Behind the making of Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World?

For most people, Andrew Tate’s stratospheric rise happened overnight. One day, few had heard of him, the next, he was a hugely influential TikTok star who was in the process of building an army of lonely, angry men. By last summer, though, it was clear Tate had already built this army – in fact, by then he was focused on growing and refining it.

Before he and his brother Tristan were arrested on human trafficking and rape charges back in December 2022, and then charged in June (the pair deny the charges), Tate spent his time making videos promoting a ‘hyper-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle’. Although he was suspended from multiple social media platforms for this misogynistic rhetoric, Tate’s followers promoted these videos for him, earning money to do so via his Hustler’s University – a platform that purports to teach subscribers how to make money online.

In a new BBC documentary, Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World?, Emmy-nominated documentarian Matt Shea and filmmaker Jamie Tahsin – whose previous film, The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate saw them gain unprecedented access to the influencer and his inner circle – expose something more sinister still. The film reveals disturbing chat logs from Tate’s secret society, the War Room, which suggest members are being taught to groom women into online sex work.

The leaked chats show how the War Room’s ‘PhD’ course (‘Pimpin’ Hoes Degree’) allegedly teaches its members to use ‘loverboy’ tactics to seduce, isolate, and coercively control women before luring them into camming, often taking all the profits they earn from it. Members – who are enacting this abuse from all over the world – are even encouraged to share photographic or video evidence with each other, including when they successfully manipulate women into getting their name tattooed on their body.

The disturbing documentary sees Shea and Tahsin speak to two victims out of a potential 45 who were identified as having been exploited by War Room members between 2019 and 2020 – though the pair believe the overall figure is likely higher. These victims recount the formula used by Tate’s followers, including conditioning them with rewards, in order to, as one victim put it, “hypnotise” them into subservience.

GQ sat down with Shea and Tahsin to discuss Tate’s power over young men, their explosive investigation, and why they believe there’s someone else pulling the strings.

GQ: What were your first impressions of Andrew Tate?

Jamie Tahsin: When I first started speaking to Andrew, it was 2019 and he had like 50,000 Instagram followers. What was surreal was how dedicated his following were: their Instagrams were curated to be exactly like his; they’d have Andrew Tate quotes as their captions. The fact that he was talking about running this giant webcam company and selling courses teaching men how to do the same thing was obviously a red flag, but I don’t think we ever anticipated that he would become quite as big as he did.

In the documentary, you meet a follower who says he won’t believe the allegations against Tate until he admits to them himself. Why do you think he has such power over these young men?

Matt Shea: People tend to look at Andrew Tate [and his followers] as a political thing, but it’s actually closer to a spiritual thing. A lot of these young men see Andrew Tate as a messiah-like figure who’s saved them from the depths of whatever insecurity they have, and he’s their key to happiness and to saving society. If you challenge that by investigating them and putting forward allegations, that’s emotionally quite difficult for them to comprehend.

JT: He was the first masculinity influencer who ticked the superficial boxes of masculinity. The other weren’t ex-world kickboxing champions, they weren’t six-foot-three, they weren’t perceived by some as traditionally handsome, they weren’t seemingly multi-millionaires. He was the perfect encapsulation of what loads of young teenage men – and adult men, we’ve come to find – feel really insecure about.

At the centre of your investigation are Telegram chats between War Room members, which you got from an internet sleuth called @crabcrawler1. How did he access these files? Were you surprised by the accusations?

JT: He got the files from a former member of the War Room, who, before leaving, had taken large amounts of these chat logs. I then had numerous phone calls with that ex-War Room member, going through the logs, authenticating them, and getting him to supply additional information to show his time in the War Room and his association with the various people named. We did know about the charges relating to Andrew Tate at that point, so we’d started to uncover certain things that were pointing us in this direction, but we were shocked by the scale and detail of the information that we were able to get.

You posit that Iggy Semmelweiss, a War Room ‘general’, might actually be the mastermind behind this whole operation. You met him during your first documentary into Tate – did you have any suspicions that he might be the true leader at that point?

MS: We both suspected that because he had mastermind energy. At one point he addressed the entire War Room crowd with a statement: “I have an interesting role in the War Room; none of you know my true purpose”. He just screamed that sort of weird, live-action role-playing game side of the internet that intersects with the manosphere. He seemed like he could be the Q Anon-style master of it all. He seemed to have a grand plan and an idea of how to go about it, whereas Andrew Tate seemed a bit more like he was along for the ride and just having fun.

What was he like when you tried to talk to him?

JT: He’s very intense. The first time we were there, I tried to get Andrew to get Iggy to give us an interview and he said he wouldn’t do it. Then I tried on two more occasions to speak to him directly, and it was this very surreal combination of refusing to engage, but also fixated eye-contact, never blinking. So he wouldn’t say yes to anything you’d ask, but he also wouldn’t walk away.

MS: What kind of person creates an entire society of men and then encourages them to traffic women and send images back of those trafficked women? Is it all just some grand operatic fetish of Iggy’s?

What’s quite interesting about him is that he refuses to talk to you and refuses to play an active role in the mainstream media in relation to Tate, but is very much in the War Room propaganda videos, so he wants people to know he’s a leader of sorts.

JT: Yeah, he also breadcrumbs constantly, like the fact that he makes references on his Twitter and in messages to this book, The Scarlet Citadel [by Robert E. Howard]. In that book, there’s a wizard who traffics screaming girl slaves and wears a ring identical to the ones [Iggy gets the War Room members] to wear. There has to be a degree of hubris for him to lace his tweets with these subtle references to him being the keeper of the Scarlet Citadel. I’m sure in some ways, he wants people to work it out because he’s probably quite impressed with what he thinks he’s achieved.

MS: That also goes back to why Andrew Tate has had success that other masculinity influencers haven’t. Iggy is the old school manosphere pick-up artist nerd who’s into Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy, and fancies himself as a dark wizard. He sees Andrew Tate as an avatar of masculinity. The way we talk about it is: if these guys played World of Warcraft, they’d pick Andrew Tate to be their avatar. But they aren’t really this character of masculinity in real life. Iggy is playing out a fantasy through Andrew Tate.

What do you hope people will take away from this documentary?

MS: I certainly hope that people begin to see what’s going on around Andrew Tate, not just as a guy saying misogynistic things on the internet, which is how most people know him, but actually as someone who’s surrounded by what appears to be a high degree of criminality.

Between your two documentaries, have you found that more people are taking Tate seriously?

JT: I wouldn’t say more people are taking him seriously, but I’ve noticed that his fans have become even more invested in and loyal to him, and more antagonistic of anyone who reports on what he does. It’s been quite shocking to see how they’ve gone from people who supported someone on the internet to people who literally believe this man is a messiah who’s going to save civilisation.

MS: I do think that this film has opened up a lot of Andrew Tate fans and would-be-fans – whether it’s them, their parents, or teachers watching it – to the fact that he’s manipulating them, and that his end goal isn’t to help you become a better man, but to make money off you.

Has Tate himself changed during this time?

MS: I’ve noticed shockingly little change in him despite what he’s been charged with. The only thing that’s changed is that his marketing team have intentionally tried to portray him as more of a religious family man than a playboy, which is an interesting tension. It’s the same man at the centre of it all, and that’s a man who will do whatever it takes to become rich and famous.

Have you had any responses so far to the documentary from War Room members?

JT: Iggy tweeted a picture of a box of chocolates, a link to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then a meme about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s myth. So that gives you an idea of what he wanted people to take out of this story.

MS: Tate messaged me, ‘Bro, what was that shit? WTF was that?’ with a laughing face emoji.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity