Andrew Tate freed from prison after winning appeal
On Friday, a Romanian official confirmed that Andrew Tate, the controversial internet figure who has spent months in prison on suspicion of organized crime and human trafficking, had successfully appealed to have his imprisonment replaced with house arrest.
A judge’s decision last week to prolong Tate’s detention for a fourth time for 30 days was upheld on appeal by the Bucharest Court of Appeal, according to Ramona Bolla, a spokeswoman for Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT.
Tate, 36, is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States. a U.S. citizen with 5.4 million Twitter followers, along with his sibling Tristan and two ladies from Romania, was detained in late December in Bucharest.
On Friday, Bolla announced that the four had been granted an appeal that would keep them under house arrest until April 29. There has been no official indictment of any of the four accused. The judge ordered that they be freed without delay. Bolla emphasized that the judgment of the appeals court is definitive and cannot be challenged by the prosecution.
Tate, a professional kickboxer who has lived in Romania since 2017, has been barred from several social media sites for the hateful and sexist comments he has made in the past. He has said numerous times that the Romanian authorities have no proof and that the entire case against him is a “political” plot to muzzle him.
After the arrests in December, DIICOT released a statement saying they had found six victims of the human trafficking case who had been exposed to “acts of physical violence and mental coercion” and sexual exploitation at the hands of the alleged criminal ring.
The agency claims that victims were lured in under false pretenses of romantic interest before being subjected to intimidation, monitoring, and other forms of control in order to force them to engage in pornographic acts for the criminal organization’s financial benefit.
A Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, and Porsche were among the expensive vehicles seized from a property near Bucharest in January by Romanian officials investigating links to the Tate brothers. They claimed to have taken possession of property valued around $3.9 million.
If prosecutors are successful in establishing that the vehicles’ owners profited from illegal activities like human trafficking, those funds will be used to pay for the inquiry and recompense victims. Tate tried to fight off the confiscation of his property, but was ultimately ineffective.