An appeal to switch Andrew Tate’s detention to house arrest has been successful, an official announced on Friday. Tate is the contentious internet personality who has spent months in a Romanian jail on charges of organised crime and human trafficking.
According to Ramona Bolla, a representative for Romania’s anti-organized crime organisation, DIICOT, Tate’s appeal, which contested a judge’s last week order to extend his arrest for a fourth time for 30 days, was successful at the Bucharest Court of Appeal.
The British-American citizen Tate, 36, was initially detained in late December in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, along with his brother Tristan and two Romanian ladies. Tate has 5.5 million followers on Twitter.
The four were successful in their appeal on Friday and will now be under house arrest until April 29, according to Bolla. The four have not yet been formally charged. The judge decided that they should be released right away. Bolla said that the appellate court’s judgement was definitive and cannot be contested by the prosecution.
Tristan Tate told a crowd of media as the brothers emerged from the Bucharest detention centre late on Friday that “the courts today made the right decision.”
I admire what they’ve done for me, and I’m confident that they made the right choice because I’m going to be able to show my innocence.
Outside the building, some Andrew Tate supporters were chanting “Top-G, Top-G,” which is a well-known nickname that many of his followers use to refer to him.
Afterwards, Andrew Tate expressed his desire to thank the judges “who heard us today, because they were really attentive and they listened to us, and they let us go,” standing in front of what is thought to be the Tate brothers’ residence close to the capital.
“I have no grudge in my heart against Romania or against anyone else,” he declared. “I merely trust in the truth. I firmly think that justice will ultimately be carried out. There is just no chance that I will be found guilty of anything.”
Tate, a professional kickboxer who has lived in Romania since 2017, has previously been blocked from using a number of social media sites due to the expression of hate speech and misogynistic beliefs. He has asserted time and time again that Romanian prosecutors lack proof and that their case is a “political” plot to silence him.
After the arrests in December, DIICOT released a statement in which it claimed to have identified six victims in the human trafficking case who were reportedly sexually exploited and subjected to “acts of physical violence and mental coercion” by members of the suspected crime ring.
According to the agency, victims were seduced under the guise of love and afterwards intimidated, put under surveillance, and subjected to other forms of control while being forced to commit pornographic activities for the criminal organization’s financial gain.
Authorities from Romania raided a Tate brothers-related compound outside of Bucharest in January, towing away a collection of high-end vehicles that included a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, and a Porsche. They declared taking possession of items believed to be worth $3.9 million.
The assets would be used to pay for the costs of the investigation and to compensate victims, according to prosecutors, if they can demonstrate that the owners of the automobiles made money through illegal operations like human trafficking. Tate appealed the asset confiscation ineffectively.
