(Reuters) – Internet figure and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from Romania on Thursday, shortly after prosecutors lifted a travel ban related to criminal charges against them.
The Tate brothers are under criminal investigation in Romania on accusations of forming an organised criminal group, human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering. They have denied all wrongdoing.
“We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet, ever,” Andrew Tate told reporters as he left the Florida airport on Thursday, saying he and his brother were innocent and the victims of lies.
He did not respond to reporters who asked why the brothers had come to Florida, or whether U.S. President Donald Trump had helped get their travel ban lifted.
On Thursday Trump said he knows nothing about the Tate case in Romania while speaking to reporters alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer ahead of the two leaders’ meeting.
Starmer noted that the Tates face UK legal challenges as well and called for justice to be served, telling reporters: “There’s an English element here, so obviously it’s important that justice is done, and human trafficking is obviously, to my mind, a security risk.”
Tate, who gained millions of online fans by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle that critics say denigrates women, planned to return to Romania at the end of March to fulfill a judicial control obligation, a source told Reuters.
Referring to the charges against Tate, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters that his state was “not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” and that the Florida attorney general was looking at what jurisdiction the state had to “deal with this.”
Andrew Tate’s online instructional videos direct men to, among other things, physically assault women who accuse them of cheating, according to extremism-tracking group the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face, you grip her up by the neck,” Tate says in one video.
(Reporting by Luiza Ilie and Jeff Mason; writing by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk and Julia Harte; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Nia Williams and Daniel Wallis)
