So, yes, I’ve been there. The horrible compound in Romania, with its screens on the walls, supercars in the yard and guns on the coffee table, where the British misogynist influencer Andrew Tate was arrested last week, on charges relating to human trafficking and rape.
I went in September. The allegations are that he was part of a gang who lured women there by means of online seduction, before holding them against their will to work on pornographic webcams. He lured me, though, by agreeing to an interview for The Times Magazine.
I was keen. Tate is a cult figure for teenage boys — ask your son, if you have one — and he’d just been banned from most social media. I wanted to understand why. We sat in his cigar room, with its tacky wood panelling, and its even tackier massive glass safe, and he explained to me that it wasn’t misogynistic for a man to want to dominate women, or to consider them his property, or to expect them to put up with being part of a large harem that included girls in their teens, even if the man in question was pushing middle age. The real misogynist in the room, he added, was me, for disregarding the opinions of women who wanted to live like this, too. “What you’re doing,” he said, “is being condescending to women.”
All of this was ludicrous and horrible, but it didn’t sound criminal. As such, I concluded, he sat on the faultline of the sort of “legal but harmful” speech that campaigners have been worrying about for years. When the piece ran, though, nobody much cared about the conclusion. By far the most common feedback was from parents, who had noticed their sons obsessing over this Tate guy, and were grateful to know more.
Next, there were messages from young men, telling me that Tate was a hero and I was scum. Loads of those, actually. More than I’d expected. Finally, some deemed it outrageous I’d written it at all. As if, despite his millions of followers and ubiquity in playgrounds, Tate’s career high was three largely appalled pages about him in a Saturday magazine. As if any interview, even one that called him “creepy as hell”, was an accolade, like an OBE.
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Since his arrest, I’ve had much more of all three, but mainly the last. In particular, many object to my observation that Tate was engaging despite being vile, even in person. It would be a lie, though, to say otherwise. His misogyny would put him beyond the pale in any social group to which I’d ever hope to belong, but he knew how to talk, if only thanks to my reassuring penis. Is that surprising? As a YouTuber, charisma was his stock in trade. Indeed, as seducer-turned-pimp, I suppose it would be, too.
Did I spend those three hours in intense conversation with a sex trafficker? Am I the Andrew Tate equivalent of Louis Theroux, who spent all that time with Jimmy Savile and failed to uncover the one thing we now all know about Savile? Time will tell, but the prospect doesn’t make me feel super. Yet I knew, already, that his compound had been raided in the spring. Neither he nor his brother Tristan would talk about it on the record. Nobody had been arrested, six months had passed. It all went in the piece.
I also knew Tate’s history in porn. “I haven’t been involved in that for a very long time,” he told me, which I suppose may have just been a flat lie. He also insisted, to my open incredulity, that “most of the girls who worked for me ended up being multimillionaires”.
On my tape, there’s a bit where we tussle over comments he’d made on a previous podcast (because there have been many, many podcasts) about the male partners of women working in porn deserving a cut of their earnings, because a woman’s sexuality was the property of her husband. At the time, I clocked this mainly as yet another example of his crashing misogyny. Although it is also, of course, classic abusive pimp logic. As perhaps befits a man who now stands accused of being a classic abusive pimp.
Clearly, I’m sorry I didn’t get more out of him. I’m not sorry, though, that I took the gig. Boost his profile? This is provincial thinking. It was vast already. You — we — just didn’t know. Kids were already emulating him and teachers were already worrying about him. For a while, he was literally the most googled name in the world. Really, I should have got there six months earlier.
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It is no longer inevitable, though, that a huge audience entails huge scrutiny, or any scrutiny at all. It is inconceivable that a film star or a politician could have reached Tate’s level of fame without the likes of me pricking up their ears.
Yet with YouTubers, as with terrorist radicalisation or QAnon, this can all happen in the dark. Once we notice, it is always worth shining a light. If we fear to, as I said in the piece, I’m honestly not sure what we’re here for.
What Tate represents is what happens to popular culture when it becomes responsible to nothing other than an audience’s cheapest whim. He peddles a domineering male sexual fantasy similar to that which you’ll find in gangster rap or The Sopranos or a million other places, too, but without that extra narrative veneer that turns horror into art.
At heart, Tate’s base was an audience too young or unsophisticated to know the difference, and I’m still unsure what can be done about that. To ban his sort of content in law, porn or norms on free speech, and probably wouldn’t work, anyway. At the very least, though, we can know about it. Like I said, your sons already did.
