Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate, the British American online influencers who had been held in Romania for two years over criminal investigations, have left the country for the United States, Joseph McBride, their lawyer in the United States, said on Thursday.
The brothers boarded a private jet in Romania early Thursday morning local time and were expected to land at an airport in southern Florida on Thursday morning, Mr. McBride said.
Their sudden departure from Romania raised questions about whether the Trump administration, which Andrew Tate has openly aligned with, played any role. Romanian officials said that the United States had not put pressure on them, and the Tate brothers’ lawyer, who has long lobbied U.S. lawmakers on their behalf, said he could not comment on whether U.S officials had used their power to free the men.
Still, the lawyer, Joseph McBride, added: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”
In response to questions about the brothers, Romanian prosecutors said in a news release that they were still pursuing criminal investigations against two British American citizens. They did not name the people, but said they had been allowed to leave Romania and had to “appear before judicial authorities whenever summoned.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Tates’ lawyer, Mr. McBride, had advocated on their behalf among lawmakers on Capitol Hill going back as far as 2023, he said. He had developed contacts in Congress largely through his legal representation of several people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his advocacy for the Tates did not appear to gain much purchase until President Trump was re-elected.
In recent weeks, the brothers have aligned themselves more strongly with President Trump. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Andrew Tate said on X this month.
The Tate brothers have faced a protracted legal battle with prosecutors in Romania, who charged them with human trafficking and forming an organized crime group. According to Romanian prosecutors, the brothers misled several women into believing that they wanted a relationship with them. The women were instead housed in a compound near Bucharest and forced to appear in online pornographic videos, prosecutors said.
The Tates have repeatedly denied all the allegations against them. They successfully appealed that indictment in a Bucharest court, which found that the case did not meet the requirements for a trial.
Prosecutors in Romania have since said they are investigating the brothers over other accusations of human trafficking and money laundering.
Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer known for his sexist views, has promoted a brand of masculinity tied to lavish displays of wealth. According to an archived page on his website that has since been removed, Mr. Tate described a method that he said made him rich.
“My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together,” he said. He claimed that he had worked with “over 75 girls,” on the site.
Romania’s foreign affairs ministry said that U.S. officials had not intervened. “In Romania, the judiciary is independent and is the sole authority empowered to make decisions in an ongoing investigation or trial,” a statement said.
The Financial Times reported this month that U.S. officials had urged Romania to lift travel restrictions on the brothers. Richard Grenell, a special envoy for the United States and a close ally of Mr. Trump, raised their case with the country’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, at the Munich Security Conference this month. The travel restrictions on the Tate brothers were lifted on Wednesday, according to the Romanian authorities. Mr. Grenell could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Hurezeanu had a “focused exchange” with Mr. Grenell at the conference, the country’s foreign affairs ministry said in a post on X at the time. The two officials “covered current topics of shared interest” between the two countries, the ministry said, but the post did not mention the Tate brothers.
Mr. Hurezeanu later told G4Media, an online news site that covers judicial issues, that he and Mr. Grenell had a brief conversation in a hallway at the conference, during which Mr. Grenell brought up the Tate brothers. Mr. Hurezeanu said he had requested another meeting with Mr. Grenell to find out “what his intentions were in relation to Romania,” but that the conversation never took place.
Mr. McBride said that a defamation case the brothers brought against a woman in Florida, who has accused them of human trafficking, included evidence that the criminal case in Romania was weak. He added that the brothers’ argument that they were victims of a weaponized justice system in Romania resonated with officials in an administration run by Mr. Trump, who has put accusations of weaponized justice at the center of his political campaigns and his presidential agenda.
The brothers were also arrested in Romania in March 2024 on a separate warrant issued by the British authorities accusing them of human trafficking. A Bucharest court had ruled that the brothers should be extradited to Britain after the resolution of the Romanian cases. It was unclear on Thursday what the outcome of that extradition ruling would be.
Four British women also sued Andrew Tate in 2024, claiming that he had raped and abused them. Matthew Jury, a lawyer representing the women, said on Thursday on social media that reports that the Trump administration had lobbied for their release were “disgusting and dismaying.”
He called on the British government to “take immediate steps” to ensure the brothers would face the charges against them in Britain. “Any suggestion that the Tates will now face justice in Romania is fanciful,” he said.
Earlier this month, an American woman who gave evidence to Romanian authorities sued the brothers for allegedly luring her to Romania and coercing her into sex work, the first suit filed in the United States against the Tates. The brothers had sued her first for defamation, claiming that her testimony was fabricated.
Dani Pinter, the senior vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, called for the United States to investigate the Tate brothers for sexual exploitation of minors abroad and for sex trafficking. “This is a slap in the face to all the victims of the Tate brothers, especially the U.S. victim who is not being protected by her country,” she said in a statement on Thursday.
The post Tate Brothers, Facing Sex Crime Inquiries, Leave Romania for U.S. appeared first on New York Times.
