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Social media influencer Andrew Tate has been arrested in Romania on suspicion of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized crime group, prosecutors have confirmed.
Prosecutors in the country said the 36-year-old British-American and his brother Tristan were arrested in Bucharest and will be detained for 24 hours along with two Romanian suspects.
“These four suspects … appear to have created an organized criminal group with the aim of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to produce pornographic content for a fee on dedicated websites,”
prosecutors said.
“They could have made a lot of money.”
The brothers, who have been under criminal investigation since April, declined to comment, but their lawyers confirmed they were in custody.
Tate, a former kickboxing athlete, has been banned from various social media platforms for his misogynistic views, hate speech and running Liar University – a pyramid scheme that claims to teach people how to get rich.
But he still has a presence on social media — on TikTok, for example, where he has been banned from having an account, but content posted under the hashtag Andrew Tate has been viewed billions of times.
He first rose to fame in 2016 when he was dropped from the reality show Big Brother after a video appeared to show him attacking a woman with a belt — a clip he claimed was edited.
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He advised rape victims to “take some responsibility” for being attacked and described women as “property” that belonged to men.
He also described how he would violently attack a woman who had accused him of cheating, saying he would “wield a machete, rumble in her face and choke her”.
As a result, there are concerns about his influence on young people, especially young men.
Tate denies holding misogynistic views and accuses his critics of “distorting the facts”, although he also calls himself the “King of Toxic Masculinity”.
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