Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan will remain in prison until February 27 after a Romanian court extended their detention.
Tate, 36, a British-U.S. citizen who has 4.5 million followers on Twitter, was arrested on December 29 in Bucharest along with Tristan and two Romanian women on charges of being part of an organised crime group, human trafficking and rape.
Today, a judge granted prosecutors another 30-day extension on their arrest, meaning all four will remain in custody until February 27.
Tate, who is accused of recruiting young women and forcing them to create online pornographic content, was furious at the judge’s decision and said via his lawyers that he is ‘being arrested for a crime of opinion’.
‘We continue to maintain that practically at this moment the Tate brothers are being arrested for a crime of opinion, for what they said, at some point, in the online environment and not for what they actually did in their private lives’, Constantin Ioan Gliga, one of the defence lawyers, told Romanian news outlet Gandul.
Gliga added that the decision was ‘unjustified and totally exaggerated’.
The judge’s ruling came after all four – Tate, Tristan and Luana Radu and Georgiana Naghel – lost an appeal last week at a Bucharest court, which ruled to uphold a judge’s December 30 move to uphold an earlier decision to extend their arrest from 24 hours to 30 days.
Tate is accused of recruiting scores of women and held them under house arrest ‘like prisoners’ while forcing them to create online pornographic content on webcams.
Romanian prosecutors claim that Tate recruited the women on social media platforms and lured them to Bucharest by falsely professing his love and intention to marry them.
Meanwhile, Romanian authorities on Saturday descended on a compound owned by Tate near Bucharest to tow away a fleet of 15 luxury cars and remove 14 designer watches and cash worth an estimated 3.6 million euros (£3.1 million).
Romania’s anti-organized crime agency said is has identified six victims in the human trafficking case who were subjected to ‘acts of physical violence and mental coercion’ and were sexually exploited by the members of the alleged crime group.
The agency said victims were lured by pretenses of love, and later intimidated, kept under surveillance and subjected to other control tactics while being coerced into performing in pornography.
Meanwhile, one of Tate’s alleged victims said she was promised marriage to one of the brothers, according to court documents obtained by Romanian news outlet Gandul.
She was lured to Romania by Tate and Tristan ‘by misrepresenting the intention to establish a marriage or cohabitation relationship,’ prosecutors claim.
The woman is said to have been picked up at the airport by a ‘female accomplice’ after landing in Romania and she was initially promised that she would be living with her ‘boyfriend’.
But the woman was told ‘she would live with some girls who work for’ the brothers, prosecutors claim in the court documents. She was then allegedly forced to create pornographic content for the Tate brothers.
Romanian prosecutors claim the brothers ‘identified vulnerable people and exploited their needs for affection, trust, stability, creating the impression of a close relationship’.
The tactics are known as the ‘lover boy’ method, which is used by criminals to recruit victims who are suffering from economic hardship by seducing them with gifts and promises of a better life abroad.
The brothers had ‘the role of recruiting people, who were transported and housed in houses in Romania… and the role of supervising and coordinating the entire exploitation activity’, prosecutors claim.
The prosecutors claimed allowing Tate and Tristan to not face imprisonment ‘poses a danger to public order’.
