By evening, these incel-fluffing rapey freaks were likely to be ensconced in a Miami luxury highrise, sipping cocktails and live streaming themselves watching the sun set over the Everglades.

Tate and his brother were arrested near Bucharest in 2022 and charged with with rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. They have denied the allegations.

Tate’s grift relies on the tried and true “shock jock” calculus that provoking male insecurity about women is a sure fire way to get famous and maybe even rich. Major male podcasters (like American Dave Portnoy, a fellow “survivor” of sexual assault accusations) and television personalities Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson have platformed him.

Online, his brand of rank misogyny and get-rich-quick male empowerment (for a time, he sold a pyramid scheme called Hustlers University) made him rich – Tate reportedly has 15 luxury cars in Romania. It also attracted a legion of teenage and young men around the world. His influence among middle school boys is such that academic papers have been published and online seminars presented to help educators worldwide deal with the Tate contagion of implied and actual violence against schoolgirls.

Tate’s resume includes not just domestic violence and rape propaganda but his own personal assaults on women: He was booted off the 2016 cast of the reality show Big Brother after a British tabloid published a video of him beating a woman with a belt. He claimed it was consensual. He also bragged that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight: He said he “ended up in court” after he was charged with causing “bodily harm,” but “got away with it in the end.” He has been accused of violence against women repeatedly, including a standing case against him brought by four women in the UK, for which authorities were trying to extradite him from Romania.

At some point, he also had a career as an online pimp. He has stated that men should choose girlfriends under age 20 because they are less likely to have had sex and can more easily be “imprinted.”

In one interview, Morgan asked him whether he felt marketing naked girls on the internet was unethical. Tate replied that he kind of does now -- having converted to Islam -- but that at the time, he came to realize how “my girls” prevented suicides among unhappily married men.

His social media empire relies heavily on a global following of teen boys and incels that lap up his public misogyny. In 2017, as the #MeToo movement was in full swing, he tweeted that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted and, in general, blamed women for male violence. According to NBC, in 2022, Twitter “permanently banned his account.

But banning a rape celebrator from social media is so 2017!

Musk promptly let him back on, and as of today, his @Cobratate account has 10.7 million followers. On February 23, he posted a tweet with a video sprinkled with images of Trump doing his YMCA dance and Barron Trump gazing off into oblivion, as well as himself stalking hotel hallways, working out shirtless, and spewing his trademark rant about male empowerment including “You have to make a decision if you’re a winner or a loser, because if you’re a loser, you’re gonna hate the next four years!”

Today, the four British women who have accused him of rape and are still waiting for justice released a statement: “We are in disbelief and feel re-traumatised by the news that the Romanian authorities have given into pressure from the Trump administration to allow Andrew Tate to travel around Europe and to the US.” Their lawyers urged the UK government to intervene, saying it would be “a complete abdication of its responsibility to the victims if it stands by and lets this continue.”

One of their lawyers, Matthew Jury, called the release of the Tates “equal parts disgusting and dismaying” and said: “The UK authorities must take immediate steps to secure their extradition to the UK to face charges for the offences of human trafficking and rape they are alleged to have committed in this jurisdiction.”

Today, this far-right hero is being welcomed back to befoul our soil. He walks among us thanks to our MAGA friends, who installed the rapey-criminal Trump administration and whose predator’s ball would not be complete without a Tate or two.

Surely a coincidence, but the arrival of the Tate bros comes a day or two after Trump announced a Gold Card plan to sell American citizenships for $5 million each. And there is zero doubt who wants them here in this country.

According to the Financial Timesa few weeks ago, Richard “Ric” Grenell, now Trump’s “Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions of the United States,” personally leaned on the Romanian government at the Munich Security Conference to let the Tates out. The Romanian government at the time denied the pressure. But apparently, at some point before dawn on Thursday, they felt a little differently.

Grenell has already performed exactly this kind of official mission to spring another rockhard testosterone-poisoned accused foreign criminal. In 2019, as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, according to this great scoop by my friends over at Spytalk published in 2020, Grenell managed to get a criminal kickboxer from Europe to the US.

The US had denied a visa three times to German-Moroccan UFC fighter Abu Azaittar whose criminal past includes a conviction for beating a businessman and dousing him with gasoline and stealing his car, an accusation of punching and breaking a girlfriend’s eardrum, and other escapades. Azaitar and his brother were gang members who had earned the street nickname “the brutal twins.”

Then Grenell got involved. Shortly before he washed up in America at Mike Tyson’s Nevada ranch, Azaitar posted an Instagram picture of himself in a tight red t-shirt with Grenell in a dark shirt and black parka, looking chummy under an arched doorway. “Amazing time with mr ambassador …. Thank you for opening to [sic] door for me.”

I’m in New York City today, thinking of strolling down to the Battery to see if the “Give us your poor” bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty has been pried off and replaced with her new motto in this MAGA era: “Give Us Your Rapists and Millionaires.”

Nina Burleigh is a 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