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It’s been a while (thankfully!) since most of us have heard about Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, but suddenly they’re back in the news, having been arrested by US federal authorities on Saturday at a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami and slated for extradition to the UK, where they now face new charges, including rape and sex trafficking. Both brothers have always vehemently denied any wrongdoing and have not been convicted of any crimes.
Tate hadn’t been back to the US since he last stole headlines with a triumphal return in February 2025. Then, he was celebrating their release from country arrest in Romania, where he has also been charged with rape and human trafficking (charges which he denies), thanks to intervention from the top of the Romanian government that was strongly suspected to be due to pressure from the Trump administration.
This was only a month into the new Trump presidency, and the manosphere was ascendent. A year before, I had directed a documentary called Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet, which looked at Andrew Tate's rise to global notoriety, and the role of social media algorithms, recommendation systems, and online business models in amplifying misogynistic and extremist content.
This was a time when Mark Zuckerberg was calling for companies to have “more masculine energy” and Elon Musk was saying that the country should be run by “high-status males”. The new administration featured a number of men (Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth) who had been dogged by scandals of problematic histories with women.
The White House liaison to the Justice Department, Paul Ingrassia, was a former member of Tate’s legal team; and a counsellor to the president, Alina Habba, had been on Tate’s podcast saying “I got your back over here” and “now is the time for us to stop being wimps”.
It really felt like Tate, and all the angry boys and boy-men he represented, had won.
In retrospect, that may have been the peak. Within five days, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis had announced that the Florida attorney general was launching a criminal investigation into the brothers, who shot off some angry tweets, hopped on their private jet, and skipped back to Romania.
The tweets started on the plane home as simple trolling (“Hello Florida AG and Ron DeSantis Tristan stole my snacks on the jet please open a criminal case”) before becoming more aggressive, calling DeSantis (who as a governor of Florida and Republican is ostensibly on the same side as Trump politically) a communist, and comparing him to “Stalin’s secret police”.
A few weeks later, at a press conference in Romania, Tate told reporters that DeSantis had changed his mind about their arrest: “The media jumped on him, and he didn’t realize I was an American citizen, and now he understands he made a mistake. And there’s been some conversations, and everything's been settled and fixed.”
This appears to have been wishful thinking. DeSantis’s Attorney General responded, “Every time these guys open their mouths, it gets them deeper in a hole.”
Perhaps the Tate brothers were unaware when they decided to return to Florida last week, but a lot has changed since February 2025. A few weeks after the Tates returned to Romania in 2025, Adolescence premiered on Netflix. Suddenly, everyone was talking about “the manosphere”. Never mind that they didn’t get the finer distinctions between incels, pick-up artists and men’s rights advocates – the fears that influencers like Andrew Tate had been stirring in parents and teachers since 2022, that young men are at once uniquely vulnerable and uniquely dangerous, were everywhere. The crisis of masculinity went from niche to mainstream.
Unfortunately, the nuances portrayed in the fictional version were nowhere to be seen in the world of political and cultural elites – as we would all discover towards the end of 2025, with the release of the Epstein files.
DeSantis was representing the portion of the far right in the US who were worrying quite a lot about sex trafficking and child sexual abuse. These are the people who pressured the Trump administration into releasing the Epstein files – and they have been gaining traction ever since, at Trump’s expense.
The online reaction to Tate’s arrest feels very different from last year’s. Tate published the requisite ‘I’m being persecuted for my politics’ video, but even for his fans, it seems that excuse is getting old
As someone who spent a year in the Andrew Tate online world making a documentary feature for Sky, what struck me was how frightfully thin the line between the respectable elites – the Davos crowd, movie stars, Ivy League professors, etc – and wealthy online influencers like the Tate brothers actually is.
When Trump dismissed the outrage over his “grab ‘em by the p****y” comment, people like Tate leapt to his defence; the mainstream reaction ranged from contempt to quietly turning away. But the emails in the Epstein files suggested something much darker – that the number of men who believed that being rich and famous made that kind of talk and behaviour just fine was a lot greater than many of us realised. Many of Epstein’s friends (think Peter Mandelson) believed Epstein when he said that he was innocent. Gathering around the alpha feels like it can lead to a distinctive kind of blindness.
Tate has preached that a group of men “striving for masculine excellence” is the most powerful force any man can have (he claimed that his “private” club, The War Room, was designed for such support).
The cars and the girls and the boasts about sex and money and power were effective at attracting young boys, but they also impressed powerful men in American far-right media and politics (Tucker Carlson’s wildly successful 2023 interview with Tate in Romania, where he said that Tate hadn’t been charged with “a sex crime or violence”, is a lesson in sycophancy and strategic ignorance). Before going to Florida, the Tates were in Washington DC, meeting congressmen and at a party with Trump's special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli.
However, clearly he had not been paying attention to the change in mood.
To return to Florida, where he knew they were being investigated by a man they had repeatedly taunted, was brazen even for Tate. Florida is also home to one of the plaintiffs in the Romania case, who the Tates have repeatedly called a liar and a psychopath, and even countersued.
And he wasn’t exactly lying low – Andrew Tate was advertised as the co-host of the event where federal authorities found and arrested him and his brother. He must have felt immune: he has been living at the heart of an internet bubble.
But maybe that bubble has finally burst.
The online reaction to Tate’s arrest feels very different from last year’s. Tate published the requisite “I’m being persecuted for my politics” video, but even for his fans it seems that excuse is getting old. The young men ranting about how he’s been set up are vastly outnumbered by reels mocking Tate’s ankle-exposing trousers, putting him into AI dances, and laughing as “Freakbob” (a Spongebob-inspired influencer) watches awkwardly as the Tates were hand-cuffed and led away. My 14-year-old son says his friends all think the Tates are lame: “no one follows them anymore.”
Male influencers now still give advice on improving your body, getting rich, getting girls – but the rage has subsided, the aggression is toned down.
As the Epstein files caused friction for Trump in his Maga base, maybe Tate is feeling the force of the changing current. The Tates are in jail contesting their extradition to the UK. Orban, once celebrated by Tate as a hero, is gone. Farage, who posed for a picture with Tate at CPAC, is facing Count Binface. Maybe things are changing?
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