Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan began to build a public image and an online presence with the earnings from their lucrative pornography business.
This is Part II of our series on the internet influencer Andrew Tate. Part I, "Who is Andrew Tate?", can be read here.
(LifeSiteNews) -- Dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct in the United Kingdom, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan moved to Romania around late 2015 or early 2016. In addition to Romania’s perceived legal laxness, the Tates hoped to expand their webcam business, and purchased several properties almost immediately. As the BBC reported in 2017, Romania’s pornographic webcam business was booming, and Tate has noted in interviews that the country was strategically advantageous for his money-making plans due to looser regulations and large pool of English-speakers.
The Tates' webcam porn business in Luton had been lucrative and relatively small-scale, but it provided the working plan for a vastly scaled-up operation in Romania. The brothers set up multiple “studios” in houses or apartments, outfitted them with cameras, lighting, and internet infrastructure, and began to recruit girls. How they recruited their camgirls is at the center of the current charges against them.
According to the charges - which I will detail later - as well as hours of video footage in which the brothers detail their tactics, the Tates functioned as pimps and utilized the “lover-boy method” to entice and entrap young women into doing pornography. Tate has said point blank that “pimpin’ hoes” is “how I got rich,” explained how he used the “lover-boy method,” and detailed precisely how his recruitment methods worked. Despite the fact that Tate now poses as a savior for young men, he also regularly mocked his customers as losers that he bilked for everything they were worth, and laughingly stated that he didn’t regret it: “I had these guys selling their houses, life savings, loans, all of it to me - give me it all.”
As I have noted before, Andrew Tate is a product of the Sexual Revolution - a man who exploits moral chaos to destroy both young women and young men, and he did so, and is doing so, unapologetically.
Regardless of whether the Tate brothers are convicted on the charges they currently face, their own statements paint a clear and ugly picture of their tactics. In 2023, I worked with a private investigator to parse through leaked files from Andrew Tate’s “War Room,” in which he coaxed men on how to recruit girls for webcam work and earn their own “PHD” - “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree.” In the chats, Tate described to the members of the War Room how he was reeling in a young Romanian woman named Jasmina Valentino:
A young woman from rural Romania named Jasmina Valentina is Tate’s latest target. She believes that Tate wants a genuine relationship with her. “Rather lose them or make them slaves in my absence,” he writes. “I’ve explained it here with the last screenshots. Told her she has to move to Bucharest (7 hours drive away from her home town) and live with me.” He posts screenshots of their recent WhatsApp conversation so the men can learn from his conversational tactics. At first, Jasmina refuses to move, saying she would be lonely. Tate says he has a place for her - not incidentally, with some “girls who work for Georgiana [Naghel],” allegedly Tate’s partner in the webcam business. (Naghel was later arrested along with the Tates.)The key, Tate says, is to pick fights with the girls to keep them off-balance. He shares a series of screenshots to illustrate. “You better understand you’re here to stay and do as you’re told,” he tells Jasmina in one message. “If you’re not taking us seriously say so now.” When she replies by asking what she has done wrong, Tate escalates: “Talk to me correctly when I ask something this is your final warning.” He then accuses her of working for a sex club in her hometown, and she panics. She is vulnerable, Tate tells his followers, because she has “lost her support networks at home.”
Jasmina denies Tate’s accusation, which he tells the men he had “literally totally made…up from the sky.” He explains that he did so because “the real goal is for her to agree to never go anywhere without me. Not even her home town. I need her working. Not visiting friends back in her home town. So putting nails in that coffin saying my people there are talking bad about her.” He poses an ultimatum to Jasmina: “You are never going back to Timisoara even to visit. Without me. Understand?” She caves, confused. “Yes. I understand.” Tate ups the ante. “You don’t need to leave the house in Bucharest without either me or Georgiana. We are together. Always. We are either a couple or were [sic] not. Do you understand me?”
READ: Who is Andrew Tate? In his own words, he is essentially a vulture exploiting a broken society
Within ten days, Tate detailed how he had successfully isolated Jasmina Valentina, broken her down, and persuaded her that OnlyFans was the way to ensure that they would be together forever, traveling the world in a romantic partnership.
The men of the War Room celebrated his victory, poring over the screenshots of their conversation. Tate even boasted that he had forced Jasmina to compromise on her Christian values. “She never believed in god,” he wrote. “Women never believe in anything. Women are programmed. Just have to replace the programming. Remember that. Even when she’s doing what you want her too [sic]. There’s outside forces trying to rewrite that code.” Incidentally, Andrew Tate now presents himself as a “man of God.”
The case study of Jasmina Valentina is a succinct example of the Tate brothers’ modus operandi, as described by Andrew himself. They targeted young women, often reaching out to them via social media or by starting a personal relationship. Then they sought to both isolate them from their communities while promising them high earnings. At the same time, Andrew appeared on many podcasts, detailing his business, referring to himself as a pimp (even in a poem he wrote about himself) who “beats his hos.” Tate boasted online that a single webcam recruit could net him up to $30,000 per month.
Indeed, despite his current denials, there are hundreds of videos of Tate online describing this MO - publicly. Here is one of many examples (this is one of the few not filled with profanity and crude, sexually explicit descriptions):
At the peak of their webcam operation - definitive details are difficult to confirm due to Andrew Tate’s record of both over-the-top bragging as well as his subsequent denials as his legal problems piled up - the brothers were “managing” up to 75 young women in several locations, with both brothers recruiting, Andrew leading the operation, and Tristan taking the lead on logistics. Andrew has boasted about keeping 50 percent or more of all earnings, while Tristan put the number at 40 percent. The Tates boasted about making millions; set up a bachelor compound in Bucharest; and acquired a fleet of fancy cars. The exact amount they earned in the porn business is, again, speculative, but reports indicate anywhere from $20-50 million.
With the earnings from their porn business, the Tates began to build a public image and an online presence. Andrew had earned modest fame from his kickboxing career and short-lived UK TV appearance, but flaunting their private jet, luxury car lifestyle gained the Tates followers. The Tates soon turned to their second money-making venture: using their online image to attract young men and then monetizing their followers. There’s more than one way to grift young men, and the Tates specialized in almost all of them.
In 2021, Tate began offering a course called “Hustlers University,” where for $49.99 per month he taught “the art of the grindset,” a combination of advice on setting up e-commerce businesses, stock market and cryptocurrency advice, and, of course, how to get women. At one point, Tate claimed that Hustler’s University had more than 168,000 paying customers, and soon launched spinoffs such as “The Real World” and “The War Room,” where membership costs close to $8,000.
Tate used his paying customers to create his online fame; as the Guardian reported, he enlisted them to “flood social media with videos of him, choosing the most controversial clips in order to achieve maximum views and engagement.” It all worked precisely as Tate had planned. In 2022, he was the most googled man on earth. His online fame skyrocketed. He appeared on the brink of breaking out of the digital manosphere underworld into the mainstream, and that was clearly his intention. It is a tribute to his arrogance that Tate seemed to believe that his long, publicly documented record would not surface eventually.
Then the walls closed in and the longstanding allegations of sexual misconduct - and much more - finally caught up with him. The Romanian authorities raided the Tate compound in Bucharest twice in 2022, once in April, and again in December. The Tates were arrested and charged with human trafficking and a laundry list of other crimes.
Their response was vehement: This was an attack by “the matrix” on two innocent men, and their views were being insidiously portrayed and their good character wrongly maligned. The Tates fought back - and launched a truly massive PR campaign that would divide the right-wing world on two continents.
Coming soon: Part III of this series, titled "What does Andrew Tate believe?"
