At Home with Andrew Tate, The Face of Toxic Masculinity
“I never thought I’d become the most famous man in the world by saying women make me coffee.”
The King of Toxic Masculinity welcomes me into his compound in a suburb on the outskirts of Bucharest and offers me a cigar. His name is Andrew Tate and he was once on Big Brother. For a while – although not because of that – he may have been the most famous man in the world.
We’ll get to that. For now, just be aware that there’s an axe, a sword and a couple of knives on the coffee table and a bunch of supercars in the yard. I recognise a Rolls-Royce, but otherwise cars aren’t really my thing. Deeper inside, in his wood-panelled cigar room, there’s a safe the size of a fridge full of cash, watches and gold, and a huge CCTV screen on the wall, on which he points out the armed guards dotted around the property. They’re allowed to carry weapons, he explains, because his home is registered with the Romanian authorities as a shooting range. That’s one reason he doesn’t live in the UK – so his bodyguards can have guns.
Now look. I know what you are thinking. How can this be the most famous man in the world if you’ve never heard of him? It’s a fair question, and ten days earlier I’d hardly heard of him either. The thing is, lots of other people had. “I am the most googled man on the planet,” he said in January. “I am more googled than Joe Biden, Donald Trump. Look it up.”
He says it to me too, several times. Granted, there is much Tate says that should be taken with a pinch of salt – he has also claimed to be the world’s first trillionaire – but he may have been right. Last month, though, he was banned from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Not long before that, Hope Not Hate, the activist group, had declared, “Our major concern is that his brand of extreme and sometimes violent misogyny is reaching a young male audience and that he could serve as a gateway to wider far-right politics.”
Was this fair or was it not? That’s what I’ve come to Romania to find out.
“I’m telling you,” Tate says. “I never thought I’d become the most famous man in the world by saying women make me coffee.”
Let’s be honest. It’s not just about coffee. There are scores of Andrew Tate clips still floating around, even on the platforms from which he has been banned. “Bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up, bitch,” he says in one. In another, he says, “Slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.”
“That was about me sleeping with a machete next to my bed,” he says now. “I’m a security-conscious individual.” And what happened, he says, was that a girl picked up the machete and told him she’d chop his head off if he cheated, so he told her what he’d do to stop her. “And she laughed out loud,” he says. “ ‘You’re so funny! Give me a kiss.’ So that was a joke...”