In July, Andrew and Tristan Tate filed a civil lawsuit in a Florida court against one of their accusers, stemming from a Romanian criminal case which saw them arrested on suspicion of human trafficking in Romania last December.
In the lawsuit, the brothers claim that the human trafficking assertions which were the foundation of their initial arrest were concocted by two women with a history of fabulism. Yesterday, attorneys for the Tates filed a series of exhibits which they say prove those claims. One of the exhibits, described as “false statements to the Romanian government,” is a copy of a Victim Statement given by the accuser to the Romanian Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT).
DIICOT arrested the Tates on allegations of trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group. According to the Romanian authorities, six victims were “coerced into performing sexual acts … [and] housed in buildings outside Bucharest,” reported the New York Times. “On two separate occasions in March, one of the suspects used violence and psychological pressure to rape a victim, prosecutors said.”
In the statement, the woman claims that she met Tristan Tate in November 2021 concurrently on Reddit and a dating website. She soon met up with Tate at a conference in Miami that December. The first time they had sex, the statement claims, Tristan strangled her “with both hands.”
“I told him I do not like to be manhandled, abused,” the statement continues. “I could tell from Tristan’s eyes that he had consumed alcoholic beverages and then I passed out.”
When the woman woke up she said she couldn’t remember what happened, but Tate told her that she’d passed out while being “throttled” after asking him to do that to her, the statement says. But she said she knew she didn’t ask for it.
There was bruising on her neck, and she had pain when she swallowed, the statement says.
After the incident, she continued messaging Tate on WhatsApp, and in April 2022, Tate paid for a first-class ticket for her to come to Romania, where he picked her up from the airport in a blue Rolls-Royce.
The first night she was there, the woman said she was tired, but went to Tristan’s room to talk.
But, she said, Tristan said that “he had not brought me to Romania, to that house, without reason, so we had sex.”
“On that occasion he told me exactly that we would have sex,” the woman says in the statement. “When he said those words to me, I recalled that Tristan, had in fact strangled me that night in Miami. And so, I simply froze and I had sex with him.”
Eventually, the statement says, she realized that she was imprisoned in the house.
“Tristan was always arguing that … it is too dangerous for me to leave that house, because he had enemies,” the statement says. “Tristan was telling me that I could leave anytime I wanted, however, when Tristan was away from the house, I could not leave that courtyard.”
She also claimed that she “pleaded with the guards to open the gates so I could leave, but they were telling me they could not understand what I was saying.” At one point, she says, she tried using Google Translate to talk to them, but she said they still couldn’t understand what she was saying.
She also claims to have seen a message on another girl’s phone “in which Andrew kept telling her to self-harm to prove to him that she loves him. The girl did not agree with this, however Andrew kept insisting.”
The statement also claims that the Tate brothers “do everything necessary to instruct us to be afraid of what they can do to us.” In her statement, the woman claims that the Tate brothers have links with the Russian and Romanian mafia, and that the Tates threatened to publish her real name, her parents’ names, and her telephone number.
The woman also explains how she thinks the system the Tate brothers have works, calling it “a new way of committing huma[n] trafficking.”
“[I]n the beginning the girls were scared,” the statement says, “but then they ended up falling in love with the Tate brothers, to eventually getting to the point where they would do anything that they were asking to do. These girls are not themselves….One of these girls has not seen her family for years.”
The woman claims in the statement that she only remembers two girls from Prague and two from Ukraine who escaped the house.
The woman also claims that Tristan Tate wants to have 25 children, and that the brothers bought land near Bran Castle in Romania to build their own castle, which would be used to accommodate other girls for the enterprise they’d built.
Bran Castle is marketed as being the home of Dracula’s inspiration Vlad the Impaler, though it has few documented historical links to the character.
In a video originally posted on Rumble, Tristan Tate jokingly explains his intentions for the castle.
“No access,” he says. “Get your own. I’m going to have armed guards, armed with crossbows in full armor patrolling the castle walls with rabid dogs inside ready to tear intruders apart … I want to walk around butt-naked, swirling a huge glass of brandy, with five vampire girls all dressed up with their fangs on and shit.”
Attorneys for Tate didn’t respond to a list of questions about the woman’s claims in the victim statement.
