In late 2014, a British woman saw a gun on influencer Andrew Tate’s sofa, she recently claimed in a lawsuit. She told the BBC that she didn’t mention seeing it, but she was “a bit freaked out by it.” When she slept with Tate, she said, the sex began as consensual, but then he strangled her until she lost consciousness and still continued.
Another of the four women who filed the suit claimed that, amid his daily threats while she worked for him, Tate waved a gun in her face, calling himself a “boss” and a “G.” “You’re going to do as I say or there’ll be hell to pay,” she claimed he said as he pointed the gun. On two other occasions, she said, Tate grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against a wall.
As Tate has become a global force in recent years, his online rhetoric has become a familiar language. At the same time, allegations of his sexual violence have proliferated. Other accusations in the recent suit, which seeks damages “arising from the assaults, batteries, and infliction of intentional harm,” include a claim that Tate told a woman, “I’m just debating whether to rape you or not,” before raping and strangling her. The case concerns incidents that occurred in the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2015.
Tate, a 38-year-old dual US-UK citizen, has denied the claims in a written response, calling them a “pack of lies” and “gross fabrications,” according to the BBC. (When reached for comment, his British attorney referred Vanity Fair to that reply.) Two of the four women worked for Tate’s webcam business, while the other two were in relationships with him. Three of the accusers reported Tate to the police, but criminal charges were not brought. In his response, Tate also said that too much time had elapsed for the women to take legal action against him.
For about the last two years, Tate and his brother, Tristan, were on and off house arrest in Romania, where they face charges of human trafficking and establishing a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. Tate has also been charged with rape, and the brothers deny all allegations against them. Florida recently opened a criminal investigation into the brothers, an effort Tate has described as “trying to find crimes on an innocent man.” That inquiry followed the brothers’ brief return to the US after their travel ban was lifted. In a recent California lawsuit, an ex-girlfriend of Tate’s accused him of physical and sexual abuse during a 10-month relationship that began last year, which he has denied.
In a statement to Vanity Fair, Tate’s American attorney, Joseph McBride, compared his client to Donald Trump and Jesus, writing, “Andrew has formidable enemies who despise him, much like Trump’s enemies despise Trump and Jesus’s enemies despised Jesus.”
“Andrew Tate is not without sin,” he added. “However, the idea that Andrew is a rapist or abuser of women is a fiction fabricated by his incel feminist enemies.”
A lawyer for Tate’s four UK accusers told the BBC that his clients had “been denied justice by the police and [the Crown Prosecution Service] while watching Andrew Tate’s influence grow.” One of the women said that watching the brothers travel in recent months was “horrible to see.”
“Maybe men will look at him,” she told the outlet, “and think, Oh, well if he can get away with that, then so can I, and it kind of makes it normalized.”
As Tate has reemerged in the early days of Trump’s second administration, he has made the case for his innocence—and relevance—in some of the same alternative media quarters that the president sought out during his campaign press tour. During a recent interview with Fort Lauderdale entrepreneur and podcaster Patrick Bet-David, Tate defended himself against criticisms lobbed by Dave Portnoy, Ben Shapiro, and Ron DeSantis. He also described the makeup of his audience, saying that he was used to hearing from people in Mongolia, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, and the Arab world. Of particular interest, he said, were “hundreds of letters from women in Tennessee or Kentucky or Alabama who are raising their sons without a father, and they say that I help them teach their boys how to be men.”
In this sort of interview setting, Tate is often understood as a canny political observer. He and Bet-David discussed Trump’s intermittent proposal to instate the death penalty for drug dealers as a means of deterrence.
“It’s a solution,” Tate said. “Often what you’ll do, and I actually think Trump is smart enough to understand this—he says things that gets people very emotionally upset. But what did we say earlier about the threat of violence? You won’t need the death penalty if you have the threat of the death penalty.”
