Andrew Tate has been known to try to pass off his misogyny and his systematic humiliation and degradation of women as just ‘an act’. But allegations of rape and grooming suggest that his performance was all too real, and pulls the rug from underneath the ideology driving his movement. When we returned to the UK after confronting Tate at his headquarters in Romania for our television documentary exposing who he really is, we received a flurry of emails from women who had known him at his home town of Luton back in 2015 and 2016.
Their stories were all similar. They were in their early 20s when he’d approached them, either online or through a male friend who claimed he was ‘friends with Tate’ and recruiting ‘models’ for his new business. When they were put in touch and spoke to him, he would switch between flattery, control and insults, calling the girls beautiful one moment, then making demands or calling them stupid.
None of these women actually met Tate or went through with his proposals of work. All of them felt ‘something was up’. But then we were contacted by a woman who claimed to have been Andrew Tate’s ‘girlfriend’ (she placed the word in inverted commas herself) in 2015.
Sally, as we will call her, told us that she was 19 when she first met Tate. They messaged on Facebook, and he eventually asked her out for a drink. She recalled: “He was really, really cocky, like you see how he is now, but he could also be quite nice and sweet.
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