The documentary-maker behind Michael Jackson exposé Leaving Neverland reveals how the planet’s eighth most Googled man seemed ‘oddly vulnerable’ when they met at his house in Dubai
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.)
I’ve often wondered why Tate’s people came to us, when our best-known documentary exposed allegations of sexual abuse by a charismatic celebrity? Perhaps they hadn’t done their homework. As we started talks with Channel 4 about a possible documentary, it turned out that half the producers in town were offering the channel the same “exclusive access” to Tate. We were part of a scatter-gun plan to get the recently cancelled “Top G” back before his UK audience on old-school terrestrial TV.
Tate is the son of a Black American chess international master, who moved to Marsh Farm estate in Luton as a child. He became a champion kickboxer and then a webcam pimp, figuring out a way to optimise porn-on-demand sites such as OnlyFans by typing directly into the chats with male clients (“I finessed the dudes”) while his cam girls mock-typed on a dummy keyboard. “I went from kickboxer to a fucking pretend girl on the internet,” quips Tate in a podcast. The innovation worked brilliantly; Tate hired more girls and bought more laptops on which to type lewd messages to lonely men around the world. He was making serious money.
To this systematic approach to the online sex trade Tate added a sordid routine of control and coercion of the women who “cammed” for him. “You have to fuck the girls. You cannot do a purely professional business relationship with a female. It doesn’t work. If you’re not fucking the girl, she is fucking someone else. And that other person is gonna have the control over her mind,” he preaches in a video tutorial for aspiring webcam pimps.
Allegations of rape and physical violence by women who worked for Tate have now come back to haunt him: in Romania, where he’s facing possible trial, and in the UK, where at least four women are trying to take him to court. Two of his accusers give shockingly frank interviews for our documentary. But more of that later.
Channel 4 commissioned the documentary and just to be sure that Tate understood what was involved, Marguerite and I flew to Dubai to set the ground rules. We were ushered through the gates of a villa in Emirates Hills, past a bronze-coloured Bugatti and towards the pool where Tate was sitting bare-chested in shorts with his brother and cousin, busy on their laptops. I remember thinking: “These guys don’t look like they’re having fun.”
