False: Andrew Tate was arrested but only questioned as a witness.

Context

On December 30, 2022, Andrew Tate, a controversial social media influencer and former professional kickboxer, and his brother Tristan were detained in Romania under charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group.

Following this, social media has been awash with false and misleading posts about Tate and his arrest.

One Facebook user shared a video of Fox News television host Tucker Carlson interviewing Tate with the caption, "Arrested but then only taken as a witness. Yet some how its viral that Tate was charged with all sorts! After aledgedly bullying a teenage girl online." The same clip was also shared on Twitter, claiming that Tate had been released and that there were no charges against him. In the video, when asked if he was arrested for human trafficking, Tate claimed he was "swatted" over false claims of human trafficking and had not been arrested. He claimed that the police came to investigate after the American embassy received a call about human trafficking but found it was not true. Tate said the police took him, his brother, the housekeeper, and the gardener to the police station as witnesses, where they were required to complete some paperwork and let go. 

However, this is a clip from a months-old video and is being shared in the aftermath of Tate's recent arrest to claim that he has been released from custody.

In Fact

We traced the video back to August 2022, well before Tate's recent arrest. On August 26, Tucker Carlson posted the full interview with the video description "The Most Censored Man" on the Tucker Carlson Tonight Facebook page. On January 1, 2023, The Independent reported on the resurfacing of Carlson's old video in the aftermath of Tate's arrest, noting that this interview dates back to August 2022.

According to a report by The Guardian, the Tate brothers had been under criminal investigation in Romania since April 2022. The incident that Carlson and Tate refer to in the viral clip occurred in April when the U.S. embassy received a tip claiming an American woman was being held against her will. Following this, the police raided Tate's mansion in Bucharest. The report added that the brothers were questioned and released back then, but "the investigation was expanded to cover rape and human trafficking allegations."

Consequently, on December 29, 2022, Tate and his brother were detained alongside two Romanian suspects in Bucharest for an initial 24-hour investigation, reported Reuters. His arrest came after a viral Twitter stand-off with climate change activist Greta Thunberg, prompting incorrect claims that a pizza box seen in a video uploaded by Tate had led cops to him. On December 30, a Romanian court extended the detention period by 30 days. In a statement released on Thursday, the prosecutors said that the four suspects "... appear to have created an organized crime group with the purpose of recruiting, housing and exploiting women by forcing them to create pornographic content meant to be seen on specialized websites for a cost." They further said that they had found six women who the suspects had sexually exploited.

Tate is a controversial and divisive social media personality and has been accused of misogynistic comments, hate speech, and promoting violence against women. BBC reported that in 2016, Tate was a part of the reality TV show Big Brother but was soon expelled after a video emerged appearing to show him hitting a woman with a belt. After building up a large social media following, in August 2022, Tate was permanently banned by YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, citing violations of their policies. Before that, in 2017, Tate's account was permanently suspended by Twitter, but the ban was lifted in November 2022 after Elon Musk acquired the platform.

The Verdict

A clip from an August 2022 interview is being shared following Tate's arrest by Romanian police in December 2022. In April 2022, Tate was questioned as a witness and then released. An interview in which Tate speaks about this incident is being used to claim that he has not been arrested and that the charges against him are false. However, Tate, his brother, and two others remain in police custody. Therefore, we have marked the claim as false.