Andrew Tate, Greta Thunberg and an arrest in Romania

Andrew Tate loves fast cars, misogynistic people, and most of all, attention. The internet loves digital skirmishes and gloating. Greta Thunberg loves the environment. And the Romanian police don’t like it when rapes and human trafficking happen on their precinct. If you mix all this together, you get what will probably be the last fairy tale of 2022.

And it goes like this: Once upon a time there was a British influencer named Andrew Tate. He became an ex-influencer because all social networks blocked him. All social networks? No, he was reactivated on Twitter when ownership changed there.

“Hello Greta, I have 33 cars”

So it happened that the misogynistic and consumer-glorifying influencer from Great Britain met a climate activist from Sweden on this same short message service. “Hello Greta Thunberg,” wrote Tate, “I have 33 cars.” What sounds like advertising should of course be provocation. “Please give me your email address so I can send you a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” Tate wrote. Around 200,000 people found this message funny and clicked “Like”.

Thunberg also seemed to be having fun and wrote: “Yes, please enlighten me, email me at: [email protected].” Small dick energy does not specifically mean Andrew Tate’s genitals, but his behavior. You could also translate it as “big mouth, nothing behind it”. Around 3.2 million people liked Thunberg’s answer.

But the fact that the Swedish girl, who doesn’t own a car or have much money to speak of, got 3 million more “likes” than himself was too much for Tate. That’s when the fun stopped. There was only one thing left: Tate had to record a video in which he insulted Thunberg. On the video he smokes a cheroot with relish. On the table below him is a pizza box sold by a brand unique to Romania. Possible evidence that Tate is there. Evidence that could cost Tate dearly.

Now the Romanian police have had their eyes on the British for a long time. And she doesn’t like what she sees.

First arrest in April

In April of this year, the Romanian police stormed the Tate brothers’ villa, searched the house, confiscated several devices and took the two to the post for two days. Because there was a suspicion that women were being held against their will in the villa. This possibly related to human trafficking and illegal prostitution. The Tate brothers were later released, whether on bail or not. Her explanation for the police presence: “Bitches love to lie.”

But the police did not believe in a lie and continued to investigate. After all, Tate himself said in a video that has since been deleted that he and his younger brother Tristan moved to Romania “40 percent” from Great Britain because the Romanian police are less strict than the British when it comes to sex crimes. “I’m not a rapist,” Tate said in the now-deleted video clip, “but I like the idea that I can just do whatever I want. I like being free.”

However, Tate, his brother and two Romanians are no longer free. They were arrested on suspicion of rape and human trafficking. The Romanian Public Prosecutor’s Office (DIICOT), the special unit responsible for organized crime, confirmed this to the DPA on Friday.

Tate and the loverboy method

The suspicion: Since the beginning of 2021, the four arrested people are said to have trafficked in human beings in Romania, the USA and Great Britain and forced women into prostitution. The victims interviewed so far were recruited using the loverboy method, writes DIICOT in a statement.

In this method, women are pretended to be in love and marriage is promised. Later, the women and girls were violently held in various apartments in the Bucharest area, forced to have sex and to film pornographic videos. One of the victims was also raped twice by one of those arrested.

The punch line is everything

So far, so little fairytale. But on the contrary. However, early Friday morning, a rumor spread on the Internet that the Romanian police were only able to arrest Tate and his possible accomplices because they recognized a Romanian pizza box on the video that he had publicly sent to Greta Thunberg. This proved that Tate was actually in Romania at the time the video was recorded. The villain in his blind rage had put a stop to it himself.

But like any fairy tale, this one is simply a story with a desirable punch line. The speed with which the rumor spread shows how much the world longed for it. Various media also took up the narrative. For example, the “Spiegel” headlined: “Andrew Tate arrested after Twitter beef with Greta Thunberg in Romania.” And the “Tages-Anzeiger” reads: “The “king of toxic masculinity” ran into the environmental activist – and then apparently accidentally revealed his whereabouts to the authorities in a provocation video.”

But the spokeswoman for the DIICOT prosecutor said at the request of the DPA: “These are amusing speculations.” It is not true that the box played a role in the arrest. But like every fairy tale, this one teaches us something. Thunberg wrote to Tate on Twitter: “This is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes.”