Andrew Tate Loses Appeal To Relax Judicial Restrictions While Awaiting Trial

Andrew Tate, a polarizing social media celebrity awaiting trial in Romania on allegations of human trafficking and rape, has lost an appeal to have the court ease geographical limitations that prevent him from leaving the eastern European country.

The Bucharest Court of Appeal ruled against Tate, who had contested a May 10 judgment that prolonged a 60-day restriction preventing him from leaving the country.

The 37-year-old had requested that he be allowed to leave Romania as long as he remained within Europe’s ID-check-free Schengen zone, which Romania partially joined in March. “It’s not about wanting to leave the country. One thing is to travel free and another is to leave the country. The right to travel is a constitutional right, it is a legal right, it is one of the fundamental rights,” Eugen Vidineac, one of Tate’s attorneys, told reporters in court.

Tate, a former professional kickboxer and dual British-American citizen, was initially apprehended in December 2022 outside Bucharest, Romania’s capital, alongside his brother Tristan and two Romanian ladies. In June of last year, Romanian authorities indicted all four.

They have refuted the charges. Following their arrest, the brothers were kept in police custody for three months before being sent to house arrest. They were later restricted to the Bucharest municipality and neighboring Ilfov county, but they can now move freely throughout Romania.

Andrew Tate, who has 9.3 million followers on the social networking platform X, has frequently stated that authorities have no evidence against him and that a political plot exists to silence him.

He has already been banned from several well-known social media sites for supposedly using hate speech and expressing misogynistic opinions. The Bucharest Tribunal upheld the prosecution’s case against Tate on April 26, declaring that the trial may go on and that the case satisfied all legal requirements. But no specific date was given.

This decision was made following months of discussion in the preliminary chamber phases of the case, during which the defendants can object to the evidence and case file presented by the prosecution.

According to a statement released earlier this month by the legal team defending the four British ladies, Tate is also facing a civil lawsuit in the UK from them following an allegation made by the High Court in London.

The four women claim that in 2014 and 2015, they reported Tate to British authorities for allegedly assaulting them both physically and sexually.

In 2019, the Crown Prosecution Service chose not to prosecute him following a four-year investigation. After that, the purported victims used crowdsourcing to file a civil lawsuit against him. The Tate brothers also made an appearance in March at the Bucharest Court of Appeal in a third case, which was unrelated to the first two.

The arrest warrants were obtained by British police in response to accusations of sexual assault in a UK case that dates back to 2012.

The British plea to extradite the Tates to the UK was approved by the appeals court, but only after the Romanian legal proceedings were finished.