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Right’s influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan landed in the United States after prosecutors have raised restrictions that prevented them from leaving Romania, where they were detained for sexual exploitation.
Local television images have shown the brothers, who are American and British nationals, landing a private jet at Fort Lauderdale airport near Miami, Florida on Thursday.
The couple had been held in Romania since 2022 for human trafficking, sexual exploitation, money laundering and the exploitation of a group of organized crimes. They denied reprehensible acts.
“My brother and I are largely misunderstood,” Andrew Tate told journalists at the airport. “We have not yet been found guilty of crimes of our lives, never.”
The Romanian authorities’ surprise decision to raise travel restrictions on Misogynous self-written influencers came after the American pressure which was reported by the Financial Times, with senior Washington officials pushing the Romanian authorities to raise restrictions on the brothers.
Romanian authorities said on Thursday that they had “changed” the ban on the accused leaving Romania, but the prosecutors said that the criminal prosecution was continuing. The United Kingdom has also sought to extradite them.
The Romanian authorities allowed the brothers to go on condition that they return next month to go to the local police station, but people familiar with the issue could not say if they would comply.
A Bucharest court decided Thursday to thaw the brothers’ bank accounts and return their luxury properties and cars, which had been seized in the context of the procedure against them. Some assets remain “under precautionary attacks,” said their legal team.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania, Emil Hurezeanu, told the Financial Times on Thursday that he had “no information on the liberation” of the brothers, nor “information on the requests or the US requests”.
The detention of the tates in Romania aroused significant interest in the United States, where it was defended by right-wing social media personalities, with personalities such as the former presenter of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, one of the main supporters of President Donald Trump, carrying out sympathetic interviews.
Andrew Tate has built a sequence of several million on online platforms for young men who promote the idea of male superiority and to reject feminism. He moved to Romania in 2017, claiming that the country’s legal system was more permissive with regard to personal freedoms than in the West.
The British extradition request came after the police obtained a European arrest warrant in March 2024 as part of an investigation into allegations of rape and human trafficking. The Bedfordshire police who head this investigation said Thursday that they were working with the Romanian authorities as part of an in -law investigation, but had no comment.
A group of four alleged British victims of Tate published a joint declaration saying that they were “incredulous and felt re-traumatized by the news that the Romanian authorities granted pressure from the Trump administration to allow Andrew Tate” to go to the United States.
“It is clear that there is now a major risk that the criminal prosecution for its alleged crimes in Romania does not take place,” they added.
Matthew Jury, their lawyer at McCue Jury & Partners, called on the British authorities to take “immediate measures to guarantee their extradition to the United Kingdom” to deal with accusations.
Romania has become an unlikely battlefield for pro-Trump influencers who also criticized the country’s authorities for canceling the first round of its presidential election in December. The authorities alleged that the vast Russian interference had benefited the far -right candidate Călin Georgescu, who finished first.
Prosecutors began a criminal investigation on Georgescu on Wednesday, with legal experts suggesting that allegations against him could be used to prevent him from presenting himself in repeated elections for May.
Analysts said the two cases highlighted the extreme political pressures on Romania’s judicial system.
Costin Ciobanu, a researcher at the University of Aarhus, specialized in Romania, said that recent events were “likely to trigger internal debates and raise questions about how legal power” had dealt with business.
Additional report by Suzi Ring and Peter Andringa in London
