Influencer and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have touched down in Florida shortly after Romanian prosecutors lifted a travel ban on the pair.
The Tate brothers are under criminal investigation in Romania on accusations of forming an organised criminal group, human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering.
“We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet, ever,” Andrew Tate said as he left the Fort Lauderdale airport on Thursday (local time).
He said he and his brother were totally innocent and the victims of lies.
Both Tate brothers are former kickboxers with dual US and British citizenship.
Andrew Tate did not respond to questions about why they had come to Florida, or whether US President Donald Trump had helped get their travel ban lifted.
Britain’s Financial Times reported this week that US officials had brought up the brothers’ case in a phone call to the Romanian government.
It said Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell followed up with Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the recent Munich Security Conference. A source told the FT a request was made to return the brothers’ passports and allow them to travel while they waited for court proceedings to conclude.
The brothers had been banned from leaving Romania pending the criminal investigation into accusations against them of forming an organised criminal group, human trafficking, trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering. They have denied all wrongdoing.
On Thursday, Trump said he knew nothing about the Tate case and Romania.
Tate, who gained millions of online fans by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle that critics say denigrates women, planned to return to Romania at the end of March to fulfil a judicial control obligation, a source told Reuters.
Referring to the charges against Tate, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said his state was “not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct”, and that the state’s attorney general was looking at legal options.
Andrew Tate’s online instructional videos direct men to, among other things, physically assault women who accuse them of cheating, according to extremism-tracking group the Anti-Defamation League.
“It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face, you grip her up by the neck,” Tate says in one video.
-with AAP
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