*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

When the British American influencer Andrew Tate was arrested for human trafficking in Romania, in 2022, he claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy to silence him. At the time, Tate was becoming one of the most famous people on the planet—videos of his masculinist pep talks and misogynistic rants were being shared billions of times online—and his vast reach made him a political force. Prosecutors went on to allege that Tate and his brother Tristan had coerced dozens of women into online sex work, but right-wing allies in the United States, including Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens, lined up to defend them. After Donald Trump’s reëlection in 2024, Romania succumbed to American pressure and released the Tates from a travel ban. Since then, the brothers have travelled the world, while being hailed in MAGA circles as free-speech heroes.

At a cigar lounge in Bucharest this spring, Andrew Tate assured me that the trafficking investigation was “just garbage out of a corrupt country.” The brothers strenuously denied that they had hurt a single woman, and Andrew issued me a challenge: “Show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a girl chained up. Show me something.” Digging into the case, I obtained an extensive cache of prosecutorial records, in addition to thousands of leaked files and messages from within the Tates’ inner circle. I also gathered accounts from more than a dozen of the Tates’ alleged victims, and interviewed some of their closest associates and advisers. The evidence revealed a detailed account of how the Tates built a vast empire of online exploitation. “I’ve done this with over 100 girls,” Andrew bragged to associates as he discussed coercing one woman into sex work, explaining that his goal was to turn women into “loyal slaves.” Today’s story is the product of nine months of reporting, and, as always, I’m indebted to The New Yorker’s extraordinary team of fact checkers for combing over every detail. We hope you’ll read and share it.

Tate presided over an online network called the War Room, in which, for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year, he promised to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” Members learned how to recruit women into “sexual slavery” in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or “Pimping Hoes Degree.” He had used Pencov as a teaching case, reporting on her subjugation over the secure messaging app Telegram. “I’ve done this with over 100 girls,” he told members. “I almost sound evil. But I’m not. I’m a shepard. Leading the sheep.”

The Tates had moved to Romania from the United Kingdom in 2015, after three British women accused Andrew of rape and strangulation, and the brothers seemed to operate there with impunity. Court records show that local police sat on at least two reports indicating that the Tates were coercing Romanian women into sex work. Andrew openly discussed bribing law-enforcement officials in War Room chats, and bragged on social media about his connections. “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp,” he wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “Doubt me? EPSTEIN HAD ACCESS TO PUSSY. Look at his fucking friends list.”

Tate’s enormous reach made him a political force. He had always been an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump—“He’s grabbing bitches by the pussy. I like that guy,” he’d once said—and he became a singularly influential proponent of masculinism: a creed, devoted to countering feminism and restoring the patriarchy, that helped unite the disparate factions of the MAGA coalition. Tate called for women to be stripped of the vote, barred from the workplace, and forced to procreate. By comparison, conservative politicians’ efforts to erode reproductive rights and roll back gender-equality laws seemed moderate. “I have shifted the Overton window heavily since I became famous,” Tate bragged.

In the summer of 2022, feminist and antifascist groups mounted a campaign to deplatform Tate, and he was ejected from mainstream social media. But the bans only enhanced his fame, with conservative pundits hailing him as a free-speech martyr. “We’re adults and Americans, and we’ll listen to anyone we want,” Tucker Carlson said as he welcomed Tate onto his Fox News show. Tate played his part adroitly. “When somebody who’s championing men’s issues like myself comes forward and finally manages to garner huge percentiles of the public support, I’m silenced,” he said.

Tate made a deal with the right-wing streaming service Rumble, which had recently received major investments from Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, and J. D. Vance, Trump’s future Vice-President. The details have not previously been confirmed, but a confidential contract shows an agreement to pay Tate at least six million dollars a year for a weekly quota of five short videos and a thirty-minute live stream. His presence inspired a forty-five-per-cent increase in active users, sending Rumble to first place on the Apple and Google charts. A few months later, Elon Musk bought Twitter and reinstated Tate’s account.

When Tate was arrested on human-trafficking charges, his allies defended him. Donald Trump, Jr., called the case “absolute insanity,” and Musk suggested that the authorities were targeting the Tates while ignoring “actual sex trafficking.” Carlson, who had just released a documentary called “The End of Men,” devoted hours of airtime to proclaiming Tate’s innocence; so did the right-wing podcaster Candace Owens. The activist Charlie Kirk praised him onstage. “What he says is so powerful,” Kirk said. “Our society is configured towards collapsing the American man.”

As the 2024 U.S. election approached, the team saw an opportunity. Tate forged relationships with Barron Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. In the weeks before the vote, he pumped out pro-MAGA content, mobilizing young men in such large numbers that Kamala Harris later named him as a key factor in her defeat. When the result was in, Tate posted jubilantly on X: “THE PATRIARCHY IS BACK.” After the Inauguration, he added, “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president.”

As Tate warmed to his new career, he adopted a motto: “There are only two categories of people—pimps and hoes.” He was quoting the infamous Chicago pimp Ken Ivy, who published a book called “Pimpology” and another titled “The Art of Human Chess.” Tate studied both volumes closely.

“Seduction is a chess game and to the victor go the spoils,” Ivy wrote, in a treatise on recruiting sex workers. “To master someone completely, they have to depend on you for everything,” he instructed. “Most hoes have low self-esteem for a reason. A pimp looks for that weakness, and if it isn’t on the surface, he brings that motherfucker out of them.”

In fact, Tate’s removal from “Big Brother” had nothing to do with the videos. The Hertfordshire police had contacted the producers to inform them of the assault allegations from Navarro, Walker, and Price. But officers apparently missed indications of another crime: child pornography. Tate said that the belt video was made in 2012, at the start of his relationship with Hruskova. That year, she turned fifteen.

At the height of the #MeToo movement, Tate tweeted that women should “bare some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted. During the controversy that followed, his disdain for women began cohering into a political identity. He appeared on Infowars and then at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was photographed with Candace Owens, the right-wing television personality Jack Posobiec, and the far-right British politician Nigel Farage.

After the 2016 election, Tate had posted a string of pro-MAGA tweets, and he began messaging with Donald Trump, Jr. Eventually, he secured an invitation to Trump Tower. “That was the first time he had ever had any kind of interaction with anyone that big,” his former “harem” member told me. “It was like a drug to him.” After the visit, he posted a photograph of himself in a gold-embroidered blazer, clasping hands with a grinning Trump, Jr. He wrote, “The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” Tate started selling an online course called Network Brilliance, in which he declared, “I have access to the president’s son,” and claimed to know “every big person in politics on the right.”

Tate’s longest-standing political connection was to Tommy Robinson, a far-right agitator whose Islamophobic rhetoric and inflammatory claims about Asian sex-grooming gangs have stoked violent unrest across several British cities. Robinson also grew up in Luton, and he and Tate knew each other well.

Tate was intrigued by one of Robinson’s allies, the Canadian activist Lauren Southern. She had become a darling of the manosphere at the age of nineteen with a video titled “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she argued that men were the real victims of an unjust society. She followed up with a series of videos in which she trolled women who marched against sexual violence, ridiculing their views and holding up a sign saying “THERE IS NO RAPE CULTURE IN THE WEST.”

The Pizzagate conspiracist Mike Cernovich was a member, as was the far-right lobbyist Jacob Wohl, who bragged about supplying women to U.S. politicians, claiming that “these men will always want to win your good graces in hopes that you might toss them a girl or two.” Wohl was later convicted of running a voter-suppression scheme targeting Black neighborhoods during the 2020 election.

Tate’s most bellicose advocate was Joseph McBride, a lawyer who’d made his name defending several January 6th rioters. McBride was a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr. He filed a defamation lawsuit against Hadley in Palm Beach County, describing her as a serial liar and “a predator who has a long history of baiting men into sexual relationships for the specific purpose of destroying their lives.” Another one of the Tates’ lawyers filed a claim on Fisher’s behalf, accusing Hadley of entrapping him. Pencov and Anghel filed their own claims against her, through the same lawyer. The Tates also sued Hadley’s parents and the family friend who’d initiated the raid.

McBride published Hadley’s name, birth date, and passport number, along with her parents’ address. Then Ahmed shared a distraught voice note that she had sent to Fisher years before, after her ex-boyfriend died by suicide. The post was headed “Unveiling The Woman Who Targeted Unsuspecting Men.” Candace Owens devoted an episode of her show to unpacking the claims about Hadley. McBride arranged for Tucker Carlson to fly to Romania for a fawning interview with Tate, which drew a hundred and twelve million views. McBride later said in a private chat that it had taken him “2 years of relentless work to shift the J6 narrative,” but that he was already “75% there on completely shifting American thought on Tate.”

In 2024, as the U.S. election approached, Tate pinned his hopes on Donald Trump. Barron Trump had been tasked with reaching a young male audience, and Tate intended to help him deliver. Justin Waller, a close associate who has called himself the Tates’ “third brother,” agreed to be the intermediary.

Published in the print edition of the June 15, 2026, issue, with the headline “A Web of Abuse.”

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse | The New Yorker

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

Continued from previous post

Trump himself had been cagey. On the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in September 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, “I’d certainly take a look at it,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.” The list “probably will be” made public, he said, but he sounded less than enthusiastic. In private, Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was “fake news” designed to harm him politically.

But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters. Throughout 2024, Greene had made it her mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Presler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of a “deep state” capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.

Patel — a National Security Council director for counterterrorism and Defense Department chief of staff in the first Trump administration — had repeatedly claimed in podcast interviews that the government was hiding Epstein’s “black book” or client list, and he frequently asserted that the F.B.I. was deliberately withholding names to protect the powerful. Patel promised that a second Trump administration would release “everything” to restore public trust.

On “The Dan Bongino Show,” Bongino’s background as a Secret Service agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover-up. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he’d asked his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would “rock the political world,” he predicted. The “Washington swamp” was “not telling you the truth.”

And so as they took office in 2025, Trump’s advisers were subject to intense pressures of their own making. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly made things much worse.

First, in a Fox News interview on Feb. 21, she appeared to confirm the existence of an Epstein client list, something that the MAGA base had believed was sitting in the files, hidden — and hinted that its release was imminent. Asked whether the Justice Department might release the names, she responded, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

But many viewed what came six days later as an even more egregious misstep.

On Feb. 27, the White House Communications Office scheduled a lineup of cabinet officials to brief popular right-wing influencers in the Roosevelt Room. The session began with Vice President Vance, followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, walking the influencers through the administration’s agenda. In attendance was a who’s who of online MAGA: Mike Cernovich, Liz Wheeler, Collin Rugg, DC Draino. The president himself brought them to the Oval Office and gave them custom-designed challenge coins as a token of his appreciation. Before everything went wrong, one of them would remark, “It was the best day of my life.”

Then the attorney general and her team walked into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes. Bondi had brought binders as handouts for the influencers; her aides would later tell colleagues that the F.B.I. had prepared them, with the assurance that they contained revelatory details. Someone on her staff said: “Watch this. This is cool. This is going to be epic.”

But as Bondi’s staff started distributing the binders, the blood pressure of other officials in the room skyrocketed. They had no idea what was in the handouts. The attorney general was distributing something she was calling “the Epstein files” that had not been vetted by anyone in the White House. One official, opening the binder, began flipping through pages to see if Trump’s name was mentioned anywhere. A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was.

n June, four months after the circus in the Roosevelt Room with the influencers, Bondi and Blanche briefed the president on the status of the Epstein review. “We’ve gone through the files,” Blanche told Trump. “There’s not a lot there. A lot of child pornography — obviously we can’t put any of that out. There are some mentions of you, but nothing substantive.” Most of Trump’s advisers had rejected out of hand the idea of releasing the F.B.I.’s raw interview notes. More important, they wanted to avoid putting out anything that could damage the president.

With full transparency a nonstarter, a small group of White House and Justice Department officials decided to draft a memo that would explain why the department was not releasing any further information about Epstein. But even the process of composing the memo was fraught, in part because no one wanted their name on it and in part because of deep concerns within the leadership of the F.B.I.

None of the three had ever experienced anger at this volume from Trump’s conservative base. It was disorienting, especially for Patel and Bongino, whose power and influence had been built online. The movement that had treated them as heroes was suddenly turning on them. The two men were now tightly connected to a memo that stated, in black and white, that while information in the government’s possession showed ample evidence of Epstein’s own wrongdoing, there was no evidence of a wider conspiracy.

The day the memo was released, Bongino showed up to a daily Justice Department meeting with the F.B.I. staff and the attorney general. He was in a volcanic mood. As soon as he entered the room, he erupted at Bondi, shouting at her.

“You fucked this thing up from the start,” Bongino yelled. “The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”

Patel and Bongino both subsequently told a White House official that Bondi needed to resign.

Two days later, on July 9, the two men were summoned to a meeting with Wiles and Bondi in the Situation Room complex. They were the last to enter the small, wood-paneled room. Seated around the table were Bondi, Wiles, Blanche and Taylor Budowich, one of Wiles’s deputies. The moment Bongino sat down, Wiles told him that she had been informed he leaked a sensitive story about Epstein and Trump to ABC News.

“I’ll tell you what,” Bongino replied. “I’ll give you $100,000 cash right now. I’m not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit I leaked it. A hundred thousand dollars.”

Wiles snapped back, “Well, we all got ourselves into this —— ”

Bongino cut her off.

“No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me. And exactly what I said was going to happen happened. And now you’re pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this.”

Bongino’s aggressive response to Wiles startled the others; she was the White House chief of staff, essentially a stand-in for the president. Wiles put Bongino on the spot. “Going forward,” she said, “we’re all in. We’re all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not?”

“No, I’m not,” Bongino said. “This is not my plan. I’m not part of this going forward. Forget it. I’m out of here.” He stormed out of the Situation Room and onto West Executive Avenue, where he climbed into the back of Patel’s armored S.U.V. and directed the driver to take him to F.B.I. headquarters.

Some of Bongino’s close friends hoped he would resign right then — an act of protest that would have made him a MAGA martyr and only increased his following. But White House advisers intervened, urging him to stay. If he quit over Epstein and went public, it could severely damage the president. Bongino told associates he would remain for Trump’s sake and keep pushing for more Epstein information to be released.

Continued, next post.

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.

*The following opinion is mine and mine alone and does not represent the views of my family, friends, government and/or my past, present or future employer. US Department of State: 1-888-407-4747.