Everything you need to know about Andrew's brother, Tristan Tate

Andrew and Tristan Tate have been allowed to leave Romania despite being under investigation by police on charges of rape, sex trafficking and money laundering in their home country. The influencer brothers are best known for creating a cult of misogyny online via podcast interviews and short-form video content.

The Tate brothers, who deny all charges against them, are currently reported as being on a jet bound for the United States. It is unknown whether the US or Donald Trump had a significant part to play in their release, but Trump’s special envoy Richard Grennell reportedly spoke with the Romanian government to urge the authorities to lift the pair’s travel ban and return their passports.

Grenell claims he had had “no substantive conversation” with Romania’s foreign minister but added: “I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”. The Tate brothers are required to return to Romania eventually, potentially as early as the end of March.

Andrew Tate, 38, and Tristan Tate, 36, are American-British media personalities with Romanian heritage. They were both born and raised in the United States (in 1986 and 1988) before moving to the United Kingdom in 1997. Contrary to general belief (and recent Sam Fender-spurred conversation about “white privilege”), Tate and his brother are bi-racial, raised by their African American father Emory Tate, who was a chess International Master, and their White English mother Eileen Tate, who worked as a catering assistant. Andrew and Tristan also have a younger sister, Janine, who is a successful corporate lawyer in the United States and lives a private life.

Before internet fame, both brothers trained as kickboxers and attempted to gain popularity via reality TV shows, with Andrew appearing on Big Brother in 2016 and Tristan appearing on Shipwrecked in 2011. Andrew Tate is the far more popular of the two Tate brothers and is largely responsible for their meteoric rise online, with his views on women, masculinity and transgender people first gaining virality in 2022.

Tate believes that women should belong to men, shouldn’t drive and shouldn’t leave the house. He has also said that women should "bear responsibility" for their own sexual assault. He has spoken out in favour of Russell Brand, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and the Nazis, questioning whether they were really the "bad guy" in World War II.

In recent years, Andrew Tate has set up “courses” within his Hustler’s University and War Room networks which charge men to “free” themselves from “socially induced incarceration.”. Tristan Tate, Andrew’s younger brother, arguably lives in his brother’s shadow — but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Tristan may be less well known but he’s still controversial,” says Harry Ainsworth, a videographer, YouTube scholar and expert on the Tate Brothers. “He appears in content with Andrew but doesn’t leading the charge with the efforts like the War Room, nor does he pull in big numbers on social.”.

Unlike Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate is a father and has openly discussed his fatherhood on various podcasts. He has a young daughter, whose age is unknown, but Tate claims he has not been permitted to see her since the investigation against him and his brother began in 2023.

“I’m now not allowed to talk to my own daughter and her mother. They’ve stolen her from me and she will not see my face for three more years until I can bury this bulls*** accusation,” he said in 2024. “They cut me off by saying that me being so nice to her mother is going to end up [as] human trafficking. Isn’t that cruel? Isn’t that a knife in the back from a country I’ve shown nothing but respect for?”.

Ainsworth notes that Tristan could “perceivably seem a bit less controversial than his brother,” but that “could simply be due to his face not being as out there as Andrew.” He continues: “He’s the same cigar smoking ‘man’s man’ but without the overwhelming online presence and baiting personality of his brother.”.

Before his manosphere influencer era, Tate became known to the public via the 2016 series of Big Brother, where he appeared as a contestant. He was later removed from the Big Brother house after showrunners discovered that Tate was involved in an ongoing rape investigation with Hertfordshire Police. The case was closed in 2019 with no charges filed.

However, Tate claimed he was ejected from the Big Brother house for another reason. The influencer alleged that his removal was due to a video surfacing of him striking a woman with a belt. Tate claimed that this footage showed a consensual act and he and the woman were “friends.”.

Tate then resurfaced in the 2020s, becoming well known in right wing circles for his appearances on Alex Jones’ podcast Infowars and his controversial comments online. He breached the mainstream in 2022, building a strong following on TikTok, Instagram and X. Andrew Tate became the third-most Googled person of 2023, with his Wikipedia page ranking among the top 25 English Wikipedia articles that year.