Andrew Tate's arrest prompted by livestreamer who said Tate was leaving Romania, law firm says

A livestreamer may have triggered Romanian police to detain influencer Andrew Tate and serve him with a U.K. arrest warrant.

A law firm representing four of Tate’s U.K. accusers told NBC News that a livestream from fellow influencer Adin Ross prompted authorities to intervene on suspicion that Tate was planning to flee Romania before standing trial there on rape and human trafficking charges.

Tate was detained in Romania late Monday and served with a U.K. warrant in connection with allegations of rape and sexual assault that are in addition to the Romanian charges. Tate is British American, was born in the U.S. and rose to prominence while living in the U.K.

Both Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested Monday night and were to be released on Tuesday, Tate’s representative told NBC News. The brothers were initially released from house arrest in August after they were indicted on rape and trafficking charges in June. A date for the Romanian trial has not been set, but Romanian judicial authorities ruled Tuesday that the brothers can be extradited afterward to the U.K. to face sex crime charges. The Tate brothers have denied all allegations of sexual violence against them.

Ross, known to be Tate’s friend, is a popular video-game livestream personality who often makes content featuring rappers and celebrities. Twitch, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon, permanently banned Ross in 2023 after he displayed racist and antisemitic comments left by his viewers during a livestream. At the time, Ross said he was banned from Twitch for “no reason,” then later acknowledged it was the unmoderated chat messages that led to the ban.

During a livestream on the platform Kick last week, Ross said that Tate had sent him a text message saying that he was planning to leave Romania and never return.

“Andrew had hit me up. He said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be leaving Romania soon, and probably never coming back. If you want to come over and do a week of long streams and content before I leave, I think it’ll be big,’” Ross said on his livestream. “He said ‘It’s basically now or never.’”

“Again guys, it might be the last time we ever do this, so it’s kind of like we got to take advantage of this now,” Ross continued in the clip, which was widely shared online following Tate’s arrest.

Tate’s spokesperson Mateea Petrescu denied that Tate was planning to flee Romania. Ross didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Our clients are fully committed to actively participating in the legal process and defending their reputation. We believe this rumor has originated from a popular online influencer who misconstrued a text message from our clients while streaming live. There is simply no truth to it,” Petrescu said.

Petrescu did not immediately respond to a request for further details about the text message Ross said Tate had sent him.

Matthew Jury, a lawyer representing Tate’s U.K. accusers, responded to the arrest by highlighting what he called disinformation around the case.

“Since his arrest in Romania, Tate has spread a vast amount of disinformation about the criminal allegations he faces in the U.K. in a series of high-profile interviews with individuals such as Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson,” Jury wrote, acknowledging the right-wing media interest in Tate’s case. “We hope these recent developments will discourage them and others from continuing to give Tate such a platform or, at least, encourage them to properly interrogate him on the allegations.”

Jury’s clients are suing Tate in a U.K. civil case over rape and abuse allegations dating back to complaints made to U.K. police in 2014 and 2015. The police waited until 2019 to pass the information in the complaints to prosecutors, who then declined to press charges.

“This potentially negligent conduct resulted in Andrew Tate being free to move to Romania and commit more alleged crimes against women for which he is now awaiting trial. This could have been stopped,” the accusers wrote in a joint statement to raise money for their case.

When Vice News broke the story of Tate’s U.K. case in January 2023, the prosecutors who declined to press charges in 2019 said there were “evidentiary” issues and “no realistic prospect of a conviction.” Vice reported that the U.K. police apologized to the women involved for taking so long.

The Tate brothers command social media accounts with millions of followers and retain enormous influence over young boys, to the point where the U.K. has established an educational initiative to combat Tate’s influence in the classroom.