Victims of accused human trafficker Andrew Tate are being harassed and intimidated in an effort to silence them, their lawyers said on Thursday, while a spokesman for the influencer, Reuters reports.
Andrew TatePhoto: Alexandru Dobre / AP / Profimedia
Tate was sent to court in June along with his brother Tristan and two Romanian women suspected of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized criminal group for the sexual exploitation of women, charges which the four have denied.
According to Romanian law, the case is now at the preliminary chamber of the Bucharest Court, where a judge has until November to check the files to ensure legality. The process will not start until this procedure is completed.
The American and British legal representatives of the alleged victims held a press conference in Bucharest on Thursday.
“These women are very scared, they’re terrified, they’ve been threatened, they’ve had people come to their workplace,” Jillian Roth of the law firm Laffey, Bucci & Kent told reporters.
Roth, along with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), is defending the two women who are key prosecution witnesses in a civil suit filed by Tate for defamation in the United States.
“This lawsuit was filed with the sole intention of intimidating, harassing and retaliating against the women who came forward to speak out against their abuse,” Roth said.
Tate’s head of communications, Mateea Petrescu, denied the allegations.
“Andrew Tate is legally entitled to use and benefit from the legal system in the United States, where he is a citizen, and in the United Kingdom, where he is a citizen, or anywhere else in the world,” she said.
In Britain, four women want to file a civil lawsuit against Tate, claiming he raped them between 2013 and 2016. British authorities did not press charges against Tate at the time.
Matthew Jury, one of their lawyers, said they had been subjected to a campaign of threats, intimidation and harassment.
The two British millionaire brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, detained on December 29 by DIICOT prosecutors on charges of forming an organized criminal group, human trafficking and rape, were remanded in custody for 30 days on December 30, pending an investigation into the abuse on seven women, who prosecutors say were lured by false claims about relationships. Along with them, two young women were arrested – a former police officer and Andrew Tate’s girlfriend – accused of supporting the two in their criminal activity.
How British millionaires Andrew and Tristan Tate recruited their victims / Details from the investigation – DOCUMENT
They were then placed under house arrest in April and have been under judicial control since August.
On September 28, the brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate also escaped the ban on leaving the Capital and Ilfov county, being free to move on Romanian territory.
“Owned by Tate”
The Tate brothers, with dual citizenship, British and American, and two young accomplices (Alexandra-Luana Radu and Georgiana Manuela Naghel) were sent to court by DIICOT on June 20, being accused of constituting an organized criminal group, for the purpose of extortion, accommodation and exploitation, by forcing some women to create materials with pornographic content, intended for distribution for a fee on profile sites. From these activities, he would have obtained important sums of money.
They are accused of constituting an organized criminal group, human trafficking in a continuous form, rape in a continuous form (two material acts), illegal access to the computer system, altering the integrity of computer data, hitting or other violence and inciting this crime.
According to DIICOT, the crime of human trafficking would have been committed both on the territory of Romania, but also in the United States of America and Great Britain.
The investigators say that the Tate brothers recruited young women under the pretext of starting a love relationship, after which they took them to a house in Ilfov county, where they were forced to produce video clips, which were posted on websites for adults. The two brothers misled young women that they wanted a marriage/cohabitation relationship and that they had real feelings of love for them (“loverboy” method).
The women were allegedly later transported and housed in a building in Ilfov county, where, through acts of physical violence and mental coercion (intimidation, constant surveillance, control and invoking alleged debts), they were sexually exploited by the group members by forcing to pornographic manifestations with a view to the production and dissemination, through social media platforms, of material having such a character and by submitting to the execution of a work, in a forced manner, in order to obtain important financial benefits consisting in the sums of money obtained as a result of accessing materials by users.
The victims told the investigators that a video chat studio was set up in the villa in Ilfov County, and they were met by armed guards upon arrival. At the same time, they would have been forced to get tattoos with the message “owned by Tate”.
The investigators identified seven victims in this case, but only three became civil parties in the case.
Regarding the crime of rape, the investigators say that, in March 2022, one of the girls was forced by one of the Tate brothers, through the exercise of physical violence and psychological pressure, to repeatedly have sexual relations with him.
Also, regarding the crimes of instigating hitting or other violence, respectively hitting or other violence, the investigators say that, in October 2021, in order to “punish” one of the girls who refused to continue making pornographic materials and requested to be allowed to leave the building located in Ilfov county, at the instigation of one of the Tate brothers, one of the accomplices would have exercised acts of violence on the injured person.
During the investigation, DIICOT prosecutors seized several assets owned by the Tate brothers in Romania: 15 plots of land and buildings located within the counties of Ilfov, Prahova and Braşov; 15 luxury cars; 14 luxury watches; 2 ingots and a medal, shares in four companies; sums of money and cryptocurrencies.
“I’m going to make these f***** slaves.” Disturbing details of the indictment against the Tate brothers
The indictment drawn up by prosecutors against brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate contains explicit and in many cases disturbing details of how the two and their accomplice in Romania exploited the women captured by their sex trafficking network, wrote the BBC, which obtained a copy of the document.
The indictment contains hundreds of pages of testimony and wiretaps, which contain accusations of sexual violence that led to the injury of some of the women held in the Tate brothers’ compound near Bucharest.
The women claim that the income they made from their video chat activities was controlled by the network, as were their passwords and accounts on the OnlyFans platform.
Prosecutors say that the money made on this platform was managed by Georgiana Naghel, one of the brothers’ two Romanian accomplices.
The network they set up took 50% of the women’s money and sometimes even more, with witnesses reporting that they were forced to produce content according to a strict schedule and under verbal and physical threats.
Some of the threats attributed to Georgiana Naghel refer to “breaking teeth” and “going to the morgue.” Naghel is accused by prosecutors of physically assaulting one of the victims, something she denies.
The indictment also contains intercepts of audio messages from 2020 in which Tristan Tate appears to say that he does not want the victims to have access to their OnlyFans or PornHub accounts: “I don’t want them to have the passwords, I don’t want them to have nothing (…) I don’t want to tell them that they have OnlyFans, I want the money to be used by me and you, screw them”.
In another message he says that “mainly I’m going to make these f***** slaves (…) I’m going to make them work more and more hours and hours. I work these f***** like slaves. At least 10 or 12 hours a day”.
The BBC also notes that Romanian prosecutors will try to show how the Tate brothers and their accomplices in Romania created a system that practically sequestered the women with severe restrictions on their actions.
Among the practices they used were forbidding women who had recently arrived at the compound to leave without permission, as well as requiring them to be accompanied by one of the Tate brothers’ trusted associates when they were given permission to go outside.
Romanian prosecutors state that after being recruited by the network, the victims were placed under the supervision of the brothers’ two accomplices, Georgiana Naghel and Luana Radu.
In one of the text messages included in the indictment, a victim asks Andrew Tate that he is the one who “runs the business with the girls/OnlyFans and TikTok.”
“Tristan and G do. But I lead them,” he replied.
