For someone ever willing to promote his vile brand of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate was strangely quiet when one of his ten million followers made shocking headline news in the summer of 2024.

No one familiar with the case will easily forget how police called to the home of BBC racing commentator John Hunt that July in Bushey, Hertfordshire, found the bloodied bodies of his wife Carol, stabbed to death with a ten-inch butcher’s knife, and two of their daughters, Hannah and Louise, both shot dead with a crossbow.

Later it was revealed that the killer, Louise’s jilted ex-boyfriend Kyle Clifford, had watched several of Tate’s videos, including one the night before the brutal attacks. His fury that 25-year-old Louise had dared to end their 18-month relationship led him to bind her arms and ankles with duct tape, then gag and rape her before shooting her through the chest with the crossbow.

During the trial, which led to Clifford being given a whole life sentence last year, Tate’s account on the social media platform X made no mention of the case or any attempt to distance himself from it.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has been more vocal, since warning that Tate’s radicalisation of young men is ‘quite terrifying’.

Yet now it has emerged that Tate may only have remained free to spread those hateful ideas because of the failings of the Hertfordshire Constabulary, the very police force which later brought Kyle Clifford to justice.

This month was due to mark the start of a civil case brought by four women making claims of sexual violence against Tate. They include allegations that he grabbed one of the women by the throat on several occasions in 2015, pointed a gun in her face and assaulted her with a belt.

The women say they have resorted to civil action because the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the criminal case in 2019, citing lack of evidence. But an explosive new report by investigative journalist Heidi Blake blames police incompetence and prejudice instead.

‘Their officers bungled the investigation from the start, making it almost impossible to bring Tate to trial,’ she writes in this month’s The New Yorker magazine.

After reading of the proposed civil case, another woman who claimed to have been attacked by Tate joined the lawsuit – but it has now been postponed indefinitely pending the reopening of the criminal case.

Meanwhile, Ms Blake paints a damning picture of Tate’s activities, drawn from thousands of leaked files, alongside interviews with him and his younger brother Tristan, and more than a dozen alleged victims.

The latter included Maya Navarro*, one of the women who made those initial rape allegations against Tate.

She first encountered him in late 2014, when he was setting up the pornography business which funded the lavish lifestyle underpinning his appeal to impressionable young men.

Frequently posting photographs of his £3.4million Bugatti Chiron sports car, his private jet, and diamond-encrusted watches, he routinely derides‘brokies’ - his catch-all term for anyone without money.

As he boasts, he has accumulated all this despite being brought up on a rough council estate in Luton, Bedfordshire, by a single mother.

After leaving school, he worked in a fish market while Tristan, two years his junior, sold double-glazing door-to-door.

Both also made money as kickboxers -Tate being a four-time world champion, and Tristan twice winning the British championships -but by 2014 they had moved into online porn, persuading women to perform sex acts on camera in return for payment by subscribers.

In 2012, as he competed across Europe, styling himself King Cobra and getting a large tattoo of that menacing creature on his chest, 26-year-old Andrew Tate had begun a relationship with Bibiana Hruskova, a 15-year-old Slovakian schoolgirl who became besotted with him.

Two years later, he summoned her to England and persuaded her, then still a minor at 17, to become his first online sex worker.

Since filming sexual imagery of anyone under 18 is illegal in the UK, Ms Hruskova pretended to be a Russian woman in her 20s. Persuaded by Tate to get a tattoo of a cobra down one side of her body, she had another reading ‘Tate Property’ above her bikini line.

Later setting up an online network called the War Room, in which members paid around £6,000 a year for lessons on how to recruit women into ‘sexual slavery’, Tate boasted that Ms Hruskova had made him around £1.5million and in return earned only pocket money for coffees and manicures.

‘She works hard to please me. To get attention,’ he said.

In the first month alone, Ms Hruskova brought in around £75,000, enabling the brothers to buy an Aston Martin. This, and the other trappings of their growing wealth, helped them to recruit other young women, often from troubled homes or living in poverty and vulnerable to what they called the ‘lover-boy technique’.

This involved wooing them with promises of money and a relationship until they were susceptible enough to agree to perform on camera.

One was Maya Navarro, a 20-year-old from a struggling family in Bedfordshire. She described Andrew Tate as being ‘very charismatic, very confident’.

Showing her screenshots of the money supposedly going into Ms Hruskova’s bank account, he promised to make her rich enough to travel the world and help her family.

‘I don’t think I’d ever spoken to anybody in my entire life that had said those kinds of things to me,’ Ms Navarro told Ms Blake.

Paid hundreds of pounds in cash for her webcam work, more money than she had ever earned before, she could soon afford luxury items such as a Michael Kors watch and a pair of Louboutin heels.

But she says that one night, after she’d been working from a room at a Hilton hotel in Luton, she woke to find Tate behind her, groping her legs before raping her with his hands around her throat until she fought for breath.

She went back to live with her mother for a while but then regretted giving up the source of the most money she had ever made.

By the time she returned in the spring of 2015, Tate had moved his webcam operation to a four-bedroom apartment in Hitchin, Hertfordshire - about ten miles north east of Luton.

She said it was ‘the nicest place she’d ever stayed’ but there, she claims, Tate raped her again.

After that, she says, he began attacking her at random moments - whipping her with a belt if she slept late - until finally she walked out for good.

Soon afterwards, another girl named Emilia Walker* left too. They compared notes and she told Ms Navarro that, although she had started sleeping with Tate consensually, he had attacked her many times, choking her until she almost passed out.

That summer, the two women filed complaints with Hertfordshire Police, who had also been contacted by another woman named Hannah Price*. She said that she dated Tate for a few weeks the year before but told him she wasn’t ready for sex.

During their brief time together, Ms Price claimed that he had raped and strangled her twice and showed detectives his texts.

‘I love raping you,’ he said in one.‘Monsters are monsters.’

When Ms Price made her complaint, she claims that officers discouraged her from taking it further, warning that it would be a long and difficult process.

They also omitted to make a digital recording of Walker’s statement, instead noting her words down on paper so carelessly that they got Tate’s name wrong, referring to him as ‘Michael’ instead of Andrew. 

Hertfordshire Police self-referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct in December 2023, saying: 'We are investigating a former detective constable for potential gross misconduct, relating to alleged failures to properly investigate, and two former detective sergeants at the level of misconduct, who supervised the investigation.'

According to Blake, police also mishandled key evidence. After Tate was arrested on suspicion of assault, his phone was seized but left unsecured at the police station while the investigation dragged on.

Although officers later found material on it that appeared potentially incriminating, the failure to properly safeguard the device meant the evidence was unlikely to stand up in court.

A long-serving Hertfordshire detective told Ms Blake that the problem lay with ‘overworked, overstretched’ officers who failed to take the women seriously, partly because two of them were sex workers.

‘It was one of many cases that were completely cocked up because of poor policing,’ he said.

Quickly released, the only ‘punishment’ Tate received was an end to his subsequent attempt to become a reality TV star on the 2016 season of Big Brother.

At the time, this was believed to have been because a tabloid newspaper had got hold of a video showing him whipping Bibiana Hruskova with a belt. In fact, it was because the Hertfordshire police had contacted the producers and told them of the various allegations there had been against him.

As Heidi Blake points out, they had apparently missed indications of another crime: child pornography.

‘Tate said that the belt video was made in 2012, at the start of his relationship with Hruskova. That year, she turned fifteen.’

With no charges pressed against them, the brothers were free to spend more time at their new base in Romania, where their webcam business boomed.

The operation was run from a heavily guarded compound on the outskirts of the capital Bucharest, with a courtyard containing an illuminated swimming pool and rows of their supercars.

In their search for potential recruits, the brothers trawled dating apps and social media, bombarding young women with promises of a glamorous future.

At its peak, the business reportedly involved as many as 75 women, Tate bragging that more than 30 of them had the cobra tattoos which marked them out as his property.

One woman claimed Tate beat her so severely during what he described as rough sex that she suffered lasting injuries to her eye and breast.

Another said that he had punched her in the face and raped her, squeezing her head painfully between his hands as he threatened to get her pregnant and lock her house so that ‘she would definitely go crazy’.

A number of the women did become pregnant, Tate describing how he and Tristan have ‘double-digit children’ and calling himself ‘the big gorilla’.

‘I take fertile females and I impregnate them.’

Mothers were moved to their own accommodation where they kept working on camera. The brothers sometimes visited, and Tate has revelled in his five-year-old son sitting in silence for hours on his orders.

‘Doesn’t f****** move, doesn’t say a f****** word, because he’s scared for his f****** life.’

The operation continued largely unchecked until April 2022, when the US Embassy in Bucharest was tipped off about an American woman who said she had come to the city to teach Tristan Tate the piano. Instead, she said, she was being held against her will and that other women in the Tates’ compound appeared ‘brainwashed’.

After a SWAT team stormed the property and removed the women for questioning, Romania’s anti-organised crime prosecutors launched an investigation which, in December 2022, saw the Tate brothers arrested and accused of human trafficking and forming an organised criminal group.

Two years later, following an investigation by Bedfordshire Police, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the Tates were facing a string of criminal charges in the UK.

Separate to the allegations made by the women who contacted Hertfordshire Police in 2015, these included rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain.

Although the UK issued an extradition warrant, a Romanian court ruled that the brothers could not return here until all legal proceedings against them there have concluded.

Whether they will ever face trial in Romania remains in doubt. As Heidi Blake points out, the country has recently been beset by a judicial corruption scandal, with judges accused of dismissing or delaying politically sensitive cases - and the Tates’ case is certainly one of those.

Over the years, Andrew Tate has been photographed with right-wing politicians including Nigel Farage and far-Right agitator Tommy Robinson, who had also grown up in Luton and knew him well.

Intrigued by one of Robinson’s allies, the Canadian activist Lauren Southern, he invited her to Romania, ostensibly to discuss a business venture. Instead, according to Southern, he raped her, ignoring her desperate pleas that he should wear a condom.

Only male political figures seemed worthy of his respect. Following her defeat in the US presidential election of November 2024, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris specifically blamed Tate for instructing his young male followers to vote for Donald Trump.

Although Romania depends on the US for its defence against Russia, Tate has denied that a grateful Mr Trump was involved personally in the recent lifting of a Romanian ban on the brothers travelling abroad pending legal proceedings. But he told Ms Blake that the restrictions had been removed because of American pressure.

As for the chances of any trial going ahead, he crowed that they were ‘zero’.

Both he and his brother have consistently denied wrongdoing, insisting all relationships and sexual activity were consensual and portraying themselves as victims of a politically motivated campaign.

‘I’ve never done anything wrong in my life,’ he told Ms Blake.

He added: 'Show me a victim. Show me a hurt girl. Show me a bruise. Show me a girl chained up. Show me something.'

Tate insisted that none of the women he’d recruited had accused him of crimes, emphasising to Ms Blake that they are 'still my friends'.

In a recent X post entitled ‘Innocent Men Don’t Run’ he lounged on a harbourside balcony in Hong Kong and taunted the UK government, suggesting that if they were sure of their case, they should come and get him.

As he knows full well, Hong Kong has no formal extradition treaty with the UK and, even if it did, there is still the obstacle of Romanian legal proceedings needing to be completed first.

Until that happens, the Tates remain free to spew the kind of vitriolic nonsense said to have contributed to the deaths of Louise Hunt, her sister and her mother - among the first victims of Andrew Tate’s poisonous ideology, but almost certainly not the last.

*Names changed to protect anonymity