For more than a decade, women have gone to the police seeking justice for alleged crimes committed by Andrew Tate. For more than a decade, the criminal justice system failed them.

As Andrew Tate’s fame rose, much of the media failed alongside it. Instead of exposing him and scrutinizing the evidence against him, many chose to amplify him — using him to generate outrage, attention, and profit.

Andrew Tate spent years telling the world exactly who he was. They refused to listen. They refused to investigate the evidence staring them in the face. In some cases, they profited from amplifying him. Take him at his word:

I exploit a broken society. Broken society suits me to the ground. I use it to my advantage. It’s how I make money with webcam girls. It’s how I have multiple girlfriends. I get away with a bunch of sh*t I shouldn’t get away with.

After Tucker Carlson’s high-profile departure from Fox News, he launched his new independent venture, the Tucker Carlson Network. For his first major interview, he chose Andrew Tate.

Behind-the-scenes footage from their July 2023 meeting showed Carlson arriving at the Tate brothers’ compound in Romania. He greeted Andrew Tate, embraced him warmly, spluttering, “this is like”, and, lost for words, let out his trademark chuckle — completely starstruck. Tate, feigning humility, replied, “You’re the famous one, bro.”

Without the context, you’d have no idea that, less than three weeks earlier, Tate had been indicted on charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized criminal group.

Carlson asked Tate, “You’re not accused of pandering, pimping, or forcing women to have sex with anybody?”

Tate replied, “No.”

He was. Carlson offered no correction. No pushback.

Tate told Carlson that the basis of the human trafficking charges was simple:

Their justification for this is that girls do TikTok. Some girls I know who they found who say they’re not victims, have TikTok accounts.

The indictment tells a very different story.

Five women gave statements against the Tate brothers in the first Romanian case, four of whom are listed as injured parties. Prosecutors allege the women were “sexually exploited” and “forced to produce pornographic content,” including webcam work and OnlyFans.

Carlson then asked whether Tate was being accused of “using violence?”

Tate replied, “They’re accusing me of using the ‘Loverboy’ method. Coercing them by being nice.”

He immediately flashed a wide Cheshire cat-like grin.

Prosecutors accuse the Tate brothers of subjecting women to “physical violence and psychological coercion resulting from intimidation, surveillance, and control, with the aim of sexual exploitation.”

Carlson rushed to endorse Tate’s narrative:

That’s not actually human trafficking. I don’t care what you call it — you weren’t buying, even accused of buying or selling anyone.

And on and on the interview went.

Either Carlson had failed to do the most basic research and hadn’t read the publicly available charges, or worse, he had read them, knew Tate was misleading him, and chose not to correct the falsehoods that would ultimately reach an estimated 50 million viewers across multiple platforms.

Neither possibility reflects well on Carlson.

Following Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens traveled to Romania with her husband, George Farmer, a longtime friend of Andrew Tate, to interview him for her then-Daily Wire show.

Owens repeatedly claimed to have read the Romanian indictment. Yet, as with Tucker Carlson’s interview, the claims made throughout her interview bore little resemblance to the indictment itself. This time, however, Owens did much of the heavy lifting herself.

One of the interview’s central claims was that Tate had abandoned the webcam business around 2013. Throughout the interview, Tate and Owens invoked “10 years ago” like a mantra, with Owens arguing it would be unfair to judge someone by who they were a decade earlier.

Just months earlier, Owens herself said on her show that when she first met Tate through her husband in 2019, her Romanian assistant warned her Tate was operating as a pimp in Romania. By Owens’ own account, she already knew years before the interview that Tate’s webcam business hadn’t ended in 2013.

Tate himself repeatedly boasted on podcasts as late as 2021 that his webcam business was still operating. In many respects, the Romanian prosecutors’ star witness is Andrew Tate himself.

But Tate told Candace’s audience, “Everything from these old videos, old clips, my webcam company, things that happened 10 years ago, have nothing to do with this case,” to which Owens immediately responded: “Correct.”

Again, the indictment tells a very different story.

But the magnum opus had come first. On June 12, 2023 — eight days before Romanian prosecutors indicted him, and more than two months into his house arrest — Patrick Bet-David gave Tate more than five hours to deliver a marathon of untested claims. He signed hats for a giveaway competition before Bet-David presented him with a Bible and a Quran. The interview concluded with Tate promoting Bet-David’s Minnect platform, where fans could pay for personalized messages from a man then under criminal investigation for rape and human trafficking.

But Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Patrick Bet-David didn’t create Andrew Tate; they inherited him.

The institutional failure began years earlier in Britain.

In 2014 and 2015, three women went to police alleging that Andrew Tate had raped and assaulted them. Tate was arrested and questioned.

The alleged victims then heard little from police until, two years later, when Tate appeared as a contestant on the U.K.’s “Big Brother” on Channel 5.

Tate, rather presciently, declared during the show, “I’m going to become the most hated man in the world.”

One of the alleged victims shared her account in the Channel 4 documentary “I Am Andrew Tate”:

The police said they’re trying to get him out, but they’re having some pushback from the “Big Brother” team because “he’s good TV.”

Tate didn’t remain on the program for long. Producers were alerted to a video showing him whipping a woman with a belt, and he was removed from the show.

Tate immediately claimed the footage depicted consensual “sex games” filmed years earlier, in 2012. The woman in the video publicly backed his account.

The story dominated the British tabloids, from The Sun and Daily Star to the Mirror and Daily Mail. No one has given her full legal name.

Years later, Romanian prosecutors would identify that same woman as an alleged victim and charge Andrew Tate with trafficking her into pornography while she was still a minor. Romanian authorities confirmed her date of birth as September 25, 1997. If Tate’s claim that the footage was filmed in 2012 is true, she would have been just 14 or 15 years old.

The age of consent in the U.K. is 16. The age of consent for pornography is 18.

So how did Britain’s media — and the police — fail to properly scrutinize Tate’s relationship with the girl in that video? How did nobody seriously investigate whether she had been groomed as a legal child into Tate’s webcam operation?

The same Crown Prosecution Service that failed countless victims of grooming gangs also declined to prosecute Andrew Tate. Around this time, in 2017, Tate fled to Romania, openly citing what he described as the country’s more relaxed approach to rape allegations:

When people say why do you live in Romania? And I explain my five reasons. One of them is the MeToo era. They go “oh but you’re a rapist.” I say no I’m not a f*cking rapist. But I like the idea of being able to do what I want. I like being free.

Four women are now pursuing Andrew Tate through the U.K. civil courts, three of whom first reported him to police in 2014 and 2015. Meanwhile, Hertfordshire Constabulary has reopened its criminal investigation into those rape and sexual assault allegations after concerns were raised about how the original investigation had been handled.

Today, the Tate brothers face ongoing criminal proceedings in Romania and are separately contesting extradition to the United Kingdom. Across both jurisdictions, the cases involve 35 alleged victims. The allegations include sex trafficking, rape, offenses relating to indecent images of a child, and extreme pornography.

Andrew Tate’s adopted moniker is King Cobra. But he more closely resembles a coral snake.

Most dangerous animals try to conceal the fact they’re a threat. The coral snake does the opposite. It advertises its danger with vivid, unmistakable bands. It doesn’t hide its venom; it advertises it so brazenly that people begin to assume the warning must be an exaggeration.

Or, as one Channel 5 executive reportedly put it more than a decade ago, “He’s good TV.”

The media dismissed the “Top G” — the self-styled “King of Toxic Masculinity” — as more bark than bite.

They were wrong.

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