What to Know About the Tate Brothers’ Charges and the Reactions to Their Return to America

The return of the Tates to the U.S. is fracturing the right.

Self-described “misogynist” influencer Andrew and his brother Tristan touched down in Florida on Feb. 27 after a two-year travel ban due to pending human trafficking and other charges against them in Romania. The brothers were released after Romanian prosecutors approved a request to lift the restrictions, according to Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT. Although the agency did not specify who made the request, reporting from the Financial Times suggests the Trump Administration placed pressure on Romanian authorities to return the Tate brothers’ U.S. passports and allow them to travel.

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The news of their arrival incited expected blowback from Democrats. Delaware Senator Chris Coons posted on X, “Why is the Trump administration importing sex traffickers?” But a number of Republican politicians as well as right-wing commentators also joined the chorus of criticism.

“What’s the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers?” asked Barstool Sports owner Dave Portnoy, who previously said he voted for Trump last November, in a post on X on Thursday.

“America does not need more self-proclaimed pimps and terror supporters with outstanding criminal allegations of sex trafficking and a history of pornographic distribution,” conservative media pundit Ben Shapiro posted on X. “Andrew Tate is the enemy of any traditional American conservatism,” posted Jeremy Boreing, Shapiro’s co-founder of right-wing outlet the Daily Wire.

GOP Senator Josh Hawley told a HuffPost reporter, “I don’t think conservatives should be glorifying this guy at all … I certainly don’t think that we should be using any influence in our government to try to get him out of what seemed to be extremely serious charges in Romania.”

“This really feels like a moral watershed,” posted researcher and right-wing commentator Richard Hanania. “Everything else MAGA does has some kind of twisted moral logic that maybe you can see if you squint really hard. This time it’s just ‘we love pimping.’”

Hanania added: “They’re going to Florida, I wonder if DeSantis will greet them on the tarmac.”

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis decidedly did not.

“Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct in the air,” DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday. “I don’t know how it came to this. We were not involved, we were not notified. I found out through the media that this was something that was happening.” He added that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is currently looking at “what state hooks and jurisdiction” there are to “deal with this.”

Ultheimer posted on X that he had directed his office “to work with our state law enforcement partners to conduct a preliminary inquiry” and that “Florida has zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women. If any of these alleged crimes trigger Florida jurisdiction, we will hold them accountable.”

But DeSantis and the other critics aren’t indicative of the entire right’s perspective on the matter. Others, particularly vocal Trump supporters, have appeared to celebrate the Tate brothers’ return. 

Conservative commentator Candace Owens suggested the Tates were political martyrs, posting on X that “the restrictions that were placed on the Tate brothers in Romania were always an act of intergovernmental corruption. Do not follow or listen to people who support government corruption because they do not like a person’s character, beliefs, or past actions.”

Several other voices on the right also chimed in. “The Tate brothers are US citizens,” posted right-wing influencer Laura Loomer. “Good thing Ron isn’t President.” 

Valentina Gomez, who unsuccessfully ran in 2024 to be secretary of state of Missouri and is now running for Congress in Texas, posted that DeSantis “feels emasculated” by the Tates.

And Tampa Bay Young Republicans gave the Tates the welcome DeSantis wouldn’t: “As free speech absolutists, the Tate’s haven’t been formally convicted of any crimes and are welcome to speak to our group. We’re old enough to remember when a ‘Convicted Felon’ won the Presidency,” the group posted on X.

Debate ensued online over whether reactions to Tate’s return to America should be a “moral litmus test” for conservatives.

Auron MacIntyre, a host and columnist for right-wing outlet the Blaze, called making it a litmus test a “mistake,” posting in a thread on X: “Tate only exists because American conservatives have failed so thoroughly at speaking to young men and portraying masculinity in a positive light … If you find that your movement is unable to provide a strong and compelling vision of masculinity because it is too afraid of offending the wrong people then you shouldn’t be surprised when a guy like Tate comes around to fill that void.”

Others strongly disagreed. “If you are willing to defend Andrew Tate, you are every bit as infected by the ‘woke mind virus’ as the craziest leftist. You have become what you hate. You are willing to defend the indefensible,” responded European Conservative contributing editor Jonathon Van Maren. “Championing a vile man because it somehow ‘owns the libs’ is, in fact, the equivalent of repeatedly kicking yourself where it hurts but being totally convinced that you’re striking a blow against the ‘other side.’”

“Social shame serves a purpose,” posted Billy Binion, a reporter for libertarian magazine Reason, “—it communicates to people that certain behavior is unacceptable. This is one of those times. No need to coddle Andrew Tate.”

Here’s what to know about the Tate brothers and what makes them so controversial.

Who are Andrew and Tristan Tate?

Andrew Tate, 38, rose to fame in 2016 when he appeared on British reality show Big Brother. He became the subject of controversy when several of his homophobic and racist tweets surfaced, which led to him being removed from the show. (Producers said it was due to events outside the house and not because of either the tweets or a video that emerged of Tate striking a woman with a belt, which both he and the woman said was consensual; later reporting by Vice found that Tate was removed because producers learned of a police investigation into Tate for an alleged rape in 2015.)

Tate went on to build a social media following around coaching young men and boys how to get rich and get girls—including through paid online courses in his online academy called “Hustlers University.” His social media is plastered with videos of private jets and sportscars. He claimed to have 33 sportscars—a number he flaunted during a Twitter spat with environmental activist Greta Thunberg just before his arrest in December 2022.

“Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” Tate wrote to the then-19-year-old on the platform formerly known as Twitter, from which he was banned in 2017 for saying women should bear responsibility for being sexually assaulted until Elon Musk reinstated his account in 2022. (Thunberg responded with what Guardian columnist Rebecca Solnit called “one of the greatest tweets in history,” posting: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”)

Tate, a former professional kickboxer, has described himself as “absolutely a misogynist.” U.K. authorities have pointed to Tate as one of the key influencers spreading misogyny and radicalizing young boys online. Tate has said that “if a woman is going out with a man, she belongs to that man,” and he’s admitted to hitting a woman and breaking her jaw during a bar fight. He once wrote “I love raping you,” in a text to a woman, according to the BBC. 

Tate told NBC News in 2022 that he is playing an “online character.” He has become the face of the “manosphere,” which has been credited with fuelling support for Trump among young men. An investigation by Wired in 2024 found that the Trump campaign’s rhetoric about women “matches perfectly” with that of Tate.

Tristan, 36, is Andrew’s business partner and also a former kickboxer. After the November 2024 election, Tristan bragged on X that “millions of young men in Europe and the USA have a healthy rightwing approach to politics that they would NOT have if Andrew Tate had never appeared on their phone screens.”

What are the charges against the Tate brothers?

The Tate brothers were arrested in Bucharest, Romania, in late 2022 on allegations of human trafficking and rape. They were charged alongside two associates in June 2023, and were ordered to remain in Romania in December 2023 after the brothers requested to visit their mother in the hospital in the U.K.

The brothers are accused of rape, trafficking minors, and money laundering—allegations that they deny. One woman, the only American victim in the sex trafficking case, said Tristan Tate lured her from Florida to Romania, where she was kept in a house with several other women and forced to create content on OnlyFans without pay. She brought a civil countersuit against the brothers earlier this month after they sued her for defamation in 2023. 

In May 2024, four of the women who said they were sexually assaulted by the brothers brought a U.K. civil case against them after the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute And they face another civil case in the U.K. brought by Devon and Cornwall Police in July 2024 accusing them of evading tax on £21m of revenue from their online businesses.

The Tates’ return to the U.S. “sends a message that if you have an opinion or political ideology that the people in power like, then it doesn’t matter if you sexually abuse and exploit women and children,” Dani Pinter, an attorney with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation representing the American woman, told HuffPost.

“It’s extremely important that we stop allowing media spin, ramp-up smears, lies, carefully constructed narratives from George Soros-funded operations trying to destroy the reputations of good people who have no intention to do anything other than to follow the law,” Andrew Tate said as he arrived at Fort Lauderdale airport.

The Tates are still required to return to Romania to appear for any court dates. Matthew Jury, attorney representing the four British women, told the BBC, “I don’t think there’s any chance the Tates would return to Romania willingly.” The women said news of the Tates’ release left them “re-traumatized.”

“Any suggestion that the Tates will now face justice in Romania is fanciful,” Jury added in a statement on X.

What have Trump and his associates said about the Tate brothers?

When asked about the Tates’ arrival on Thursday, Trump said “I know nothing about that.”

But people in Trump’s circle have appeared supportive of the brothers in the past, and in the weeks before the Tates’ return, U.S. and Romanian officials reportedly had several conversations about them.

According to the Financial Times, the Trump Administration first brought up the brothers’ case in a phone call with the Romanian government in early February. Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell reportedly brought it up again with Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at a security conference in Munich, although a spokesperson for Hurezeanu reportedly responded: “Romanian courts are independent and operate based on the law, there is due process.”

Grenell told the FT, “I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

In 2023, Donald Trump Jr. called the detention of the Tate brothers in Romania “absolute insanity,” and Musk replied in seeming support to a post by Andrew Tate on X announcing his intention to run for U.K. Prime Minister. A recent Reuters report found that Gavin Kliger, one of the young staffers of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, reposted content from Andrew Tate on X between October 2024 and January 2025.

Paul Ingrassia, who formerly represented the Tate brothers in a Florida defamation suit filed against several of their alleged victims, is now the White House liaison to the U.S. Justice Department. He has described Tate as the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence” offering “a dying West some hope for renewal.”

Joseph McBride, another attorney representing the Tates in the defamation case, said in a statement on Thursday that the brothers feel “secure in America for several reasons, the primary one being that Donald Trump is the president.”

Earlier this month, Andrew Tate posted on X: “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back.”

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