February 2023. Our full-access Andrew Tate documentary is going fine, even after the sudden plot twist of his arrest for allegations of rape and human trafficking in Romania. Marguerite Gaudin, the director, has managed to shoot Tate for a day in London – shopping on Savile Row, cosy chats in a limo, an appearance on Piers Morgan – and she’s now waiting for him to be released on bail to do more filming. Then everything falls apart.
“The planet’s most Googled man”, in between sets of 500 push-ups in a Bucharest prison cell, hires one of Michael Jackson’s lawyers, who seems to hate me. The lawyer is Mark Geragos, an LA troubleshooter – clients include Jackson, Colin Kaepernick, Winona Ryder, Chris Brown and Jussie Smollett.
Now Geragos’s firm is helping to wrangle the fallout of the rape and human trafficking allegations against Tate and his brother. Their job is to deal with the international media, who have flocked to Bucharest and, because of our history, they won’t let us anywhere near Tate. My 2019 exposé of Michael Jackson, Leaving Neverland, is coming back to haunt me.
Our adventures with Tate started with an email five months earlier. Subject line: “Potential documentary opportunity with currently the most controversial public figure.” Tate had been “cancelled” by many online platforms for making viciously toxic statements about women in videos that were hyper-shared on TikTok by teenage boys in the summer of 2022. As is usually the case, “cancellation” made him even more of a hero. In August 2022, his currency reached a new peak, allowing him to claim he was “the most Googled man on the planet”. (In fact “Andrew Tate” was the eighth most-searched name on the web in 2022.)
