Andrew Tate’s anti-feminist brand was funded by a webcam scam exploiting lonely men

Evidence

The manosphere’s most brazen figure was Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer who built his brand on explicit misogyny. His first brush with notoriety came when he was expelled from the reality show Big Brother after a video surfaced of him hitting a woman with a belt. From there, he built Hustlers University, a subscription-based tutorial promising to help young men “escape the matrix” of feminist society. “There’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist,” Tate declared. His real fortune, however, came from a Romania-based webcam business, where he matched lonely men with women who read from a script of tragic tales to manipulate them into handing over cash. Tate, pocketing the profits, invested in crypto and a fleet of thirty-three luxury cars. In 2022, Romanian authorities arrested him and his brother on charges of human trafficking and rape. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 800

Categorization

• XREF: Bears on the manosphere chapter’s place in Marx’s account of status-driven ideological currents, connects to reading on performative masculinity and the death of the sellout.