Will Andrew Tate face justice in Britain?
Andrew Tate speaks to the BBC during last night's Panorama programme. Credit: BBC
Very few men face prosecutions for rape, even though police chiefs describe violence against women as a “national emergency”. There has been a great deal of hand-wringing over this state of affairs, yet an “influencer” accused of rape and sex trafficking is regarded as a role model by millions of other men.
Said influencer, Andrew Tate, has 10 million followers on X, a following apparently unimpressed by a string of serious charges against him in Romania, where he now lives. Last night’s Panorama programme on the BBC revealed that Tate was investigated in the UK a decade ago after several women went to the police making allegations against him, but was never charged.
The programme hadn’t even finished when Tate, who is under house arrest in Romania, took to social media. He castigated the BBC, bringing up the cases of former employees Jimmy Savile and Huw Edwards, and dismissed his accusers as “girls lying about things that happened 14 years ago trying to get some money”.
It was a blatant attempt at deflection, but Tate’s reference to Savile is instructive. Savile is now recognised as one of the country’s worst sex offenders and we know that some of his victims went to the police while he was still alive, only to be dismissed. Tate insists that he’s innocent of all the charges against him in Romania, but Panorama focused on an earlier period of his life when he and his brother Tristan were living in Luton.
The programme’s reporter, Oana Marocico, interviewed two women who say they were raped by Tate a decade ago. Both women tell a similar story with one crucial detail: they describe what began as consensual sex and then turned violent, alleging that Tate choked and raped them. Anna (not her real name) says she then received a series of text and voice messages from Tate admitting what he had done. “Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit?” he is alleged to have asked.
The woman went to the police in 2014. Two other women reported similar allegations and a file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2019, but it was decided there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges. There are obvious questions to be asked about that decision, given that more than one woman accused Tate of a specific —and life-threatening — sexual fetish.
Tate agreed to be interviewed by Marocico, although his defence against allegations of exploiting women through a webcam operation — he claims he was lying about making hundreds of thousands of pounds each month — hardly bolsters his overall credibility. Indeed, his dismissals of his own boasts in past interviews recall tactics used by Donald Trump, who habitually lies about claims he is on record as making.
In a weird parallel with Tate’s attempt to smear his accusers, Trump famously dismissed an allegation of sexual assault by the writer E. Jean Carroll as a “fabricated story by someone looking to promote a book”. In May last year, a court ruled that Trump had assaulted Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages.
Tate retains a huge fan base, speaking to supporters who evidently share his view that men like him are at risk of false accusations. The allegations against him have yet to be tested in court. But while Tate’s endless self-promotion is something to behold, it raises questions about how accusations against brazenly confident men are handled by the UK’s criminal justice system.
