Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate, the British American online influencers, arrived in Florida on Thursday morning after a Romanian court ruled they could leave the country, a development that raised questions about whether the Trump administration played a role in their sudden departure.
The brothers, who had been barred from leaving Romania for more than two years over criminal investigations, boarded a private jet in Romania early Thursday morning local time, said Joseph McBride, their lawyer in the United States. They landed at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport shortly after 11 a.m. and left in an SUV with heavy security around 12:30 p.m.
The Tate brothers have openly aligned themselves with the Trump administration in recent weeks. Romanian officials said the United States had not put pressure on them, and McBride, who has long lobbied U.S. lawmakers on their behalf, said he could not comment on whether U.S. officials had used their power to free the men.
Andrew Tate refused to answer questions from reporters Thursday about the Trump administration’s involvement. Still, McBride, said earlier Thursday: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”
Tate said he and his brother are “largely misunderstood.”
“We’ve yet to be convicted of any crime in our lives, ever,” he said outside the airport. “We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet, ever.”
The Tates have repeatedly denied the allegations against them. They successfully appealed an indictment in a Bucharest court, which found in December that the case did not meet the requirements for a trial, sending it back to prosecutors.
“A prosecutor recently decided that because we have no active indictment in court, to let us go and return,” Andrew Tate said. “This is a democratic society, you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, as my brother and I are.”
The travel restrictions on the Tate brothers were lifted Wednesday, according to Romanian authorities. In response to questions about the brothers, Romanian prosecutors said in a news release that they were still pursuing criminal investigations against two British American citizens. They did not name the people, but said they had been allowed to leave Romania and had to “appear before judicial authorities whenever summoned.”
Romania’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said U.S. officials had not intervened in their case. “In Romania, the judiciary is independent and is the sole authority empowered to make decisions in an ongoing investigation or trial,” the ministry said in a statement.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
McBride had advocated on behalf of the brothers among lawmakers on Capitol Hill going back as far as 2023, he said. He had developed contacts in Congress largely through his legal representation of several people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But his advocacy for the Tates did not appear to gain much purchase until President Donald Trump was reelected.
In recent weeks, the brothers have expressed their support for Trump. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Andrew Tate said on the social platform X this month.
For more than two years, the Tate brothers have faced a protracted legal battle with prosecutors in Romania, who charged them with human trafficking and forming an organized crime group. According to Romanian prosecutors, the brothers misled several women into believing that they wanted a relationship with them. The women were instead housed in a compound near Bucharest and forced to appear in online pornographic videos, prosecutors said.
Since the Bucharest court sent the case back in December, prosecutors in Romania have said they are investigating the brothers over other accusations of human trafficking and money laundering.
Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer known for his sexist views, has promoted a brand of masculinity tied to lavish displays of wealth. According to an archived page on his website that has since been removed, Tate described a method he said made him rich.
“My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me to where she’d do anything I say, and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together,” he said. He claimed that he had worked with “over 75 girls,” on the site.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Thursday said the Tates were not welcome in his state, and that he had no involvement in the plans for the Tates to travel there.
“Our attorney general, James Uthmeier, is looking at what state hooks and jurisdiction we may have to be able to deal with this,” DeSantis said at a news conference. “But the reality is no, Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct in the air, and I don’t know how it came to this.”
The Financial Times reported this month that U.S. officials had urged Romania to lift travel restrictions on the brothers. Richard Grenell, a special envoy for the United States and a close ally of Trump, mentioned the case with the country’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, at the Munich Security Conference this month, according to the report.
Grenell said in an email Thursday that he did not discuss any issues with Hurezeanu. Hurezeanu had a “focused exchange” with Grenell at the conference, the country’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a post on X at the time. The two officials “covered current topics of shared interest” between the two countries, the ministry said, but the post did not mention the Tate brothers.
Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of Romania said on social media last week that the U.S. “has not made any requests” of Romania about “the legal situation of well-known foreign influencers investigated by the Romanian authorities,” while acknowledging a “discussion” between Grenell and the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
McBride said that a defamation case the brothers brought against a woman in Florida, who has accused them of human trafficking, included evidence that the criminal case in Romania was weak. He added that the brothers’ argument that they were victims of a weaponized justice system in Romania resonated with officials in an administration run by Trump, who has put accusations of weaponized justice at the center of his political campaigns and his presidential agenda.
Also on Thursday, a Bucharest court ruled in favor of an appeal by the Tate brothers, lifting a seizure on some of their assets, according to a spokesperson for Tate, Mateea Petrescu. The assets included two properties, a Ferrari, a Mercedes-Benz and four other vehicles, bank accounts and company shares, Petrescu said.
The brothers were also arrested in Romania in March 2024 on a separate warrant issued by British authorities accusing them of human trafficking. A Bucharest court had ruled that the brothers should be extradited to Britain after the resolution of the Romanian cases. It was unclear Thursday what the outcome of that extradition ruling would be.
Four British women also sued Andrew Tate in 2024, claiming that he had raped and abused them. Matthew Jury, a lawyer representing the women, said Thursday on social media that reports that the Trump administration had lobbied for their release were “disgusting and dismaying.”
He called on the British government to “take immediate steps” to ensure the brothers would face the charges against them in Britain. “Any suggestion that the Tates will now face justice in Romania is fanciful,” he said.
Earlier this month, an American woman who gave evidence to Romanian authorities sued the brothers for allegedly luring her to Romania and coercing her into sex work, the first suit filed in the United States against the Tates. The brothers had sued her first for defamation, claiming that her testimony was fabricated.
Dani Pinter, the senior vice president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, called for the United States to investigate the Tate brothers for sexual exploitation of minors abroad and for sex trafficking. “This is a slap in the face to all the victims of the Tate brothers, especially the U.S. victim who is not being protected by her country,” she said in a statement Thursday.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
