Every Time the Tates Get Arrested, Their Media Empire Kicks Into Gear – Mother Jones

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Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate (left)Mother Jones; Andrei Pungovschi/Getty

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On July 19, a day after brothers and accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by US Marshals outside a bare-knuckle boxing match in Miami, Andrew’s X account sent out a tweet. “The UK can try, but it can’t actually stop me from tweeting,” the account wrote, adding a smiley face. The next day, another tweet captioned “Why They Arrested Me” linked to a three-hour conversation with 25-year-old podcaster Jack Neel.

The next day, with both Tates in custody, Andrew’s account railed against the British government, where he and Tristan are facing a new battery of charges on rape, trafficking and indecent images of a child, leading to their most recent arrest and possible extradition to the UK. “If I was really a sexual predator like grooming gangs, Prince Andrew, BBC Presenters, or Lord Mandelson (Epstein’s Best Friend),” the tweet read. “The British Police would not be hunting me around the globe. They would be protecting me.” In subsequent tweets, Tate claimed he was being held in the SHU, a solitary confinement unit, adding, "No contact with the outside world. My neighbor is a cannibal who screams throughout the night." (The SHU part seems to be obviously untrue, given that Tate or someone on his behalf is tweeting for him.)

Tristan’s account was active too, reposting tweets from supporters calling the charges against the Tates “a political attack” and “corrupt Romanian bullshit.” “Romanian,” of course, because some of the tweets he was resharing were recycled from previous arrests. The brothers were first arrested in 2022, after Romanian prosecutors accused them of rape and human trafficking there, kicking off a years-long, multi-country legal fight. The Jack Neel podcast was supposedly recorded in May of this year, according to a comment Neel pinned underneath the video on YouTube, and planned to be released if the Tates were apprehended again. Neel has interviewed Tate several times, always focused on the supposed injustice of his legal troubles.

The Tates have, in other words, been arrested so many times and in so many diverse locales that it’s become a kind of marketing strategy for them. (Only this time, however, their florid, nonsensical outfits while being handcuffed were so hilarious that they generated their own minor news cycle.) The infrastructure they’ve created to build their wealth also snaps into action each time they face legal trouble. Using a network of monetized X accounts, some newly-launched Substacks, and referring continually back to the products they sell—along with conversations and relationships with other so-called masculinity influencers and vloggers like Neel—the Tates manage to use their legal troubles to further bolster their infamy and as vehicles for continuing to build their wealth.

In the video released this week, Neel nodded meekly as Tate scrawled on a whiteboard, ranted about the supposedly biased and incompetent legal processes against them, and implied that the UK and Romanian prosecutors were colluding, all before bragging about getting his leased luxury sports cars—he has claimed to have four 812 Competizione Ferraris, among other things —back after prosecutors seized them.

The Tates remain under indictment in Romania, and prosecutors there said in May that given Andrew’s misogynistic rhetoric, they would add hate speech to the charges against him. In his conversation with Neel, Tate insisted that he leased the cars as part of a clever ploy to keep his property out of the hands of authorities, and not because he couldn’t afford to buy them. Tate also darkly intimated that because of his bravery and refusal to bend to what he referred to as “the system,” he might soon be mysteriously killed.

“I want people to understand, no matter what happens to me, I never feel regret. Even if it all goes wrong. Because I’m proud of my track record of always choosing the brave choice.”

“Planes crash, bro,” he told Neel, adding moments later, “I want people to understand, no matter what happens to me, I never feel regret. Even if it all goes wrong. Because I’m proud of my track record of always choosing the brave choice.”

There are other, more accurate terms for the choices the Tates have made. While the pair present themselves as high-flying international playboys, journalists who have investigated them have found that their sources of income divide into two basic, and very pedestrian, income streams: alleged pimping and multi-level marketing. As journalist Heidi Blake recently outlined in a stunning, and often sickening, story for the New Yorker, the Tates built a business from the...