February 2023. Our full-access Andrew Tate documentary is going fine, even after the sudden plot twist of his arrest for allegations of rape and human trafficking in Romania. Marguerite Gaudin, the director, has managed to shoot Tate for a day in London – shopping on Savile Row, cosy chats in a limo, an appearance on Piers Morgan – and she’s now waiting for him to be released on bail to do more filming. Then everything falls apart.
“The planet’s most Googled man”, in between sets of 500 push-ups in a Bucharest prison cell, hires one of Michael Jackson’s lawyers, who seems to hate me. The lawyer is Mark Geragos, an LA troubleshooter – clients include Jackson, Colin Kaepernick, Winona Ryder, Chris Brown and Jussie Smollett.
Now Geragos’s firm is helping to wrangle the fallout of the rape and human trafficking allegations against Tate and his brother. Their job is to deal with the international media, who have flocked to Bucharest and, because of our history, they won’t let us anywhere near Tate. My 2019 exposé of Michael Jackson, Leaving Neverland, is coming back to haunt me.
Our adventures with Tate started with an email five months earlier. Subject line: “Potential documentary opportunity with currently the most controversial public figure.” Tate had been “cancelled” by many online platforms for making viciously toxic statements about women in videos that were hyper-shared on TikTok by teenage boys in the summer of 2022. As is usually the case, “cancellation” made him even more of a hero. In August 2022, his currency reached a new peak, allowing him to claim he was “the most Googled man on the planet”. (In fact “Andrew Tate” was the eighth most-searched name on the web in 2022.)
I’ve often wondered why Tate’s people came to us, when our best-known documentary exposed allegations of sexual abuse by a charismatic celebrity? Perhaps they hadn’t done their homework. As we started talks with Channel 4 about a possible documentary, it turned out that half the producers in town were offering the channel the same “exclusive access” to Tate. We were part of a scatter-gun plan to get the recently cancelled “Top G” back before his UK audience on old-school terrestrial TV.
Tate is the son of a Black American chess international master, who moved to Marsh Farm estate in Luton as a child. He became a champion kickboxer and then a webcam pimp, figuring out a way to optimise porn-on-demand sites such as OnlyFans by typing directly into the chats with male clients (“I finessed the dudes”) while his cam girls mock-typed on a dummy keyboard. “I went from kickboxer to a fucking pretend girl on the internet,” quips Tate in a podcast. The innovation worked brilliantly; Tate hired more girls and bought more laptops on which to type lewd messages to lonely men around the world. He was making serious money.
To this systematic approach to the online sex trade Tate added a sordid routine of control and coercion of the women who “cammed” for him. “You have to fuck the girls. You cannot do a purely professional business relationship with a female. It doesn’t work. If you’re not fucking the girl, she is fucking someone else. And that other person is gonna have the control over her mind,” he preaches in a video tutorial for aspiring webcam pimps.
Allegations of rape and physical violence by women who worked for Tate have now come back to haunt him: in Romania, where he’s facing possible trial, and in the UK, where at least four women are trying to take him to court. Two of his accusers give shockingly frank interviews for our documentary. But more of that later.
Channel 4 commissioned the documentary and just to be sure that Tate understood what was involved, Marguerite and I flew to Dubai to set the ground rules. We were ushered through the gates of a villa in Emirates Hills, past a bronze-coloured Bugatti and towards the pool where Tate was sitting bare-chested in shorts with his brother and cousin, busy on their laptops. I remember thinking: “These guys don’t look like they’re having fun.”
We sat down; water was offered. Tate was cordial, charming. He pontificated on some standard “alt-right” themes – Covid conspiracy, stolen US election – but with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He also explained that when making his famous “Top G” lifestyle videos, he’d get the cast of bikini-clad women together on a boat, instruct them to “party” for about four minutes while it was filmed, then go back to work on laptops. I loved that insight into the artificiality of Tate’s content. But it left me wondering what he and his team were doing on their laptops all the time. Were they still “finessing the dudes”? Surely that grunt work was now below his pay grade.
We listened for 20 minutes then cut to the chase: “This isn’t going to be a puff piece, Andrew, you understand that, don’t you?” “Yep. You can ask me anything. The only condition is you can’t film my screens.”
Then Tate mentioned that he’d be collecting a diamond-studded watch from a local jeweller, and we could film that. There was a road trip in Iceland in February, then back to Romania in March. Beyond that, he sounded unsure where life would take him. He seemed oddly vulnerable. We walked back out through the empty villa and past the Bugatti with an odd feeling that Tate was a bit sad.
Andrew and his brother Tristan were released into house arrest in Romania in late March 2023 and returned to “Top G House”, a shed-like structure decked out in black cladding and red neon in a depressed-looking cul-de-sac of warehouses and battered Ceauşescu-era apartments by a local airport. Marguerite flew out and waited – the first of six trips – and we asked Tate if we could film him. The answer was always “not right now”. So we adopted a different strategy.
The puzzling thing about Tate that was never addressed in other documentaries about him was what his actual life story was. The film-makers always did the stunty thing of trying to get Tate to admit to being a misogynist, a rapist and a general bogeyman. These kinds of TV rows are gold dust for Tate’s business and they made great if predictable TV, so everyone was happy. But the documentaries left you none the wiser about who this guy actually is and how he became the bete noire he is today. We resolved to tell Tate’s story, and do it largely in his own words, despite the fact that he showed no sign of having the courage to follow through on his commitment to let us film.
The result is a lot more insightful than anything Tate could have told us if he’d sat for several days of interviews. To get to the truth, Marguerite and her editor Ben Hills had to scour hundreds of hours of Tate recordings. There were hours of documentary footage shot by amateur videographers who trailed Tate for weeks or even years. There were dozens of podcasts in which Tate was jaw-droppingly frank about his personal history, his business model and his violent ways with women. A slew of chatshows that hosted him after his “cancellation” – Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones. Plus regular tussles with his old buddy Piers Morgan. We even found him aged 21 on Channel 4 show Ultimate Traveller, and in 2016 on Channel 5’s Big Brother.
Tate was thrown out of the Big Brother house when the Sun got hold of a video of him thrashing a half-naked woman with a belt. The Star then posted a worse one of him slapping and beating the same young woman. Tate claimed it was just japes, and the woman claimed at the time it was consensual, but the Big Brother team had also learned he was being investigated for rape and assault by Hertfordshire police and hit the eject button.
The vast reservoir of recorded material formed the basis of our narrative of Tate’s rise and fall – but it was one of the women who reported Tate to the police who gave us the hard insights into his darker side. We met her through lawyer Matthew Jury, who represents her in a planned civil case against Tate in the UK. The woman, now 29, started camming for Tate at 20. He was like the big brother she never had. He promised to look after her, she told Marguerite in a long and brutally frank interview. Then he raped her twice, she alleges, and on the second occasion strangled her until she couldn’t breathe. He denies these allegations.
But as you’ll see in the film, Tate has spoken at length online about how to control and subdue women with sex, physical violence and strangling. Everything this young woman told Marguerite was backed up, in general terms, by things Tate has said himself.
This is where the documentary rubber hits the road. It’s all very well telling the story of Tate’s rise from kickboxing champion to webcam pimp, expanding the camming empire into eastern Europe, launching his Hustler’s University courses for the growing fanbase, then triggering a global moral panic as it emerged that teenage boys had spent the pandemic mainlining Andrew Tate content. But when you consider that the ultimate influencer of our age could be – by his own admission, although he insists he was “joking” – someone who advocates beating and strangling women to control their minds and now faces multiple allegations that he uses rape as part of his business model, well that’s more than a storm in an internet teacup, isn’t it?
• This article was amended on 5 January 2024 because Andrew Tate’s father was a chess international master, not grandmaster as an earlier version said.
I Am Andrew Tate is on Channel 4 on Sunday at 9pm
