Andrew Tate – news: Arrested influencer shares cryptic tweets about ‘hunting cockroaches’ in prison

When influencer Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania during a police raid, he was detained alongside three other people – one of them, his brother.

Tristan Tate, who is also a former kickboxer turned social media influencer, was detained in December as part of an investigation into human trafficking and rape by Romania’s anti-organised crime agency Didcot.

The four suspects, including the Tate brothers, will be held for 30 days after a judge extended their initial detention period of 24 hours, said Didcot spokesperson Ramona Bolla. Prosecutors say they found six women who had been sexually exploited by the suspects.

Thomas Kingsley has more

Romania’s anti-organized crime agency has carried out additional house searches in its investigation into divisive social media influencer Andrew Tate, an official said Thursday.

Ramona Bolla, spokesperson for the agency, DIICOT, said searches are taking place in the counties of Bucharest, Ilfov, and Prahova “in order to obtain further evidence.”

Thursday’s searches come a day after Tate lost a second appeal this week at a Bucharest court, where he challenged the seizure of assets by prosecutors in the late December raids, including properties, land, and a fleet of luxury cars.

More than 10 properties and land owned by companies registered to the Tate brothers have also been seized so far.

Katherine Denkinson’s take on the influencer’s rise to infamy: Andrew Tate should have been anathema to the folks who spend half their time telling us they’re not far right. But, instead, he became a well-dressed, wealthy caricature of a successful “alpha male”, conducting high-profile TV interviews with people like Piers Morgan.

Julia Hartley-Brewer, who tweeted that she would choose Tate’s lifestyle over that of “doom-mongering eco-cultist” Greta Thunberg, later claimed she didn’t really know who Tate was, branding him “an irrelevance”. She has since decided that Tate is, in fact, a “nasty misogynist”.

Interestingly, earlier this week, Hartley-Brewer also appeared on TalkTV discussing the actions of rioters in Brazil and at the Capitol insurrection, claiming that “what happened with… Trump and Bolsonaro started on the left”.

The concept of the left being responsible for the Capitol insurrection has been around since 2021, when Republicans were pushing it to deflect from their own actions on 6 January. It has been disproven many times, yet remains strong within the QAnon conspiracy circuit who see the left and Antifa as working for the powers that be – while they represent the disenfranchised “alt-right”, a group which could feasibly claim Tate as one of their own. The Capitol claim is one of the more egregious examples of conspiracy theories making their way into mainstream news, but not the only one.

Andrew Tate’s Twitter account referred to being “surrounded by cockroaches” in a post published on Thursday evening.

The jailed influencer’s account has continued to post since his arrest, with many tweets being written in the first person and referring to Mr Tate’s circumstances.

Romanian authorities have announced fresh raids in the investigation against Andrew Tate as seven homes are searched (Thomas Kingsley writes).

DIICOT, the prosecutors overseeing the case announced that seven homes were searched on Thursday morning in Bucharest, Ilfov counties and Prahova.

In a statement on Thursday morning, DIICOT said: “This morning, the prosecutors of DIICOT – Central Structure, in the continuation of the investigations in the case regarding the commission of the crimes of constituting an organized criminal group, human trafficking and rape, implement seven home search warrants, within the radius of Bucharest municipality and Ilfov counties and Prahova.”

Andrew Tate, the controversial former kickboxing world champion turned social media influencer, has lost his court appeal against his detention in Romania over rape and human trafficking charges (Joe Sommerlad writes).

Eugen Vidineac, a lawyer representing the 36-year-old and his brother Tristan, who has also been detained, has insisted that “there is not a single piece of evidence apart from the victim’s statement” to back up the allegations.

Mr Tate has amassed millions of followers across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok over the past decade. But he has also seen his accounts banned over inflammatory statements he has made, often appearing to advocate violence against women, which the platforms ruled violated their policies.

Frequently accused of embodying toxic masculinity and misogyny, having claimed that women cannot drive, belong in the home and are a man’s property, Mr Tate has made inconsistent statements on the subject. He told the Anything Goes with James English podcast in June 2021 that he was “absolutely sexist” and “absolutely a misogynist”, only to then claim on Piers Morgan Uncensored more recently that he was “absolutely not”.

British prime minister Rishi Sunak was urged to help schools stop boys being “brainwashed” by Andrew Tate.

Mr Tate, a British-American former professional kickboxer-turned influencer, has amassed millions of followers across social media platforms.

Labour MP Alex Davies-Jones said at a sitting of Britain’s parliament on Wednesday: “Teachers are now having to develop their own resources to re-educate boys who are being brainwashed online by [Mr Tate’s] deeply toxic messaging. The prime minister has been too slow to recognise the damage this is causing.”

She asked what Mr Sunak was doing to tackle the “radicalisation” of young men in Britain.

More than 10 properties and land owned by companies registered to the Tate brothers have so far been seized by Romanian investigators, along with land and a fleet of luxury cars.

Ramona Bolla, spokesperson for Romania’s anti-organised crime agency, DIICOT, said yesterday that searches were taking place in the counties of Bucharest, Ilfov, and Prahova “in order to obtain further evidence.”

Matthew Simpson, a 28-year-old teacher working at a secondary school in Bristol, says students are being exposed to Andrew Tate’s content in “out of context” memes online, my colleague Matt Mathers reports.

“The most popular one currently is about the colour of Andrew Tate’s Bugatti [it is brown],” Mr Simpson told The Independent. “Students don’t understand the full picture of his views and prejudices and will happily quote him.

“But then when challenged they will be entirely ignorant of the fact that the man with the brown Bugatti espouses vile misogyny daily to his millions of followers. The concern is that these bite-size chunks of content could also act as a gateway drug, into his longer more damaging content.”