Tristan Tate, left, and Andrew Tate
During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow.
The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims, and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids.
To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide.
One of the Trump administration’s first acts was helping the brothers escape rape and trafficking charges in Romania by flying them to Miami. Ric Grenell, a “diplomat” with the extra special title of Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States, pressured Romanian officials to lay off the Tates, who had been released from prison but ordered to remain in the country. A month after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, they were out and delivered to Miami by private jet. No announcement, no explanation – unless you count this deleted Roger Stone tweet crediting Grenell:
Just another pair of freaks for the Predators Ball assembling in Washington.
A year and a half after getting his mojo back, Andrew was interviewed at the Milken Conference by Melania’s former “agent” and Trump Special Envoy for Global Partnerships Paolo Zampolli – who had just distinguished himself by having ICE deport the mother of his child. The Tates’ Trump-granted impunity and connections opened doors for them in Dubai, Russia and Kazakhstan.
Meanwhile, the brothers never stopped upselling their PHD (Pimping Hos Degree) to millions of men and boys. Their followers are a new class of young men who insult their female teachers and classmates, creating such a negative impact at schools that educators have held conferences about it.
The unofficial official administration position on this pair of stranglers came from occasional Laura Loomer walker, tiny incel Paul Ingrassia, who has called Andrew Tate the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence” for his “sheer physical prowess,” “sharp as a tack” and full of “willpower and spirit.” Ingrassia has since been demoted from his personnel office perch near the White House inner circle to the GSA – not due to his support of the Tates, but because his Nazi-adjacent views came to light.
It turns out Ingrassia was not the Tates’ real White House connection. Don Jr. has called their prison time in Romania “absolute insanity.”
But according to reports in Forbes and the New York Times, the real Tate link is the Boo Radley of the Trump family: Barron Trump. During the 2024 campaign, Barron reportedly became such a fan of the Tates that he turned his father onto the notion that they could help him with young men.
Barron has largely escaped scrutiny. First, because he arrived on the national scene as a preteen. And second, just by virtue of the parental combination of an icy mother and a depraved father. Now a young adult, this towering spectral figure, publicly silent, still gets a pass, despite reportedly being tied not only to the Tates but also to the family crypto business and rumors that he cashes in on prediction markets via insider knowledge of his father’s antics.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) has formally asked the House Oversight Committee to investigate the Tates’ access to the administration, including subpoenaing Barron Trump to determine whether he used his position to interfere in any of the brothers’ legal proceedings.
Her request is completely reasonable: investigating why and how the Trump administration aided two men credibly accused by at least eight women of strangling them – some to the point of unconsciousness – is at least as urgent as the Epstein investigation.
Naturally, her office has been deluged with hate mail for daring to suggest Barron answer for himself.
Beyond exposing the Trump incels and misogynists who welcomed the stranglers back onto American soil, the Rumble platform should be investigated for giving the brothers a $6 million contract (that Andrew Tate claims was actually $9 million) and platform from which to spew their violent misogyny.
In a functioning civil society, women and girls would have some avenue to sue the Tates, along with the companies that have disseminated their messaging. This isn’t just hate speech. It has quantifiable effects. Researchers are finding that the increasingly common teen habit of strangling women during sex has become so widespread that young women are suffering brain damage. That research briefly made headlines and disappeared while Andrew Tate continued proselytizing to millions of boys in junior high (and maybe, younger, who knows) that nearly murdering a woman can be sexually gratifying.
Tate stans blame women instead. John Mac Ghlionn wrote in the Hill last year:
Schools, particularly in Western countries, have become increasingly hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity. Boys are expected to behave like girls — to sit still, be passive and suppress their natural instincts ... A toxic society, not toxic masculinity, made Andrew Tate famous.
This combination of whining – hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity – and sweeping framing – Western countries – rather than just, say, Oberlin, is standard rhetorical fare among the MAGA literati.
Cheering on men who publicly celebrate – and are credibly accused by multiple women of – choking women to unconsciousness are laundered into soldiers in Project 2025’s greater campaign against feminism.
That narrative began to crack on July 19, when the Brits decided to not only reopen their investigation but to add dozens of new charges. They may have been shamed into action after journalist Heidi Blake published her exhaustively reported New Yorker article in early June, documenting harrowing stories from women in England, Romania, and elsewhere. (If Blake doesn’t win a Pulitzer, the oversight will rank up there with the egregious long delay in Julie K. Brown’s recognition for her 2018 Epstein series in the Miami Herald.)
After the arrests, there was a burp of MAGA support online. But as the deeply distracted, disaster-ravaged White House hasn’t signaled it will get involved, the usual suspects have not been stepping up. That includes women like Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who once told Andrew Tate on his podcast, “I’ve got your back.”
The Tates’ own lawyer (a meathead named Joe McBride who posts pictures of himself packed into suits like warm, rancid sausage in a casing) warns that comparing his client to Epstein will get him murdered in jail.
Desperate to get some traction with Big Daddy, McBride is using Twitter to try to gin up conspiracy theories, curry favor with Trump, play the commie card, and threaten Rep. Ansari – sometimes all in a single post:
If Andrew Tate were free, he would be dismantling this communist psychopath in real time and raising an army to unseat her for going after Barron Trump.
The Tate Bros are one of the most powerful weapons the conservative movement has.Their absence is the point.
The thing is, Tate is no Epstein. And Barron Trump, Ric Grenell, Paul Ingrassia, and Joe McBride are definitely not an assemblage of white shoe lawyers waiting to save his sorry ass.
Soon, one hopes, Andrew Tate will be pulling kitchen duty in prison, where inmates can line up and bark one of his favorite misogynistic slogans – the same one his legion of preteen fanboys have been scrawling on papers they turn in to their female teachers: “Make me a sandwich.”
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
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- Lawyers for Tate brothers, accused of rape and sex trafficking, to meet with prosecutors over UK extradition hearing dates | PBS News ›
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- Tate brothers arrest: New documents detail rape charges in extradition case. Here’s what we know | CNN ›
