Tucker Carlson - Ep. 14 The Tate brothers have just been released from house arrest in Romania, so it seemed like a good time to hear from Andrew's brother, Tristan.
Tristan Tate defends his and Andrew’s wrongful imprisonment in Romania, exposing a politically motivated case built on coerced testimony and flimsy evidence like TikTok interactions, with two women jailed for 92 days without charges. He ties the persecution to Andrew’s controversial views on masculinity, framing it as a global "Deep State" attack on traditional values while praising Romania’s stability over Western decline. Tate contrasts his CCTV-cleared innocence with real traffickers’ lenient treatment, vowing legal retribution against his tormentors despite refusing to sue Romania. A former fighter and Christian convert, he dismisses media bias—like the BBC—as state propaganda, predicting a free-speech backlash while warning of authoritarian risks. Now free after years of house arrest, he criticizes Western cities for crime and moral decay, praising Dubai and Saudi Arabia’s religious order as safer alternatives, and pins U.S. revival on figures like Tucker Carlson. [Automatically generated summary]
They're part of the organized criminal gang, which is hilarious because Luana, one of the girls, has never, ever, in the whole six years I've known her, had a conversation with Andrew once.
They don't know each other.
Andrew didn't even know her name.
And she's apparently a part of this organized criminal gang.
The interesting part is...
Do you remember Christopher Hitchens when he was alive?
Oh, well, I've never met the guy, but I read an article he did for Vanity Fair about 11 or 12 years ago.
Where he volunteered to be waterboarded to test the effectiveness of torture on foreign prisoners.
And the conclusion he came to was, in the article, and I remembered it vividly when I was in jail, if you don't have the answer to their questions and you are being tortured, you can psychologically break.
You have to be torturing people who do know the answers.
Otherwise, this is an ineffective mode of operating.
And essentially, the way I look at the way these two women were treated was they were locked in prison because they know us.
They're an attack vector on us.
One is my personal assistant, so she knows everything I do.
She does airport pickups, pays my electricity bills.
And every week or so, they had the keys of freedom dangled in front of them.
Are you ready to tell us about the Tate's criminal activities now?
And they said no, and they stayed in prison.
The next week, you ready to tell us about the criminal activities that the Tate brothers did?
And the problem is, they can't have told the police about criminal activities that I take part in, because those criminal activities don't exist.
So I see it as a method of psychological torture.
I'm not mad I was sent to jail.
Any notions of being angry and justice and stuff that I truly have in my soul is for those two girls who went to jail with me.
Because they didn't deserve it.
I mean, I've probably done something in my life that made me deserve something.
You know, these are two wonderful people.
Wonderful people.
And they were sent to prison with me.
One for having the crime of being my personal assistant and one for the crime of knowing me.
alleged victims who say they weren't victims of rap.
And they're charged in this organized criminal game.
It's not the fact that, as I said, the evidence is junk because they now have to put a case together. - But I'm confused as to how what you're being accused of constitutes Human trafficking?
Especially when you understand that the Romanian alleged victims, who say they're not victims, have lived in this country for 10 to 15 years before I ever showed up here.
So I'm not sure how the trafficking took place.
But in a very loose way, they had to prove I was doing something with women.
By coercing them for my financial benefit, which is how we ended up with the TikTok story.
Because the real evidence they wanted, maybe the prosecutors, maybe the people who attacked me genuinely thought I was a pimp.
Maybe they did when they started this.
And they assumed that the perp walk and putting me in handcuffs and walking me in front of the cameras would have women coming forward saying they were harmed.
Maybe they were looking for real evidence.
I don't believe if they knew that they were going to end up with this TikTok story, they would have...
And the way to attack somebody is through his loved ones.
I'm not going to say that, you know, Andrew got me put in jail.
But what a way to get to Andrew than to throw his little brother in jail and say he's part of your gang, he's a human trafficker too.
Because I don't even have any allegations of misogyny against me.
I've never made a YouTube video and joked about men being better drivers.
I've never done any of these things.
But I had to go to jail along with him.
So attacking me was a way of attacking him.
And attacking my personal assistant and her friend, I think, was a way of hoping you were going to turn these women into prosecution witnesses, essentially.
But, frankly, once they moved me into a room with Andrew, frankly, I quite enjoyed jail.
You know, I think that in...
When I got out, I spoke to a girl I knew, and she goes, you know, in three years you'll laugh about this.
And I'm like, no, you don't understand.
I was laughing in jail.
And I'm laughing right now.
They might send me back for five years for TikTok theft.
TikTok theft.
That's what I'm officially accused of.
But frankly, I quite enjoyed it.
I feel like me and my brother are very busy people.
We live together.
We've spent every waking hour together since we were...
Born, essentially.
But we have our own lives to live.
You know, I've got my daughter.
I've got business to run.
He's got business to run.
We're both at our laptops a lot.
We're on our phones a lot.
We're on our devices a lot.
I said to Andrew after the first month, I said, you know, we may have had more meaningful conversations this month than we would have potentially had this year if we hadn't been sent to jail.
So I feel like our relationship is stronger than before.
And there's no universe where I can't make Andrew laugh.
And you have all the time in the world to play your stupid jokes.
So every time someone didn't want to smoke a cigarette, you insult them, you call them names.
That's what guys do.
Andrew would go out to visit the doctor or the lawyer, etc.
I don't know if he's going to be back in 10 minutes or in an hour.
And I'd open a pack of cigarettes and stand by the door like this.
So the first thing he does when he opens the door is me forcing him to smoke a cigarette.
I had all the time in the world to play jokes on him.
So I didn't...
I still don't see it as such a negative thing.
And people will call me crazy.
But it was me and my brother drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, talking.
You know, we have...
An innumerable amount of stories and experiences and ideas.
Let's just say this would have happened in any NATO or European Union country that I chose to live in.
It would have happened.
It would have happened in Spain.
It would have happened in Poland.
It would have happened in France.
The French, the Spanish, and the Polish have nothing against me.
I think the Romanians really have nothing against me.
The Romanian people love me.
You know, Romania is the most Christian country in the world outside of the Vatican City.
98.8% Orthodox Christian.
These people share the same values as me.
They don't feel people like me should be locked up.
I have so much support in Romania from both powerful people and common people alike.
So it's very hard for me to believe that the Romanians woke up one day and thought, "This guy who publicizes how wonderful our country is and spends millions of dollars here in this country, let's get him." I find it very difficult to believe that that was a Romanian idea because it's not the kind of thing you would do.
Why would you?
If you had a great neighbor move into your neighborhood, Raise the property values.
Talk about how great your neighborhood is.
He was a law-abiding citizen, didn't hurt anyone.
Would you think, yeah, we need to go throw petrol bombs in his house?
Let's burn his house down.
Let's get him out.
No, you wouldn't.
So I believe this would have happened anywhere.
So I won't say who did it, but I don't hold Romania responsible at all.
And I never will.
People said if they drop this case, oh, they can't just drop it because you'll sue the country.
And I famously tweeted, I will never sue the country of Romania.
Romania has struggling hospitals, struggling orphanages, infrastructure issues.
The pensions are a mess.
The teachers need pay rises.
They've made me feel welcome up until this point.
And this has been my home country.
My daughter is a Romanian.
I'm not going to steal $200 million from the government.
And do what with it?
I don't need the money.
I don't want this to reflect negatively on this country in any way.
But it has.
Who with money and power and influence wants to come here now?
It's made people nervous.
And that hurts me.
As I said, my daughter is a Romanian citizen.
This is her country.
So it's my country too, isn't it?
So I don't like the reputational damages country has faced.
And exactly who did it, I think in five or six years, we'll find out.
There'll be fingerprints on a lot of pieces of paper that we'll be able to know exactly why this happened.
But it didn't happen because I'm a human trafficker.
My father got essentially screwed over by the VA, a story that I won't tell here.
But although he played chess and he was a very smart man, he had no money.
None.
And there was a point when my mother and him, I believe, were going through the divorce and she made the point of, look, if something happens to the kids, we can't afford to take them to the hospital.
And they made the decision together saying, well, look, the kids are British citizens.
You're a British citizen.
Go over and live in England.
We'll see if we can fix the marriage at some point in the future.
Never happened.
But it was a financial issue that made us move.
And probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.
Did I think about going back to the United States?
No, back to the UK. Oh, back to the UK? No.
Well, I've always felt British.
I moved to England when I was eight.
So I was very young, very, you know, it's why my British accent is stronger than Andrew's because he was a year and a half older than me by the time we moved there.
But I really liked England and I'm super proud of England and proud to be British.
Which upsets me because obviously England's falling apart.
But I consider myself English.
So I like that country.
I can't move back now.
When the government is saying you can't talk about this guy's brother in school, I'm going to move back there.
I'm public enemy number one.
And bad things will happen.
Worse than they happened here, I suspect.
So sadly, I can't go back to England.
But I do love England.
I said if I could swear loyalty to any British leader ever, it would have been the Queen of England.
King Charles, not so much.
But everyone's like, oh, who do you vote for?
You know, Labour or Conservative?
Liberal, Democrat?
I was like, no, Queen Elizabeth II. That's the politician I'm proud of.
I don't want to hear about the others because they're not interesting.
Well, they don't want anybody to have anything to be proud of.
It's the reason buildings are ugly.
It's the reason they'll take down your national flags.
It's the reason they allow mass amounts of unchecked immigration of people from different cultures, some of them good, some of them bad, to flood into your borders.
They just don't want anybody to have anything to rally behind, whether it be a flag or a monarch.
So then they can just divide people and tell people how to think, what to do, how to behave.
If I say, no, no, no, Queen Elizabeth has these certain values and I'm British, so I'm going to have the same values as her.
I'll give you an example.
I like to speak the Queen's English.
Now it's the King's English, but that's what it's called.
English people can't even speak their own language anymore.
You ever been to London?
Heard their accents?
Yes.
I know Americans who are illiterate, but it is the English language, so I'll bully the English.
There are British people who speak one language who can't even speak it right.
No, no, no.
Speaking the Queen's English was the standard we used to set for people to communicate with one another.
That's gone.
So it's sad that these people want to destroy the foundations of almost every society.
And what better way in England to destroy the foundation of British society and British patriotism than destroying the crown?
And when Romanians don't know that, I get offended.
I'm like, how can you not know that?
How can you be proud of being a Romanian and drive past that monument every single day and not know where those men fought and died?
So even out of respect for the country I live in, I'll learn its history.
So when you know history, you can look at the modern world and see what's wrong with it, what's right with it, what's going wrong, what could go wrong.
And I feel like an understanding of history is the basis of Wine and Andrew's knowledge, if you can even call it knowledge.
I feel like Western society, the ideas that are purported to young men to divide...
You know, if you have three or four brothers in a family, oh, go to different universities, study different things, pay a bunch of different rents to a bunch of different people.
The idea, which is more Middle Eastern, of pooling your resources and keeping the family together, is not something the West pushes anymore.
You know, I've heard the—have you ever heard the expression, never mix family with business?
That destroys the nuclear family, the modern society, the idea of men being close friends and being respectful to one another and working together as a team.
They want you all divided.
Because when you're fighting an individual war against your life, the struggle...
Your bank balance, maybe your wife, your kids who don't respect you, when you're fighting that individual war, you're never going to unite and fight any kind of war that you need to fight together.
Even in Romania, look, 1989, there was a massive revolution here.
Say what you want about communism and Ceausescu, and I hate communism, and I don't want communism to come anywhere, and neither do the Romanians.
But Romania is a traditional society, a Christian society.
Nuclear family is very, very important to them.
Family values are very important to them.
How many drug addicts have you seen on the streets?
I mean, the separation of the nuclear family gives the state the ability to raise your kids.
And my brother's probably touched on this.
The moment there's no father at home, the moment the mother's busy working, not at home cooking meals and raising the kids and reading books to them like my mother was, then who's raising your kids?
The school?
The internet?
The television?
Whatever ideas we put on those are the ideas the kids are going to grow up with.
We don't want dad out working and mom at home with the kids 24-7.
No, no, no.
The mother of my kids, call me sexist if you want, never has to work again.
She can have passions.
She can have interests.
She wants to learn the violin, the piano, dance, ballet.
She's a former gymnast, one of them.
Go and do this.
Good.
You do what you enjoy.
Don't worry about the money.
I'll make the money.
Pursue your passions because I want you at home with the kid.
That's what I want.
And people call me a misogynist and they call me sexist for it.
Well, I've chosen her.
She's obviously a good woman.
I want her raising my daughter.
I don't want her in a daycare with God knows who.
Luckily, in Romania, I'm relatively safe from that.
But, I mean, I've seen some questionable people working in your daycares in the United States.
I feel like even if they're like, oh, you're 35 almost, your brother's 36 and you live together, they'll find it weird until they see our relationship and see how we interact with each other and see how we live and see how we work together.
They'll find it weird up until that point.
I've only ever actually ever had Western women call it weird.
I've only had...
Eastern Europeans have a different kind of mindset.
They get why two men would work together and team up.
In England, I've had English women say it's weird.
We've had women try to get in between our relationship throughout our life.
When there are big riots in London, the BBC doesn't cover them until three days later.
They don't want to inspire people to go down to London and protest.
It's not a news organization anymore than it is a government-funded agency for telling the British people what to believe and what to think.
So the fact that the British politicians don't like Andrew means the BBC, by nature, by instruction, have to hate him.
A journalist who likes Andrew would not be allowed to come here if he worked for the BBC and ask fair questions.
Questions like, you haven't been convicted of anything.
Why did you spend so much time in jail?
That would be a very normal question to ask him.
They're not allowed to.
They are the government's propaganda arm in the way that every single, in the way that the North Korean television station is the arm of the North Korean propaganda arm.
It's funded by the government.
It's run by the government.
It purports the government's ideas, no matter what they are, and Andrew Tate is a danger to society for some reason.
So that's why the BBC hates him, because the government hates him.
What else is the BBC? Do independent journalists hate Andrew?
I'm glad you asked that, because I'd actually like to clear this up.
Andrew is a Muslim, and I'm a Christian.
In a previous life, me and my brother used to run a streaming company, essentially, where pretty girls would stream online and talk to dudes online.
There was some nudity involved.
And it was a studio, essentially.
The girls worked for my company.
They had contracts to work for my company.
They got paid very, very well.
And people were like, ah, they were involved in that business where they recruited women.
Is that what they're investigating for the human trafficking allegations?
No.
No, no, no.
The human trafficking charges filed against me because they called the women who used to work for me.
Yeah, great boss.
I made some money.
My life has moved on and they hung up the phone on the police.
The charges are that in 2021, I recruited friends of mine by brainwashing them to steal their TikTok money.
If the police could have found a link between anything illegal and any business I've run from my webcam studio to any company I've ever run, they would have put it in the case file.
No, I mean, we have people who put us ourselves on TikTok.
To kind of spread our own message, do we directly or indirectly make money from promoting ourselves on TikTok?
Maybe.
That's not human trafficking.
Did I traffic myself?
Is Andrew trafficking himself?
No, but we make no money from TikTok and we make no money from anyone streaming on TikTok.
And I certainly wouldn't need, I don't know how much TikTok influencers make, but I certainly wouldn't need to brainwash people to steal amounts of money like that.
You know, do they make $100 million?
All right, let's get into the brainwashing business, me and you.
Let's go.
There's money to be made.
But that's simply not the case, is it?
So to believe that these charges are true, you have to understand that I'm already a father.
I'm already a retired sportsman.
I'm already a public figure.
I'm very well known.
One million plus followers on Instagram.
The whole world knows who I am.
Now's the time to risk it all and start brainwashing and kidnapping people for money from TikTok.
That's what you have to believe my thought process was.
And I may seem...
Unorthodox or unconventional, the people who may speak to me.
But you're not accused, and I'm speaking specifically of the accusations, you're not accused of locking someone in your basement or physically holding someone captive.
Elon would have to take his foot off the gas pedal when it comes to work.
I know he's a workaholic.
He's insane.
Truly inspiring.
That man.
And I don't think he does anything by halves.
If he tried to run all his various companies, do an hour or two of training a day, didn't take it seriously, Zuckerberg has a head start in terms of technical skill.
Elon is bigger.
He's stronger.
He's physically more imposing.
If he took six months to train five hours a day, Elon beat Zuckerberg.
I would say, without trying to kiss your ass, because I'm not an ass kisser, that's down to people like you fighting the good fight.
Depends on the American political climate, which obviously you have a lot of sway over.
And America is the king of the world, whether anyone likes it or not.
I believe it's the negative ideas from England and America that have certainly made this happen to me.
Also, my case is important for countries in Eastern Europe.
Obviously, Romania is a big ally of the United States, has been for a very long time.
They have a very good relationship with the United States.
If important people in Romania, who I know speak highly of me, stand up and say, we're not going to publicly crucify this guy because America doesn't like him or because England doesn't like him.
I believe this is a very good moment for Eastern European countries as well, NATO allies, to say, look, we don't have to do everything you say.
We don't have to follow this insane agenda of accusing people you don't like with imaginary crimes and throwing them in jail.
This could be a victory for Romania.
The work you're doing could be a victory for the United States.
England's lost, so forget England.
There's no free speech in England.
That's over.
Yeah, so it all depends on what shifts happen, who wins the next elections, how effective cancellations are.
You have people like Rumble, Elon, fighting against this silencing of every idea that's counter.
Intuitive to the agenda of the deep state or the matrix, as my brother calls them.
So I don't know, but it's a very interesting time to be alive.
I would like the optimist in me would like to think there's finally enough pushback.
So let's take Alex Jones.
You don't have to agree with everything Alex Jones says.
I like Alex Jones.
I don't agree with everything Alex Jones says.
And you don't have to.
But Bill Maher famously, and credit to him, said when Alex Jones got banned, he said we shouldn't be banning people.
He said, I hate Alex Jones, but Alex Jones should be allowed to talk.
Everyone should be allowed to talk in the town square.
I feel like when they got Alex Jones, there was no safety net.
He is a warrior, and he continued fighting, and now he's back in the mainstream.
Good for him.
But he was renegated to his own site with his own servers, streaming every day to small audiences after they axed him off YouTube.
So now there is a, I don't want to call it counterculture, but if you cancel people, look, they canceled Andrew.
How successful was that?
He's sitting here with you today.
He's bigger than ever.
His voice is louder than ever.
Now, thanks to people like Alex Jones, who took the initial...
Brunt of the weapon, the cancellation weapon.
Now there are lots of different platforms, lots of different apps, lots of different applications.
I mean, Elon's taken over Twitter, which was a mainstream app, which censored people very heavily.
The pushback has started.
So the optimist in me would like to look at the trend line and say things are getting better as compared to when they cancelled Alex six, seven years ago.
I have documents and papers I need to sign in the Middle East for various reasons.
I'm not going to broadcast them here because it's another avenue of attack.
I have paperwork I need filling out.
I just need to be able to live my life.
I mean, for a man like me, I'm—and I've explained this in court to the Romanian judges, two of them which let me go, wonderful women.
They let me out of prison.
They put me on house arrest.
I said, this isn't just some preventative detention measure.
Because I'm not some drug dealer who's now not dealing drugs because I'm now in jail.
I'm an international businessman.
You want to know how much money I make and why?
Let me come here tomorrow with paperwork and show you.
I'll call my accountant.
This is why I'm rich.
There's no human trafficking.
But when you take a man who is an international businessman, who has to travel, who has to meet people, who has to talk to earn his living, and you lock him in the way that I've been locked up, I don't even want to guess how much money this has lost me.
I don't even want to get upwards of $50 million.
For sure.
Cost me and lost me.
But I need to get my...
I need to just get my life back in order and also enjoy it.
I will appreciate things much more after being in jail.
So I'm going to continue living the same life as before.
Where would I go?
I don't know.
The Middle East?
Maybe England.
I need to visit my tailor.
I've got a bunch of suits being made.
But now I'm scared of England because I know England's my enemy.
So what am I going to go there and get arrested for...
I don't know.
Hate speech?
I don't know what they're going to arrest me for.
But when people say, oh, they can't just arrest you and throw you in jail for no reason, yes, they can.
And a lot of people with money, where New York back in the 1970s, 1980s, maybe was, and California, probably the best places in the world to live, quite literally.
Now you've got a billionaire living in New York or a multimillionaire living in New York.
He's older.
He's retired.
But what?
He can't walk the streets at all?
He has to stay in his apartment.
He needs bodyguards to go to the store, the supermarket.
He's like, you know, why not Dubai?
What does Dubai have?
What does New York have that Dubai doesn't?
Dubai has everything.
It's a wonderful place.
The United Arab Emirates is a wonderful place.
And Saudi Arabia has opened up recently.
And give it five, six, seven years, they've got the money.
Saudi Arabia is going to have nice, clean, beautiful, pretty, safe cities that every millionaire or billionaire in the world Can enjoy.
And they can go there and enjoy the Amini's and live their life without the threat of some psychopath on the subway trying to attack you.
And then if you defend yourself, what happens to you?
Maybe 20 years?
We're about to find out.
In two cases.
It's sickening.
So I think that the...
And I'll give the credit to religion.
I'll give the credit to the Islamic faith.
They don't want that bullshit in their country.
They don't want their kids being taught immorality in the schools.
So if you want to have kids and you're a very busy man, maybe your wife's very busy too.
And you want a comfortable environment where you know that your kids can go to school and learn things like math and history and geography.
I know, crazy, right?
Without drag queens reading stories to them, you can go to the Middle East and be assured of what's happening to your children, to your family, in your home, on your streets.
I get the massive push.
I get it.
And there are different places in the world, like America was, hopefully will be again, but certainly was in the 70s and 80s, when people from even this country right here, which was a shithole back then, wanted to go to America, see the Statue of Liberty, come across on a boat, start a new life for themselves, live the American dream.
I feel like the dream of the West is dying.
And people are just like, well, where can I live the dream?
What's the dream?
Nice, happy life, beautiful wife, healthy kids, good health care, safe, schools are fine.
Mass crime doesn't exist.
Drug use isn't prevalent.
It's crazy that that's now the dream, isn't it?
Isn't it sad?
What's happened?
And yeah, to use a very famous slogan, I really hope that somebody can make America great again.
It's a very good slogan.
But even I haven't liked the United States in a long time.
I go to the United States, I feel unsafe.
I feel unsafe walking around the streets.
I see the pandemic.
Of homelessness and drug use.
And I'm like, how is this the capital of the free world?
I look at the leadership.
It just makes me sick on every level.
So, yeah, the Middle East is the place to be for now.
Maybe one day in 20 years' time, America will be the place to be again.
And as an American citizen, I'm hopeful for the United States.
I am hopeful for it.
But it's people like you who are fighting the good fight, so I appreciate you a lot.
And there are very few men who I'll ever meet who I'll say I admire you or I'm a fan of yours, but I will say that to your face right now on camera.