Play stupid games, win stupid prizes — for social media “influencer” and general internet dickhead Andrew Tate, this seems to be a hard lesson learned. After getting dunked on by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg over Twitter, the 36-year-old man child was detained by Romanian authorities in connection with human trafficking, per multiple sources. But while several news outlets attributed Tate’s arrest to authorities identifying his location from a Romanian pizza box in a video he posted in response to Thunberg’s burn, that’s not actually the case.
On Dec. 29, Tate, along with his brother, Tristan, and two other Romanian suspects, were allegedly placed under arrest for an initial 24-hour period from his villa in Bucharest, per Reuters. “The four suspects,” prosecutors said in a Dec. 29 statement, “appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing, and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost.” Prosecutors have since asked a Bucharest court on Friday to extend the detention of Andrew Tate by 30 days. While the Tate brothers haven’t released any official statements on the arrest, Tate once again used Twitter to give his followers an update: “The Matrix sent their agents,” he wrote in a Dec. 30 post.
The story spread like wildfire: Andrew Tate, arrested after suffering a legendary burn from Greta Thunberg? It’s a satisfying thought, but a product, seemingly, of assumption. Authorities weren’t actually tipped off by Tate’s Dec. 28 video response to Thunberg’s, which included a Romanian pizza box that people all over the internet assumed was the golden giveaway to the former kickboxer’s current location. In true teenage fashion, even Thunberg used the pizza box rumor to kick Tate while he was down.
In fact, according to the Romanian newspaper article that originally broke the story, authorities used multiple sources of information (including Tate’s social media accounts) to pin down his whereabouts. As writer Ben Dreyfuss pointed out, the rumors of Thunberg’s takedown went viral when Pop Base, a pop culture news source with more than a half-million followers, tweeted that Tate’s arrest was directly related to the Romanian pizza box in his video response to Thunberg. According to Pop Base’s tweet, the pizza box supposedly allowed Romanian authorities to confirm his location.
However, Romanian authorities didn’t really need the pizza box for confirmation: Tate had very brazenly been posting from Romania, where he owns a house. Even before tweeting his ridiculous video response to Thunberg, Tate tweeted out his location by posting a Dec. 25 video from an undisclosed location in Romania. “After seeing, including on social networks, that [the Tate brothers] were together in Romania,” the article outlined, “the DIICOT prosecutors mobilized the special troops of the Gendarmerie and descended, by force, on their villa in Pipera, but also on other addresses.”
Now that Tate has been nabbed by Romanian authorities for connections to human trafficking, Twitter has been doing some digging into his internet archives and uncovering some huge WTF moments — like his archived site from November 2020, The PhD Program. Here, Tate claims to be an “expert on all male-female interactions” due to his seemingly self-admitted history of … emotionally manipulating women into becoming online sex workers. Big yikes. That sure sounds a lot like human trafficking to me, and it’s a lot to take in. So, while Thunberg may not have nabbed Tate, karma sure as hell did.
