A WEB OF ABUSE

Andrew Tate became a global celebrity—and a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

- BY HEIDI BLAKE R. Chast PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTIA BALSAMINI FOR THE NEW YORKER —Isabella DeSendi

Just north of Bucharest is a neat development of red-gabled houses known as American Village. It is an unlikely place to be the center of an international criminal intrigue, but on its western border is a sprawling compound, patrolled by armed guards, that belongs to the British American influencer Andrew Tate and his younger brother, Tristan. The Tates moved to Romania a decade ago to build an online-pornography empire, and American Village was where they kept their recruits.

One day in April, 2022, Iasmina Pencov was in a villa near the compound, recovering from surgery. A slender, dark-haired former psychology student, she had met Andrew Tate the previous year and agreed to move across Romania to be with him. Tate had told Pencov that he considered her his wife, and when he first asked her to strip on camera she was appalled. “I’m old fashioned and I do believe in God,” she texted him. “My body is intimate and only my husband should be able to touch and see.” But he had worn her down—“identified the objections and destroyed them,” he wrote in private messages describing her recruitment. “She never believed in god. Women never believe in anything.”

Tate presided over an online network called the War Room, in which, for a fee of about eight thousand dollars a year, he promised to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” Members learned how to recruit women into “sexual slavery” in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or “Pimping Hoes Degree.” He had used Pencov as a teaching case, reporting on her subjugation over the secure messaging app Telegram. “I’ve done this with over 100 girls,” he told members. “I almost sound evil. But I’m not. I’m a shepard. Leading the sheep.”