Influencer, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have appealed against a judge’s decision to keep them under house arrest over s3x trafficking charges.
Tate, 36, and his brother are now waiting to find out whether the court will allow them to be released from house arrest.
They are appealing against a court decision made last month to keep the brothers under house arrest for a further 30 days.
Their appearance at the Court of Appeal in Bucharest today came after the influencer was formally charged with rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to exploit women in June. Tristan and two Romanian women were charged with human trafficking.
It also comes hours after Tate made a misogynistic remark about a picture of Britain’s Got Talent Star Amanda Holden wearing a bikini while on holiday.
Tate, who has been described as the ‘king of toxic masculinity’, responded to Ms. Holden’s tweet featuring a photograph of her taking a shower in a bikini by writing: ‘You are a wife and a mother and you’re far past a teenager. There is no need for this post.’
Tate, who was arrested on December 29 in Bucharest and has denied the allegations, has lost a series of appeals against his house arrest and today he hopes that might change.
‘I am in the Bucharest Court of Appeal to find out if I will be detained for a ninth month,’ Tate wrote on Twitter today. ‘Three months in jail, six months locked in my house.’
After spending three months in police detention in Bucharest, the Tate brothers won an appeal on March 31 to be moved to house arrest.
In June, Romania’s anti-organised crime agency known as DIICOT requested that judges extend the house arrest measure after it filed its investigation.
Tate, who has been accused of peddling conspiracy theories online and has amassed 7.2 million Twitter followers, has repeatedly claimed that prosecutors have no evidence against him and that there is a political plot designed to silence him.
DIICOT alleges that Tate, his brother Tristan and two Romanian women – Luana Radu and Georgiana Naghel – formed a criminal group in 2021 ‘to commit the crime of human trafficking’ in Romania, as well as in the United States and Britain.
There are seven female victims in the case, DIICOT said, who were lured with false pretences of love and transported to Romania, where the gang sexually exploited them and subjected them to physical violence.
One defendant is accused of raping a woman twice in March 2022, according to the agency. The women were allegedly controlled by ‘intimidation, constant surveillance’ and claims they were in debt, prosecutors said.
Last week, it was reported that leaked messages demonstrated how Tate coerced women into doing sex work for him.
When the influencer was arrested in Romania in December, authorities accused him of using the ‘loverboy’ method to lure women to his compound in Bucharest under the guise of having a relationship, before forcing them to do sex work.
According to Rolling Stone, citing screenshots of purported messages from the ‘War Room’ (Tate’s group chat with his followers) and other texts in 2021, the influencer described women as ‘targets’ and ‘assets’ and spoke of isolating and manipulating them.
In one purported message, he described how he isolated one woman until she ‘lost her support networks at home’ and kept her at the compound in Bucharest.
‘The real goal is for her to agree to never go anywhere without me. Not even her hometown. I need her working,’ he wrote, according to screenshots.
Tate also appeared to seek help from his associates to force one woman to post explicit content on OnlyFans, an internet content subscription platform used mostly by sex workers.
In the message, Tate tells followers he’ll be ‘making the play tonight’.
‘Since she moved [to Bucharest] she’s been fed. But nothing else,’ he wrote.
‘She’s broke. And she can’t go home. And she can’t leave the house. Man, I sound almost evil,’ he added according to the leaked messages.
