EXCLUSIVEThe day Andrew Tate's girlfriend claims she came out of the shower to find him raping her young friend
EXCLUSIVEThe day Andrew Tate's girlfriend claims she came out of the shower to find him raping her young friend
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.
Andrew Tate, pictured posing in boxing gloves, bragged that he was making huge amounts of money running a company out of a studio in a luxury penthouse apartment with his brother
Tate two young female companions. He is said to switch between flattery, control and insults, calling 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’.
you can click here to watch the video
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.’ After a successful date, they continued their relationship, which is when, Sally told us, he mentioned his pornographic webcam company, in which girls performed online for paying customers.
Tate bragged that he was making huge amounts of money running the company out of a studio in a luxury penthouse apartment with his brother, and he promised her that if she worked for him, he could make her incredibly rich.
She wouldn’t even need to sleep with anyone, he said – all she’d have to do was perform by herself on webcam.
Sally had never done anything like this before, but she was young and in a minimum-wage job, and the proposition sounded interesting. Tate told her that, with her good looks, they would both make huge amounts of money together ‘as a couple’.
Sally agreed, and Tate took her to a pub to loosen her up with alcohol before her first show. They then went to his ‘luxury apartment’, which turned out to be a dingy two-bedroom flat above a Londis mini-market.
On that first night she got a glimpse of what was to come. ‘We were just sitting on the bed and completely out of the blue Andrew punched me in my arm. I went to the bathroom and cried, but when I came out he was super, super nice.’ She was confused, not knowing what to make of Tate or the situation she was in. He persuaded her to quit her job and work round the clock on webcam. She didn’t leave his flat for three days. He told her not to message her friends and that, as his girlfriend, she would no longer be able to speak to any other men.
Tate had told Sally he had an existing successful webcam business, but there were no other workers when she arrived in the flat. After a couple of weeks, new girls began to arrive. They would be split up, she said, either ‘managed’ by Andrew or his brother Tristan, and the girls would be required to sleep in their respective manager’s bed.
Sally claimed that Tate started to abuse the girls verbally, ‘calling us lazy hoes, dumb hoes, stuff like that’, but quickly progressed to using physical violence. ‘I saw him smack girls with a belt because they wanted a lie-in,’ Sally went on, her voice cracking.
‘He used to strangle us, choke us, and not in a sexual way. It was completely random. He would just grab you by the neck, or come into the room and say something like, “Which bitch am I gonna strangle today?”’ Sally recalled a time when Tate strangled her so badly the blood vessels in her eyes burst. Tristan was kinder to her than Andrew, but according to women we spoke to he too could be deeply unpleasant to his own ‘employees’.
One memory that stood out for Sally was Tristan roaming the flat wearing a pirate hat and wielding a plastic sword that he would hit the women with, bragging that he was ‘captain of this money ship’.
Sally had been working for Tate for around six weeks when he brought in a new young woman we’ll call Helen – someone Sally recognised from school. As one of ‘Andrew’s girls’ she was required to sleep in the bed with Sally and Tate between cam sessions.
However, unlike Sally, Helen had a boyfriend and refused Tate’s advances. For her, it was strictly about the money: the £15-an-hour wage seemed attractive to her, despite the fact that Tate himself would regularly earn £500 for each of their online sessions. But, Sally recalled, to her horror, waking up in bed with Tate and Helen one morning, before going to the bathroom to shower. ‘When I came back, I saw him raping her.’
Helen left the house almost straight away, but Sally stayed for a bit longer. ‘I didn’t want to work for him but I needed the money.
I suggested to him and Tristan that I could work from home but I’d still give them a share of the money. They just laughed at me, called me a dumb hoe, saying this was their business, and they had trained me, and they would not let me leave. Then one day, I was really tired, and I didn’t want to webcam, and Andrew threatened to “beat the s*** out” of me.
‘That’s when I knew I needed to get out of there.’
Sally put us in touch with Helen, who over the phone confirmed the allegations of physical violence and verbal abuse before recounting that day ‘when he raped me’. She burst into tears before hanging up the phone.
In a subsequent call, she explained that it was still extremely difficult to talk about what happened, and in addition that she was dating someone who wasn’t comfortable with her even mentioning it.
She said that a few months before, as Tate was becoming famous, she’d tried to share her story on TikTok, only to find hundreds of Tate supporters abusing her and then reporting her account to the site managers, leading to it being removed.