This is the first in a four-part series on the popular internet influencer Andrew Tate.
(LifeSiteNews) — Who is Andrew Tate?
I first started wondering when Tate quotes began popping up in questions I received from high school students after presentations on pornography. I’m not the only one. As Christian apologist and author Nancy Pearcey recently noted on X:
A former graduate student of mine now teaches at a high school, and she sent me an email saying, “All my male students are fans of Andrew Tate. They are even including quotes from Andrew Tate in the yearbook.”
I asked, “Where do you teach?”
“At a classical Christian school.”
Even Christian young men are being drawn in by these online influencers — if we do not offer them a healthy, attractive biblical model of masculinity.
Tate seemingly came out of nowhere. I have been following and reporting on the manosphere/alt-right internet subcultures for years, and I hadn’t heard of him. As it turns out, that’s probably because I’m not on TikTok. According to Business Insider, by early 2023 Tate content on the youth-driven platform had racked up over 13 billion views. The 38-year-old former kickboxer usually posed shirtless and ranted about a range of issues from lifestyle tips, advice on how to get rich quick, and gender relations.
Tate became an internet sensation almost overnight, and suddenly he was cropping up everywhere — especially on the Right, where his anti-feminist (or, more accurately, anti-female) rhetoric cast him as an “anti-woke” fellow traveler.
Tate was born on December 1, 1986, in Washington, D.C. His parents, Emory Tate Jr. and Eileen Tate, divorced in 1997, when Tate was 11. His mother then moved with Andrew and his siblings, his younger brother Tristan and his sister Janine, to Luton, England, where he grew up. Tate worshipped his father, a skilled chess player who earned the title of International Master from the World Chess Federation and served in the U.S. Air Force. Tate has referred to his father, who remained in the U.S. while his mother raised them, as a “superhero” and disciplinarian. Emory died in 2015 of a heart attack at age 56.
Eileen worked hard at several jobs to care for her children, and the family was poor, living in public housing. The Tate children rarely saw their father. Tate has worked hard to carefully craft his public image, and so it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, but he portrays himself as a working-class tough guy who was forced to be scrappy to claw his way up in the world. He got into fights, and then he got into kickboxing. He has claimed that the focus and training of kickboxing “saved” him. According to Tate, “I grew up amongst drug dealers and killers. Criminals both organised and disorganised.” Tate has bragged about selling drugs as a “hustler” in Luton, although he later denied it.
He started training hard as a teen and then competed professionally in the mid-2000s in the cruiserweight and light heavyweight divisions. He was fairly successful, winning four world titles: the ISKA World Full-Contact Light Heavyweight Championship (2011), the ISKA World Full-Contact Light Cruiserweight Championship (2013), the Enfusion World Championship (2014), and an earlier British title with the International Kickboxing Federation (IKF) in 2009.
His kickboxing career was the origin of his aggressive, trash-talking persona and earned him the nickname he still uses: “King Cobra.” After some relatively high-profile fights in the UK and Europe, including against Jean-Luc Benoit and Sahak Parparyan, he retired from kickboxing in 2016 to shift into the ventures that would make him a world-famous internet influencer. Tate began to seek fame.
Concurrent with his kickboxing career, Tate launched a pornographic webcam business with brother Tristan sometime around 2011, operating out of Luton. By 2015, the webcam business was, according to Tate, making up to $600,000 a month. According to the Tate brothers, their porn outfit was a legitimate business, and they were merely “managing” female clients. Allegations of abuse began almost immediately.
Tate’s first short-lived success in gaining mainstream fame came when he appeared on Season 17 of the UK reality show in which contestants live in a house, vote on who to evict, and compete to be the last man standing to earn a cash prize. Tate’s now signature brash, aggressive style was on fully display — but he was kicked out only six days later when a video surfaced that showed him viciously beating a young woman with a belt; another video soon followed, depicting Tate demanding that another young woman show her bruises to the camera. Tate insisted that the violence in the videos was consensual.
As it turned out, the TV producers had already been made aware, on June 8, 2016, that the Hertfordshire Police were investigating criminal complaints against Tate. Tate had been arrested twice the year before. The first arrest occurred early in 2015 after one of the women involved in the Tates’ webcam business alleged assault in the form of repeated strangulation — which, as allegations over the coming years seem to indicate, is Tate’s modus operand. The second arrest, later that year, was on an allegation of rape from a different woman.
It took four years for the police to pass the case on to the Crown Prosecution Service, and the CPS decided in 2019 not to pursue charges due to “no realistic prospect of a conviction.” The alleged victims have been critical of this decision, citing mishandling by both the police and the CPS. By then, Andrew and Tristan Tate had decided to move their webcam operation and their formal residence to Romania — and it is likely that this decision was motivated in no small part due to the increasing scrutiny they were under.
Tate famously claimed that one reason he moved was due to Romania’s more relaxed approach to accusations of sexual assault. In a now-deleted YouTube video, he bragged, “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.” He said that this was about “40 percent” of his motivation to move to the country, and the comments were cited in Romania’s 2022 trafficking charges against him. Tate has also stated that Romania’s loosely regulated business environment was appealing for the pornographer brothers and that the country had a “lawless” vibe.
It was in Romania that Andrew Tate became Andrew Tate. Who is Andrew Tate? In his own words, he is essentially a vulture: “I exploit broken society. Broken society suits me to the ground. I use it to my advantage absolutely. It’s how I make money with webcam girls. It’s how I have multiple girlfriends. I get away with a bunch of sh*t I shouldn’t get away with.”
