A former policeman from Romania has been named as an accomplice to Andrew Tate, and his brother Tristan, in a scheme that saw girls coerced into the video chat and sex industry.
Tristan and Andrew Tate have been accused of rape, and of establishing a criminal human trafficking organisation.
The brothers were detained for 30 days on December 30 after prosecutors raided their homes in Romania.
Investigators say one of their accomplices was Luana Radu, aged 32. She is a former police officer who left the force eight years ago. After graduating from the Romanian Police Academy, Radu was a police officer for some four years before resigning in 2014 to make a higher income in the video chat industry.
The second accomplice named is Georgiana Naghel, 28 years old. Naghel is a photo model with dual Romanian and American citizenship. She is also Andrew Tate’s girlfriend.
The two women, Radu and Naghel, are accused of acting as the Tate brothers’ “lieutenants.”
According to investigators, the two helped coerce and control at least six women into creating pornographic content on social media. They also allegedly helped Andrew Tate keep the women in the home “like prisoners.”
One of the victims is a 21 year old American citizen. Romanian authorities were notified by the US embassy in Romania regarding her alleged capture in one of the Tate brothers’ villas in Bucharest.
Authorities found two women there when they visited the address in April 2022.
According to investigators, the Tate brothers used the so-called “loverboy” method to entrap their victims. In effect, members of the organized crime group lied to women about their feelings for them, and expressed a desire to get married.
The men then took their victims to homes in Ilfov County, near Bucharest. There, they forced the women, via beating or intimidation, to conduct video chat sessions on online platforms for money.
Prosecutors have so far identified six women entrapped in the scheme.
“I was 16 years old, I had just created an Instagram account, but I was already out of the country, studying in Austria,” said Daria Gusa, now 19, “So it seemed suspicious that a man with several million followers, whom I had never heard of, had sent me an explicit message with the obvious purpose of “picking me up.””
Investigators have since seized a number of high-value assets belonging to the Tate brothers, including 11 luxury cars from a collection valued at more than five million euros.
Both brothers have alleged they are not guilty. They blame the “Matrix,” an imaginary system of oppression, for working against them.
Image via Wikimedia
