of alleged victims in this case is now seven. We'll have to wait and see what happens with regards to the Tates extradition and the status of this very much ongoing case. But I can't help but think that the developments in this case might just have been influenced by Heidi's reporting. Her story really brought attention back on the Tates, highlighted the voices of their alleged victims and uncovered the ways UK police apparently messed up the original investigation. It's a testament to the power of good journalism. So we really encourage you to go read Heidi's work. We know this is not an easy topic, but we really do think it's an important one. So thanks for staying with us. We'll be back next week. In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram famouspod and leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. It really helps people find the ship.
- [37:30]
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- [37:54]
Podcast Announcer
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