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An American woman accused Andrew and Tristan Tate of coercing her to Romania under false pretenses, attempting to “recruit her” into a sex work and then “bullying and harassing” her in a defamation suit.
The civil suit was filed Monday in a Florida court, where the Tate brothers — known online for their misogynistic comments — sued the unnamed woman for defamation in 2023. They hold U.S. and U.K. citizenship but have been residing in Romania since 2015, according to the complaint.
The pair have also been fighting criminal and civil cases in Romania and the U.K., including accusations of human trafficking and rape. Monday’s lawsuit marks the first case against the Tate brothers in the U.S., according to the New York Times.
The Independent has reached out to Doe’s lawyer, who is with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the newest lawsuit.
Joseph McBride, a lawyer for the Tate brothers, told The Independent in an email: “[The center’s] civil suit represents a poorly constructed and desperate attempt to relitigate the failed Romanian criminal case in a U.S. court. Shockingly, [The center] has blatantly disregarded Judge Curley’s order to seal the Romanian indictment by copying and pasting large sections of the Romanian indictment into their flawed lawsuit. We will be seeking sanctions immediately.” He noted he “looks forward to” the defamation trial.
The woman, 23, and only known as “Jane Doe” in the filing, claims that the Tate brothers sued her to “disrupt the Romanian prosecution” and to “bully and harass” her into recanting her testimony against them in that case.
She alleges that Tristan Tate “lured” her from Florida “under the pretense of a romantic relationship.” They met in November 2021 on an online platform when she was 20 years old. They met up multiple times over a two-week span, the suit says. At some point, he told her he loved her and encouraged her to move to Europe with him. When she arrived, he introduced rules, including no body hair at all and “no external friends,” the suit says.
She quickly felt her experience “was not normal.” Tristan became “rarely available.” Most of the other women she was living with were working on OnlyFans; she had been told that two of them were Andrew’s girlfriends, according to the complaint. One of the women said she knew things about the Tate brothers “that if she ever told anyone about, she would end up dead.”
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Mary Doe, another unnamed woman living with Jane in Romania and unnamed in the lawsuit, met Andrew Tate via Instagram in January 2022. She shared how she was struggling financially and the pair met in person the following month. Just before he arrived, he told her: “You need to understand once you’re my girl you will have to be my girl forever…What if we fall in love and I kidnap you to Bucharest,” according to the complaint.
Mary fell in love with him and believed they were in an exclusive relationship; Andrew told her that he loved her and wanted to marry and have a family with her. He asked her to go to Romania for a week and live with two women there “and report back to me,” he said, clarifying he will only sleep with them if she’s there too: the other women “want me but don’t have me.”
Mary stressed that she wouldn’t have sex with other women and that she didn’t want him to sleep with others either. “After you prove yourself,” he told her, according to the complaint. He said she’d need to “take care of me.”
“If I told you to put my name in a [tattoo], you’d do it,” he wrote, after she expressed not wanting a tattoo. “So you don’t care what I want,” she replied, to which Andrew said: “You want what I want.”
At one point, Mary realized Andrew was friends with one of her exes, prompting him to react “with jealousy” and use it as an excuse to say he no longer trusted her, the complaint says.
After demanding that she move to Romania and that she “should feel regret,” he told her he was going to beat her with a “belt” and called her a “slave” multiple times.
“You want me to be your slave or your wife?” Mary replied. Andrew said: “You’re going to do whatever I say…If I chose a woman as my wife, she loves me enough to let me call her anything I f***ing want. I WILL DECIDE if that’s slave…I’m a man. I don’t listen to females complain.”
Other messages show he said she was “property owned by me.”
After repeated “pressure and manipulation,” Andrew insisted she needed to prove she was serious by moving permanently to Romania, the suit says. He told Mary to stay with his assistant while he was away in Dubai for work; she moved into the house with women working on OnlyFans.
Via text, he told her she couldn’t go out alone, told her not to post photos of the house or the women in it, and started “grooming” her to make sexual contact with other women and send him videos. He also “insisted she have group sex” – an experience that left her “very distressed” so she locked herself in the bathroom and cried.
Mary later discovered that Andrew was also in sexual relationships with the other women, sending one of them nearly verbatim messages to the ones he sent Mary.
“This demonstrates how the professions of love and romantic feelings by Andrew Tate are fraudulent and a means only of controlling and exploiting these women — with the ultimate goal of monetary gain,” the complaint says.
When Jane Doe arrived in Romania, she and Mary discussed their experiences and how the other women in the house were collaborating with the Tates to “groom and manipulate them,” the suit says. They planned an escape. Jane, who had shared her concerns with her parents and her friend, tried to stop them from making a report because she thought it would “endanger” her and Mary. But a report to the U.S. Embassy was made, which notified Romanian authorities.
Romanian authorities were already criminally investigating the siblings at that point, the suit says. In April 2022, Romanian police raided the Tate brothers’ compound and rescued Mary, who had been there for about one month, and Jane, who had been there for about one week.
In December 2022, the brothers were arrested and began a “campaign to harass and intimidate” Mary and Jane, the complaint states. The Tates have “used their money and influence” to hire internet sleuths and private investigators to dig into Jane’s private life and launched a “frivolous lawsuit” to discredit and intimidate her, the suit says.
In January 2023, the Tate brothers sent a letter through their lawyer threatening to sue her parents for $30 million if she didn’t recant her testimony to Romanian authorities, the suit says.
Last December, a Romanian court ruled that the human trafficking case against the brothers couldn’t go to trial due to “significant procedural flaws” by the prosecution. They also face rape and sexual aggression accusations in the U.K.
The brothers have steadfastly denied the allegations against them.
Jane Doe told the Times in a statement: “I look forward to my day in court, where evidence and facts — not narratives — will decide the outcome.”
