AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Andrew Tate, the right-wing influencer who promotes misogyny as a belief system, was arrested in Miami on Saturday alongside his brother Tristan. The U.K. is trying to extradite both brothers on a host of criminal charges, including rape and human trafficking. There are 59 charges in total. The Tates deny wrongdoing, and their lawyer says it's a, quote, "political hit." They're also under investigation in Romania, where they were indicted for a series of violent crimes several years ago. Heidi Blake is a reporter for The New Yorker who got ahold of sealed Romanian prosecutorial documents for that case, also British police records and thousands of texts between the Tates and numerous women. Heidi Blake joins us now from the U.K., where she is based. Welcome.
HEIDI BLAKE: Hi, Ailsa. Great to be on the show.
CHANG: Great to have you. So people might be familiar with Andrew Tate as a right-wing influencer, but can you just explain the business of the Tate brothers at the core of these charges?
BLAKE: Yeah. So Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan made their fortune in webcam pornography. This was something they struck on at the end of careers as international kickboxers. They realized that they weren't going to make big money in that sport, and so they set about figuring out how to make a quick buck, and alighted on the idea that they could persuade their girlfriends to perform online for them as webcam pornography workers. And this was the starting point of what became a massive empire of online sexual exploitation. And they made a point of keeping the money these women made and using all sorts of pretty sophisticated and carefully calculated methods to control these women, to isolate them from their friends and family. And that was the way they made the money that they then parlayed into this huge online following.
CHANG: Right. But these charges don't only involve women, right? Like, they specifically note indecent images of a child. Do you know what the story is there?
BLAKE: The very first webcam worker that Andrew Tate recruited was a Slovakian teenager. She was actually 15 years old when he met her and was only 17 years old when he persuaded her to work for him online making webcam pornography. And it is illegal in the U.K., where this happened, and also in the U.S., to make indecent images of a child. But what the Tates did was create a profile for her in which she was portrayed as a Russian woman in her 20s. There are videos still online of her working for them, which are very extreme and very, very violent.
CHANG: Wow.
BLAKE: And that was happening when she was still underage.
CHANG: Well, what led to the Tate brothers' first arrest in Romania?
BLAKE: The brothers recruited a young American woman, a woman from Florida, who came out to their compound and quickly reported in texts to her family and friends that she felt she was being trafficked and being held against her will there. That triggered a report to the U.S. embassy, which then alerted local authorities. And all of a sudden, local police in Romania took this case very, very seriously. They raided the Tate brothers' compound and they assigned one of the country's leading organized crime prosecutors to dig into their affairs. And that's when the brothers ended up being indicted for forming an organized crime group to traffic women.
CHANG: How were the brothers able to travel freely again after being arrested in Romania? Because they were able to even come to the U.S. at one point.
BLAKE: So when Donald Trump was reelected, there was a pretty rapid change in the disposition of the Romanian authorities towards the case. Rick Grenell, the special envoy to President Trump, raised it directly with Romanian government officials. And soon after that, Romanian prosecutors contacted the Tate brothers' lawyers and asked them, what do the Americans want? And were told, we need the travel ban to be lifted. And very soon after that, Andrew and Tristan Tate were released from their travel ban in Romania. Since then, they've been traveling freely around the world.
CHANG: And now here we are. They've been arrested in Miami this past weekend. What comes next? What are you most closely watching for as this story keeps unfolding?
BLAKE: Ultimately, the decision about whether to extradite them rests with the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. So it'll be really interesting to see whether he decides to let this go ahead. You know, I noticed that the Tate brothers' lawyer, Joseph McBride, who is very close with people in Donald Trump's circle, particularly with Donald Trump Jr., has said that, you know, this thing was just approved by a low-level functionary in the Department of Justice and seems pretty - you know, seems to be sort of appealing to more senior figures in the administration to overturn it.
CHANG: Though the Justice Department did tell The Associated Press that these arrests were approved by leadership of its Criminal Division.
BLAKE: That's right. It's gone through State Department and DOJ to get to this stage. I think marks a very dramatic sea change in the fate of these two men.
CHANG: Heidi Blake is a reporter for The New Yorker. Thank you so much for joining us today, Heidi.
BLAKE: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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