It is June 2021 and Andrew Tate is teaching members of his exclusive on-line ‘War Room’ how to manipulate young women into sex work. He has recently hooked up with a girl and is working to get her onto Only Fans. Psychological manipulation is key.
“Remember what I said,” he writes. “When I’m away I go harder on my hoes.” The paying members of the War Room (which costs $8,000 per year) respond enthusiastically. A fellow named Ian, writing under the moniker ‘Blade of Wudan,’ responds: “If you are typing and not Tate right now you are wrong.”
Publicly, Tate describes the War Room as a network of men that “promotes self-discipline, motivation and confidence building while giving members access to thousands of professionals from around the world who encourage personal responsibility and accountability, emphasizing the importance of taking ownership of your choices and actions.” In private, the ‘PHD’ (Pimpin’ Hoes Degree) course is something very different. We were provided with pages of private War Room chat logs that highlight Tate’s methods. Tate even attempted to brush off questions about them in a recent interview with Piers Morgan, but they have been independently verified by the BBC.
A young woman from rural Romania named Jasmina Valentina is Tate’s latest target. She believes that Tate wants a genuine relationship with her. “Rather lose them or make them slaves in my absence,” he writes. “I’ve explained it here with the last screenshots. Told her she has to move to Bucharest (7 hours drive away from her home town) and live with me.” He posts screenshots of their recent WhatsApp conversation so the men can learn from his conversational tactics. At first, Jasmina refuses to move, saying she would be lonely. Tate says he has a place for her—not incidentally, with some “girls who work for Georgiana [Naghel],” allegedly Tate’s partner in the Only Fans business. (Naghel was later arrested along with the Tates.)
The key, Tate says, is to pick fights with the girls to keep them off-balance. He shares a series of screenshots to illustrate. “You better understand you’re here to stay and do as you’re told,” he tells Jasmina in one message. “If you’re not taking us seriously say so now.” When she replies by asking what she has done wrong, Tate escalates: “Talk to me correctly when I ask something this is your final warning.” He then accuses her of working for a sex club in her hometown, and she panics. She is vulnerable, Tate tells his followers, because she has “lost her support networks at home.”
Jasmina denies Tate’s accusation, which he tells the men he had “literally totally made…up from the sky.” He explains that he did so because “the real goal is for her to agree to never go anywhere without me. Not even her home town. I need her working. Not visiting friends back in her home town. So putting nails in that coffin saying my people there are talking bad about her.” He poses an ultimatum to Jasmina: “You are never going back to Timisoara even to visit. Without me. Understand?” She caves, confused. “Yes. I understand.” Tate ups the ante. “You don’t need to leave the house in Bucharest without either me or Georgiana. We are together. Always. We are either a couple or were [sic] not. Do you understand me?” The men taking the PHD course certainly do.
At this point, Tate’s guru Miles Sonkin—using the pseudonym Shi Yan Hui—breaks in with a lesson for everyone. If targeted girls push back, he says, they should be immediately ghosted. He shares a motto he calls the “Uncle Ben is a PIMP proverb,” which goes like this: “Pimps throughout history were responsible for the well-being and safety of their hos. In return the hos worked hard for their pimp and broke themselves (gave him ALL their money.)” That is the goal here: break the girls down, persuade them they are loved, turn them into sex workers producing revenue. In law enforcement circles, this is referred to as the ‘lover-boy method.’
Clearly feeling insecure, Jasmina sends Tate a WhatsApp assuring him that she doesn’t feel threatened by his behavior but that she wants to lay out some rules because she is “old fashioned and I do believe in God.” Because of that, she says, she will never send “a picture of me in lingerie” because she made a promise to God. “I will never do video chat or [O]nly [F]ans because my body is intimate and only my husband should be able to touch and see’; “If I give you my love I’m expecting the same thing back”; “The man I love should not hit me or beat me up.” This, Jasmina tells Tate, “is the way I was raised” and if he can respect that, she will be an entirely devoted wife for him and be “all [his] forever.”
Jasmina clearly believes that she is dating Tate and that the two of them will likely get married. Tate treats her as a target, with a single goal in mind: get her to drop her objections to doing online pornography by manipulating, gaslighting, and lying to her, while carefully screenshotting and annotating each conversation for his proteges in the PHD program. Jasmina has no idea that there are many hungry men following each conversation, learning from the way Tate isolates her, breaks down her barriers, and cuts her off from her friends and her beliefs.
“The god conviction stuff is hard to get over with religious girls,” he tells the War Room. “So it’s worthwhile I share the attempt.” This, he adds, is why he banned her from her hometown—because it is the source of her convictions. The men chime in regarding other barriers to be overcome: “God, marriage, never done it before.” One man puts it succinctly: “She’s serving 2 masters—Tate & God. Made promises to both.” Tate is dismissive. Women, he says, have no real beliefs. In Jasmina’s case, she has no money and Tate has told her he disapproves of any work except Only Fans.
“Since she’s moved … she’s been fed,” he writes, sharing a screenshot. “But nothing else. She’s broke. She can’t go home. And she can’t leave the house. Man. I sound almost evil.” He follows up shortly: “It’s comply or goodbye.”
Within ten days, he’s isolated Jasmina Valentina, broken her down, and persuaded her that Only Fans is the way to ensure that they will be together forever, traveling the world in a romantic partnership. The men of the War Room celebrate his victory, poring over the screenshots of their conversation. One participant speaks for the group: “You’re doin gods work for us younguns G @cobratate.”
Tate gives them his last lesson. “She never believed in god,” he writes. “Women never believe in anything. Women are programmed. Just have to replace the programming. Remember that. Even when she’s doing what you want her too [sic]. There’s outside forces trying to rewrite that code.” Publicly, Tate presents himself as a ‘man of God’ and a devotee of religion. But in his private comments, he sees belief in God as an irritating barrier to drafting women into the porn industry—a belief that must be destroyed.
Since Andrew Tate’s arrest and subsequent charges for human trafficking, Jasmina Valentina has publicly insisted that she is not a victim. However, it is not yet clear if she is aware that Tate used her journey into sex work as a step-by-step case study in the psychological manipulation of women for the men of Andrew Tate’s War Room seeking to earn their Pimpin’ Hoes Degrees.
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That is the private Andrew Tate. The public Andrew Tate is a cultural phenomenon: a former British kick-boxer-turned-influencer who has become one of the most Googled men in the world with more than 11 billion views on TikTok. He is the personification of various internet subcultures—from the critics of the anti-feminist manosphere to the hyper-masculine self-help gurus and pick-up artists. He has turned his influence into a steady stream of revenue, with young male customers paying for his various online courses. His popularity exploded even further when several social media platforms decided to simultaneously de-platform him, earning him interviews with the mainstream media.
I don’t understand how he’s any kind of male role model. He’s a rapist, and he picked and lost a Twitter fight with Greta Thunberg. What more is there to say?
I don’t understand how he’s any kind of male role model. He’s a rapist, and he picked and lost a Twitter fight with Greta Thunberg. What more is there to say?