Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault and physical violence.
LONDON – In 2015, controversial “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate was arrested over another allegation of rape in the UK, following a complaint from a woman who supplied police with messages sent by Tate in which he wrote “I love raping you.”
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VICE World News reported earlier this month that Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015 following separate allegations by two other complainants. In 2019 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to pursue charges against Tate for any of these allegations. The woman who supplied police with messages sent by Tate said police told her charges were not brought because there was “an ounce of doubt” in the case.
Among the dozens of messages and voicenotes reviewed by VICE World News that Tate sent the woman is a voicenote in which he appears to admit to raping her, saying, “Am I a bad person? Because the more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it. I fucking loved how much you hated it. It turned me on. Why am I like that? Why?”
The woman, whom we will refer to as “Amelia,” is the third woman to reveal to VICE World News that they had filed police complaints alleging sexual or physical abuse by Tate, an American British social media influencer and former professional kickboxer who was arrested in Romania last month as part of a separate rape and human trafficking investigation. We are withholding the woman’s identity as an alleged victim of sexual offences, and to prevent harassment and trolling by Tate’s supporters.
Two other women – one of whom says she was raped, and the other of whom says she was repeatedly strangled – went public with their experiences last week. They revealed that after their initial complaints in 2015, Hertfordshire Police took four years to pass the case to prosecutors, who then declined to prosecute. Amelia – who to this day does not know the identities of the other women – had her complaint handled as part of the same investigation, before the CPS told the women in 2019 that there was “no realistic prospect of a conviction.”
VICE’s Matt Shea takes viewers inside Andrew Tate’s secret society and compound in Romania and gives a voice to women who were allegedly abused by him. The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate. 11PM ET on VICE TV.
Amelia’s experiences – from the alleged rape in 2013, to learning that Tate would not be prosecuted, to then watching him become one of the most famous people on the planet – have left her feeling as though she is “struggling every day.” But she felt emboldened to go public with her story after seeing the other two complainants speak out. She said she no longer wanted to live in fear of Tate, and that she felt she had a duty to tell her story to potentially prevent other women from being hurt.
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Amelia said that she and Tate had been acquainted since 2009. The relationship turned romantic for the first time in 2013, after they bumped into each other and reconnected on a night out.
The rape, she said, happened in November 2013, the first time Amelia went to Tate’s flat, after they had been dating for two or three weeks. She said the pair had previously kissed, but nothing more. “Back then, and he knew this, I’d only been with 2 people,” she said. “He knew what that meant to me … that act was very important to me.”
She said the pair were kissing on Tate’s bed when he began trying to take off her clothes. She had previously told him, she said, that she didn’t want to have sex; he stopped, reassured her that nothing was going to happen, and they continued kissing.
After a while, she said, he suddenly stopped, and laid back on the bed.
“I got up and looked at him and went, ‘What’s wrong?’” she said. “This guy literally laid there and went: ‘I’m just debating whether I should rape you or not.’”
Amelia said she was stunned, unsure if it was some sort of sick joke. She said she put her hand on his chest and said, “Don’t be stupid. What are you talking about?”
“Within an instant, he changed who he was,” she said. “He wasn’t the same Andrew that I knew, that was funny, that would make me laugh … It was like his eyes went, and I didn’t have a clue who that person was.”
Suddenly, she said, Tate grabbed her neck and “started strangling me, forcing my trousers off me.”
“I was trying to keep them on and he started screaming at me, ‘Take the fucking trousers off, bitch.’”
The sudden outburst of violence from Tate, who was at the time a professional kickboxer, made Amelia feel powerless to fight back, she said, and fearful of how far the assault would go.
“I’ve never been strangled before. I don’t know if he’s going to stop. And I was so scared,” she told VICE World News. “It’s like, whenever you think about being in that situation, you think you’re going to fight back… But I’m telling you, you don’t. Because if you fight back, what else is he going to do to you? He’s a six foot three … champion kickboxer, for God’s sake.”
Tate then raped her, Amelia said. As he did, she said, he continued to choke her, saying things like “Who do you belong to?” even as she was unable to physically speak due to his hands constricting her throat.
“He’s like, ‘Fucking say it bitch. You’re not fucking saying my name, say my fucking name otherwise I’ll kill you,’” she said.
After assaulting her, Amelia said, Tate went to sleep with his arm around her, while she lay awake for hours, trying to process what had just happened. When she got home the next day, she recalls, she cried in the bathtub and called a friend, who helped spell out to her that what had happened to her was rape.
VICE World News has spoken to the friend, who confirmed the details of the conversation. We are not naming her to protect her and Amelia’s identities.
Amelia said that for a “very long time,” she was in denial about the alleged rape, feeling that acknowledging it had happened would negatively define her. To this day, she struggles to even use what she refers to as “the R word.”
“It was like, if this ‘R word’ is what happened to me, then that’s what I am,” she said.
She continued to see him for a number of months afterwards, including having consensual sex. This was partly, she said, to buttress her denial response to the alleged assault at the time.
“If I go and see him again, and I want it this time, then I’m not being degraded, then it’s not the R word,’” she said, explaining her thought process. “So that’s what I did. I was like, ‘Right, I’ll see you again… you haven’t taken that control of me. You haven’t hurt me.’”
Fiona Vera-Gray, deputy director of London Metropolitan University’s Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, said Amelia’s actions in the aftermath of the alleged rape were not an uncommon response.
“The social construction of a woman who has been raped is of someone who is weak, who is stupid, who cannot protect herself, and that she is ‘damaged goods.’ No one wants to identify with that,” she said.
“So it makes absolute sense, to me and I’m sure to anybody, why you would do what you can to try and reclaim a sense of agency over that narrative.
“It sounds like that’s what she tried to do, before she got to a point where she was like, ‘Actually, there is no other way to understand this, because I’ve been violated.’”
Amelia said she eventually broke things off with Tate after he invited her to go away together for a weekend for the first time.
“That was … when I woke up and realised if I spent a whole weekend with him, I might end up in hospital,” she said.
It wasn’t until 2014, about six months after the alleged rape, that Amelia filed a complaint with Bedfordshire Police, feeling that she finally had the strength and clarity to do so.
But she found the experience extremely demoralising, she said. At the time, she had only recently accepted what had happened to her, after months of denial, was hugely traumatised, and relied on a friend – a different person than the one she called after the alleged rape – to help speak on her behalf as a support person during the interview.
At one stage, Amelia said, the investigating officer asked her friend whether Amelia had learning difficulties, because she was struggling to speak.
“That made me feel so small… like, I can’t even be emotional,” Amelia recalled. “I can’t even … feel how I’m feeling, because you’re trying to put me down.”
This perceived dismissive attitude, combined with her trauma and ongoing fear of Tate, left her feeling unable to pursue the complaint, and she instead opted to “log” it – recording the allegation with police to potentially pick up again when she felt stronger. Amelia focused on moving forward with her life, starting a new career and moving to a new town.
But in 2015, she received a call out of the blue from an officer from a neighbouring police force, Hertfordshire Police. The officer told her the force was looking into complaints from two other women who had also made complaints of abuse – including one of rape, and another of repeatedly strangling a woman – against Tate, and asked whether Amelia would be happy with her complaint being included in that investigation. These are the same two women who went public with their experiences in interviews with VICE World News.
“I literally broke down and went, ‘Yes, I am,’” recalled Amelia. “I felt stronger. I felt like, OK, I’m not alone now, I’ve got two other girls.”
Amelia provided a video statement to police at the time, and handed over her phone. It contained voicenotes and messages from Tate – including, according to Amelia, the same messages and voicenotes reviewed by VICE World News – which appeared to corroborate her account.
These messages include an exchange that took place after the alleged sexual assault – and while they were still seeing each other – in which Tate wrote “I love raping you.”
“Monsters are monsters,” he wrote. “When ur under my control, I do whatever I please.”
Another exchange took place after Amelia stopped seeing him. Tate initiated it, sending her an unsolicited video that showed him breaking a baseball bat on his shin and following it up with a voicenote saying, “I am one of the most dangerous men on this planet. Sometimes you forget exactly how lucky you were to get fucked by me.”
When Amelia responded by writing that she wouldn’t call it lucky to have been strangled, pinned down, and forced to do something “you KNEW I didn’t wanna do,” Tate sent a voicenote saying, “Am I a bad person… because the more you didn’t like it the more I enjoyed it.”
He followed up with a voicenote asking if she would like him to “pin you down and make you do things you didn’t like,” and another telling her, “You didn’t like that I was thinking I can do whatever I want to you. That’s what it is. I’m the smartest person on this fucking planet.”
He then wrote: “You were my whore when [I] had my hands on you,” before admonishing her in a voicenote for being upset about the alleged rape. “Are you seriously so offended I strangled you a little bit. You didn’t fucking pass out. Chill the fuck out, Jesus Christ, I thought you were cool, what’s wrong with you,” he said.
Hertfordshire Police confirmed to VICE World News that Amelia’s complaint led to Tate being arrested on suspicion of rape in December 2015 – the second time that year he was held, questioned, then released under investigation, following earlier complaints by the other two women.
But despite the new allegation from Amelia being added to the investigation, the case moved slowly, and police did not pass the case file to the CPS – whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction – until 2019.
In response to a new request for comment, Hertfordshire Police said in a statement that the investigation had passed through the hands of 3 separate officers in charge (OICs) during those four years. “Investigations into sexual offences by their nature can be challenging and complex. Due to their lengthy nature, it can mean that investigations have more than one OIC,” said the statement, adding that despite the delays, the case was never closed.
“When a delay was identified, action was taken to progress the investigation as quickly as possible.”
Hertfordshire Police has previously acknowledged to VICE World News that it apologised to complainants over the delays in handling the case.
In late 2019, Amelia was informed by police that CPS had finally reached a decision. She said she attended a meeting with a police officer who delivered the news that the CPS had declined to prosecute.
“I went [to the police officer], ‘Well, explain to me why you’re letting a monster on the street,’” Amelia said.
Amelia said the police officer even apologised for the decision, and told her words to the effect of, “It’s not that the police don’t believe you. It’s not that the CPS don’t believe you. It’s the fact that there’s an ounce of doubt in the case.”
According to Amelia, the officer said the element of doubt related to the fact she had had consensual sex with Tate in the wake of the alleged sexual assault, and that in sexual assault cases, the CPS was only prepared to prosecute when it felt 100 percent confident of success, because a trial resulting in acquittal would only further traumatise the complainant.
A friend of Amelia’s – a different individual from either the one she called after she was raped or the one who initially accompanied her to talk to the police – she had brought along to the meeting as a support person corroborated her account of the police’s comments to VICE World News. Hertfordshire Police would not confirm the officer had made the comments, saying it would “not comment on the specifics of an investigation.”
Amelia was left devastated by the decision, which she felt betrayed a lack of understanding of the psychology of abuse and of men like Tate, who – looking back, she said – exerted emotional control over her through his domineering and manipulative behaviour. Tate is facing similar allegations of using “physical violence and mental coercion” to recruit and groom women into working for his sex webcam business in Romania.
“I was like, ‘That’s your excuse for the justice system?’” she recalled. “So no one’s been manipulated before, no one’s had Stockholm Syndrome before, no one’s been abused before?”
Experts in the field of sexual violence say that the fact that Amelia had consensually slept with Tate again after the alleged rape should not be viewed as somehow undermining her case, and the fact that it had been was an indictment on the criminal justice system’s handling of sexual assault cases.
“It shouldn’t be seen as a weakness” in the case, said London Metropolitan University’s Vera-Gray. She said due to the justice system’s “flawed” approach to rape, which heavily scrutinised the actions of the accuser, rather than the accused, the overwhelming majority of cases were never prosecuted because of how they would likely play out in court.
Vera-Gray said many rape complainants had encountered a similar response from police or prosecutors, being told: “We believe you, but something about your behaviour, either prior to the assault or during or after, makes us believe that a jury won’t feel that they can convict without reasonable doubt.” Due to enduring myths around rape, survivors had to meet impossible, often contradictory conditions in order to be seen as the “perfect victim” and for their complaints to be viewed as credible, she said.
Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, a UK-based group that has campaigned to improve how the justice system handles sexual violence cases, agreed.
“Rape myths and stereotypes inform every part of the criminal justice process and determine whether or not a victim’s case progresses or is dropped,” she told VICE World News.
She said Amelia’s story was “appalling, but unsurprising, given all we know about how rape survivors are treated by the police and criminal justice system as a whole.”
In the wake of the 2019 decision by the CPS not to prosecute Tate, Amelia has focused on putting the sexual assault behind her, but Tate’s rise to global fame has sent her recovery backwards. The online abuse of Tate’s accusers by his army of supporters was hard to take.
“Since he became famous, every day has been torture,” she said.
“I’m like, are you joking? That’s not supposed to happen. Someone that’s abused you, hurt you, isn’t then supposed to become world famous, and then be in your face every day.”
Like the two other women who filed complaints with police over Tate’s alleged abuse, she feels that the failure of police and prosecutors to get justice in their case had allowed Tate to continue what now appears to be a clear pattern of misogynistic and abusive behaviour towards women, ultimately leading to his arrest in Romania last month.
“You know that he now has got a God complex knowing that he can get away with any of this,” she said.
Tate’s arrest in Romania, and the decision by her fellow complainants to come forward publicly with their allegations, have been the only positive developments since her ordeal began, she said – but made her hopeful that Tate would eventually be held accountable for his alleged abuse of women.
Approached for comment on Amelia’s allegations, Tate’s lawyer said he was too busy dealing with the Romanian case against his client to respond to “old allegations.” When reached subsequently by phone, he said he had been too busy to reply to an email outlining the allegations, and hung up when asked if he was planning to respond.
Tate, whose appeal against his ongoing detention was rejected by a judge in Bucharest on Tuesday, has previously said that his relocation to Romania was motivated in part by a desire to escape a liberal, post-#MeToo Western society where men faced greater accountability for sexual assault claims.
“This is probably 40 percent of the reason I moved to Romania, because in eastern Europe, none of this garbage flies,” he said in one video clip. “If you go to the police and say ‘He raped me back in 1988,’ they’ll say ‘Well you should have done something about it then’.”
Bedfordshire Police said they were preparing a response but had not provided one by time of publication.
Contacted for further comment regarding Amelia’s allegations, the CPS said it had nothing to add to its previous statement to VICE World News regarding the investigation by Hertfordshire Police. That statement read that prosecutors had “carefully reviewed all the evidence provided by the police regarding each complainant and concluded it did not meet our legal test, and there was no realistic prospect of a conviction.”
The survivors’ interviews will be included in an upcoming VICE World News documentary about Andrew Tate. Reporters Matt Shea and Jamie Tahsin visited Tate’s compound in Romania in the summer of 2022, and gained access to the Tate brothers’ so-called “secret society,” the War Room.
If you’re in the US and need someone to talk to about an experience with sexual assault or abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), where trained staff can provide you with support, information, advice, or a referral. You can also access 24/7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
In the UK, the Survivors Trust provides support for people who have experienced sexual assault, abuse, or rape. Rape Crisis provides specialist information and support to those affected by all forms of sexual violence and abuse, and is the membership organisation for 39 Rape Crisis centres.
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