I missed this last month because the news broke when I was out for a week on vacation. Former political commentator and filmmaker Lauren Southern published a book in which she devoted a chapter to an interaction she had with Andrew Tate in Romania back in 2018. The gist of the story is that she accuses Tate of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room.
In her book, Ms. Southern described meeting Mr. Tate in 2018 through Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a British far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson. Mr. Robinson told her that the Tate brothers were wealthy cryptocurrency investors in Romania who were interested in sponsoring a media project she would help lead, she wrote.
She flew to Bucharest with Mr. Robinson and two collaborators to meet the Tate brothers and visited Mr. Tate’s compound, she said. Ms. Southern said that she later agreed to meet with the Tates alone, believing that they would discuss the business opportunity. They took her to a night club where she had two drinks and felt “surprisingly intoxicated,” enough to feel sick, she wrote.
Mr. Tate took her back to her hotel room. Ms. Southern wrote that he kissed her and she kissed him back before telling him she wanted to sleep. “He wanted to go further. I said no, very clearly, multiple times, and tried to pull his hands off me,” she wrote. Mr. Tate then “began strangling me unconscious,” she wrote.
“He repeatedly strangled me every time I regained enough consciousness to pull at his arms,” she wrote. “I’d prefer not to share the rest. It’s pretty obvious.”
Tate's spokesperson has denied all of this saying if anything did happen it was consensual. Tommy Robinson, who is also mentioned in the story, posted a video in which he claimed he saw Southern kissing Tate at the hotel room the next morning.
For her part, Southern tells a different story and several other witnesses back it up. Specifically, she told her business partners what had happened immediately the next morning.
The next day, she said, she told Mr. Robinson and the two others on the trip, Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn, that Mr. Tate had assaulted her. Mr. Robertson and Mr. Llewelyn, who were collaborating with Ms. Southern, both confirmed in interviews that they had traveled to Bucharest with her in February 2018, and that Ms. Southern had described being assaulted by Mr. Tate the morning after the encounter. Mr. Robertson said that he recalled seeing marks on Ms. Southern’s neck...
Another friend of Ms. Southern’s who had worked with Mr. Robinson, Lucy Brown, said that Ms. Southern had seemed out of character after her return from the trip, and that Mr. Robertson, Mr. Llewelyn and Ms. Southern all told her about the alleged assault. (Ms. Brown is also being sued by Mr. Tate for defamation over her accusations that he has sexually assaulted others.)
Finally, after returning to Canada, Southern also went to the hospital and documented the attack.
When she returned to Canada, Ms. Southern went to Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, according to a sexual assault assessment form that she shared with The Times, and requested counseling and sexual health tests. The hospital report said that Ms. Southern had a physical examination and reported pain swallowing, red dots on her face and under her eyes, and other symptoms from strangulation.
The alleged assault was not reported to authorities because it happened “outside of Canadian jurisdiction,” the hospital form said. Ms. Southern contacted the British authorities to try report the allegation, she wrote, but was told that an investigation could be pursued only in Romania.
As is pretty common in these cases, Southern was initially conflicted and tried to remain friendly with Tate. But eventually she did confront him by text and he denied doing anything wrong and suggested they could settle the issue "in court." The text messages ended with Southern saying she didn't want to do that. "I’m not telling anyone Andrew,” she wrote. “It’s just not ok and you should know that."
What Southern describes is pretty similar to what other alleged victims have described. I wrote about the allegations made by Tate's former girlfriend in April. She also described being choked.
“Plaintiff began crying and begging for him to stop. He would not,” the documents allege. “Tate continued to choke plaintiff, harder and harder, making plaintiff nearly lose consciousness.”
Stern claimed Tate could not climax sexually unless he “verbally degraded her to the point of feeling worthless and crying”. She wanted to leave after the reported attack took place, but was too scared, she said. The next morning, she pretended nothing was wrong and then left.
“The last words he said to me before I left the hotel were ‘Shut the f*** up, bitch. You will never backtalk me, you are my property’,” she alleged.
Tate is currently still facing charges in Romania and the UK but has not been charged with anything in the US. It's not clear that Southern has any intention of making herself part of the case against him. She hasn't said anything about that as far as I can tell.
