Who is Andrew Tate: the quarrel with Greta Thunberg and the arrest for trafficking in human beings

“This is what happens when you don’t recycle pizza boxes.” Greta Thunberg keep scratching. The last message, with clear reference to Andrew Tate, is from the morning of Friday 30 December, but the exchange between the climate activist and the influencer had started a couple of days earlier. All via social media and it should by now be clear that whoever hurts from social media perishes from social media.

Who is Andrew Tate

Andrew Tate is a 35-year-old influencer, former kickboxing champion. Online he presents himself as a guru who teaches how to make money and collect women in his Hustler’s University. Tate was born in the US, but has British citizenship thanks to his mother. After her divorce from her father, who was a well known chess player, he was brought up in Luton. In 2016 he was kicked out of Big Brother for a video of him whipping a woman. He has defined himself as a misogynist and sexist: for him, victims of sexual assault are responsible for violence suffered.

He just got back up Twitter, had been banned in 2017 and now readmitted by Elon Musk. From other social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitch, he was banned for violating their policies regarding dangerous people and organizations. In a video he declared that “no girl has ever come out publicly saying that I did something bad to her”. On TikTok, his videos, also made by his followers who use his name, have been viewed 11 billion times. In 2017 he moved to Romania because the British police were investigating alleged abuse of a woman He also had problems in Romania. Already in April he and his brother were interrogated by the Romanian authorities and released, although the investigation remains open.

The match with Greta

On Tuesday 27 December he wrote to Greta saying he had 33 cars with «huge emissions», starting the list and asking her for an e-mail address to indicate them all. She replied giving the address and begging him to enlighten her. The man’s next message is a video in which two take-out pizza boxes from a Romanian chain, Jerry’s Pizza, were visible.

It would have been these who had him identified together with his brother Tristan by the Bucharest police and then arrested. The two are to be questioned as part of an investigation: they are suspected of having created a criminal group that allegedly exploited six women to produce pornographic content.

Social users immediately began to laugh and make fun of theinfluencer stuck by pizza and Greta did not miss an opportunity to point it out: «This is what happens when you don’t recycle pizza boxes». On Wikipedia the list of Tate’s meetings has been modified by adding her defeat with Greta.

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