A spokesperson for the social media personality Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, confirmed Friday that the brothers will be released from detention in Romania after being taken into custody on Dec. 29, 2022.
Tate and his brother are both facing allegations of sexual assault and human trafficking. Neither Tate nor his alleged co-conspirators have been formally charged.
A spokesperson for the brothers said they will be released on house arrest. The conditions of their release were not immediately clear.
The pair were arrested along with two Romanian women in Bucharest on sex trafficking and other allegations.
In January, Romanian authorities seized $3.9 million worth of luxury cars and assets from a compound near Bucharest as part of the investigation into Tate.
In February, Tate lost an appeal against a judge’s decision to extend his detention for a third time, Ramona Bolla, a spokesperson for Romania’s anti-organized crime agency DIICOT, said.
DIICOT claimed it had identified six victims in the case who were allegedly subjected to “acts of physical violence and mental coercion” and sexually exploited by members of the alleged crime group.
NBC News has reached out to DIICOT for a statement on the Tate brothers’ release.
Tate, a former professional kickboxer who has reportedly lived in Romania since 2017, was previously banned from various prominent social media platforms. A spokesperson for Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, said that the company removed Tate’s official accounts from the social media platforms for violating the company’s policy on dangerous organizations and individuals.
TikTok said it banned Tate after an investigation.
“Misogyny is a hateful ideology that is not tolerated on TikTok,” the TikTok spokesperson said in August 2022. “Our investigation into this content is ongoing, as we continue to remove violative accounts and videos, and pursue measures to strengthen our enforcement, including our detection models, against this type of content.”
Tate has since been reinstated on Twitter, where he has continued to update his followers on his detention.
Early Friday, Tate sent a strange tweet, which read, in part: “When a peon’s father tries to pass down ancient wisdom, The peon ignores him to foster ‘independent’ thoughts. The independent thoughts they heard on television.”
The Associated Press contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
