Andrew Tate thought he was above the law. Romania proved him wrong.

Andrew Tate, a pugnacious online influencer and self-proclaimed “King of Toxic Masculinity,” never made it a secret why he chose Romania as his home and business base.

“I like to live in a society where my money, my influence and my power means I’m not under or obligated” to any law, Mr. Tate told his fans.

But, like much of what the former kickboxer has told his millions of mostly young male followers on social media — including claims he’s a billionaire and holds 19 passports — Mr Tate’s belief in Romania as a risk-free haven for anti-social behavior reflected more fantasy than reality.

Romanian authorities arrested Mr Tate, a citizen of both the United States and Britain, and his younger brother, Tristan, in December on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized crime group. Both men, who deny any wrongdoing, have been detained for three months in the capital Bucharest and are now under house arrest awaiting trial.

Their home is a sprawling settlement in a dingy cul-de-sac in Voluntari, a city next to Bucharest that’s dotted with shiny new office towers and run-down empty lots. It looks more like an industrial warehouse than the lair of a man who boasted of enormous wealth and posted videos of himself hanging out in private jets with beautiful women and in fast cars.

The high-end cars that once stood in the courtyard, including a Rolls-Royce, a Porsche, an Aston Martin and a BMW, have all disappeared and been seized by Romanian authorities. The only vehicle left is a clumsy Russian Lada. It wasn’t worth confiscating.

Romania is still well below most of its fellow members of the European Union in clean government rankings. In last year’s Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International, only Bulgaria and Hungary were lower. And Romania, according to the The 2022 State Department report on human traffickingremains “a primary source country for sex trafficking” in Europe.

But Romania has made a serious effort in recent years to tackle the endemic corruption and general lawlessness that have plagued the country for so long – which apparently attracted Mr. Tate. Before his arrest, he said he enjoyed “living in countries where corruption is open to everyone,” and where anyone can pay a $50 bribe to get out of a speeding ticket.

Eugen Vidineac, the Romanian lawyer who defended Mr Tate, said his client had “said a lot of stupid things” but that after his arrest he “didn’t think Romania was so corrupt”.

Since Mr Tate established Romania as his base around 2016, the country’s anti-trafficking agency has expanded its staff and launched a message blitz on billboards, television and online, warning women about ‘lover boys’, traffickers who use seduction as a recruitment technique . Mr. Tate is accused of using this tactic to lure vulnerable women onto his turf to perform in online sex videos.

The State Department report said that while Romania “did not fully meet minimum standards for the elimination of human trafficking”, it was making “significant efforts to do so”.

It cited legislative changes, a sharp increase in prosecutions for human trafficking, intensified cooperation with other European countries and the creation in 2021 of a special unit to combat sex trafficking by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, the agency responsible for investigation leads into Mr. Tate.

The directorate opened 1,246 new human trafficking investigations last year, doubling the number by 2021.

Monica Boseff, the president of the Open Door Foundation, a private group that runs a shelter for women fleeing the sex trade, said Mr Tate “wasn’t the only misogynist to make scary statements about women on social media.” But she said he had “miscalculated” in his belief that anything is possible in Romania.

“We still have big problems to solve, but there has been real improvement and we finally have hope” that abuse and exploitation of women are slowly being seen as crimes by society and officials, Ms Boseff said.

For Silvia Tabusca, a law professor at the Romanian American University in Bucharest, who has worked with prosecutors on human trafficking cases, Mr. Tate not so much that he misjudged Romania’s changing legal and social climate, but that he included a young American woman among his alleged victims.

With no pressure from the United States to investigate Mr. Tate, Ms. Tabusca said, “I’m not sure Romanian prosecutors would have ever touched him.”

The US embassy in Bucharest, citing “privacy concerns”, declined to comment on whether US authorities had intervened on behalf of a US citizen. The Romanian agency leading the investigation also declined to comment.

Like Ms Tabusca, Mr Tate’s lawyer attributed what he described as the unexpected zeal of Romanian authorities against his client to the US intervention, which he said began last year after the mother of a young Florida woman began to express concerns that Mr Tate had her daughter captured and asked the State Department to do something.

The mother’s appeal, the lawyer said, prompted US authorities to turn to Romania for help and led to the opening of a criminal investigation last April — shortly after the daughter told her mother she was in Romania and on the Mr. Tate’s yard. Investigators wiretapped the compound, tapping his phone and monitoring his movements and online communications.

The details of what they found are still classified and, according to the lawyer, who has access to the file, do not provide evidence of criminal wrongdoing, only of debauchery. “My client’s problem,” he said, “is his lifestyle. But lifestyle is not a crime. What matters is what is illegal, not what is immoral.”

Mr Tate, in turn, gave a distinctively melodramatic explanation for his arrest. A day after armed police officers stormed his compound, he told his Twitter followers, now numbering 6.6 million, that “the matrix sent their officers.” The ‘matrix’ is Mr Tate’s catch-all term for what he sees as a conspiracy by ‘awake’ corporate elites, mainstream politicians and feminists to emasculate men.

Prosecutors accuse Mr. Tate of luring women to his compound and then forcing them to work as performers on pornographic webcams. The lawyer said Mr Tate’s residence had no webcam studios and his client had never forced anyone to stay or work there. The Tate brothers, he said, ‘are famous; they are rich; they are young and beautiful,” adding, “What would be their interest in forcing women to act as slaves?”

The only people living in the compound, the lawyer said, were the brothers and their various girlfriends. He acknowledged that some women had appeared in videos released by Mr Tate, but said they had done so of their own free will in hopes it would help them gain a following on social media. “He never took money from the girls,” the lawyer said.

The now-defunct website for one of Mr. Tate’s business ventures – an online academy offering a “Ph.D. Program” in “techniques to get girls” – gave a different story. It boasted that Mr. Tate “owns and operates strip clubs and webcam studios” and has “TOP QUALITY wives living with him and making him money full time”.

The sales pitch for the program, which charged more than $400 for enrollment, promised to teach students “how to build an army of women who are so loyal to you that they’ll allow you to have as many girls as you want.” you want.”

Two women described as victims by prosecutors have maintained that they interacted with Mr. Tate of their own accord and were not coerced. A clinical psychologist’s report, prepared as part of the case, said they had been brainwashed into believing they were in a real romantic relationship with Mr. Tate.

Ms Boseff, the head of the Open Door Foundation, said most of the more than 1,200 women who had passed through her group’s shelter over the past decade had been entrapped by traffickers posing as ‘lover boys’ and often felt affection and loyalty to them despite being forced to work as prostitutes.

Mr. Tate, she said, understood that “everyone craves to be loved, to be cared for, and to hear words of encouragement”—needs that can make young women with turbulent family lives particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

Human Trafficking Bureau statistics show that 74 percent of victims are recruited by acquaintances, friends, neighbors or even relatives.

Since his release from prison and house arrest in late March, Mr Tate has recast himself as a philanthropist, claiming to have set up a shelter for dogs, rebuilt a Romanian orphanage and “to save the world.”

Unconvinced by his newfound commitment to good works, a Bucharest court on Friday extended the house arrest of the Tate brothers for another month.

“Romania is not as corrupt as Tate had thought and hoped,” said Mihaela Dragus, a police officer from the Romanian National Agency against Trafficking in Human Beings.

Delia Marinescu contributed reporting from Bucharest.