Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have landed in Florida in the US after a travel ban in Romania was lifted – as Donald Trump insisted he knows “nothing about that”.
The Tates landed in Fort Lauderdale in a private plane at around 11:30am local time, their representative Mateea Petrescu added.
Speaking around an hour later, Andrew Tate told reporters: “We’ve yet to be convicted of any crimes in our lives ever. We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet ever.
“Our case was dismissed on 19 December in Romania under the Biden administration, and our prosecutor recently decided, because we have no active indictment in court, to let us go and return.
“This is a Democratic society, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, as my brother and I are.”
The brothers, who champion US President Trump, are facing charges in Romania of human trafficking, sexual misconduct and money laundering, as well as starting an organised crime group.
The self-styled misogynists are dual UK and US nationals whose controversial views are shared widely on social media platforms such as TikTok and X.
Their arrival in Fort Lauderdale comes after the Financial Times reported last week that the Trump administration had lobbied their Romanian counterparts to ease restrictions on the brothers while they face charges.
Romanian foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu said the Tates were mentioned during his brief hallway meeting with Mr Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month.
Mr Trump was asked about the arrival of the Tates in the US while meeting with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer at the White House this evening.
Asked by a reporter if his administration pressured the Romanian government to let the Tates travel, the US president told reporters: “I know nothing about that. You’re saying (Andrew Tate) is on a plane right now?
“I just know nothing about it, we’ll check it out, we’ll let you know.”
Romanian prosecutors later said they had approved a request from Andrew Tate, 38, to travel outside of the country, pending the outcome of a criminal investigation.
The pair had been released from house arrest, but were not allowed to leave the country and were required to check in with the police regularly.
Image: Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan outside a Bucharest court last month. File pic: Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via Reuters
“The request to change the obligation of not leaving Romania was approved,” prosecutors said in a statement on Thursday.
“All the other obligations have been maintained, including the requirement to check in with judicial authorities every time they are called.”
A spokeswoman for the Tates told Sky News the Romanian courts had decided they will return to the brothers all of their assets.
This includes restoring their ownership of all previously frozen bank accounts, five properties, six cars including two Audis and a Ferrari, and company shares. Some assets will remain under precautionary seizure, according to the court ruling.
The brothers are fighting a series of legal battles not just in Romania, but also in the UK and the US.
They have consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with all the legal action taking place.
The Tates grew up in Luton and have millions of social media followers. Andrew Tate also appeared in the UK version of Big Brother in 2016.
The pair are often criticised for their misogynistic views online – particularly as they have a predominately young, male audience.
A number of banned Twitter accounts have been reinstated by Elon Musk. Tate was among those brought back on 18 November 2022 after Musk took over and rebranded it X.
A British court ruled in March that the brothers are also under a European arrest warrant and will be extradited to the UK – where allegations of rape and human trafficking are being investigated by Bedfordshire Police – after Romanian trial proceedings finish for a separate investigation.
A recent lawsuit filed in Florida accuses both Tate brothers of conspiring to coerce a woman into sex work, luring her to Romania and defaming her after her testimony to Romanian authorities. The Tate brothers had previously sued her for defamation in 2023.
Four British women who allege they were raped and coercively controlled by Andrew Tate said they have been “retraumatised” by today’s events.
“It is clear that there is now a major risk that the criminal prosecution for his alleged crimes in Romania will not proceed, and he may use this development as an opportunity to harass further and intimidate witnesses and his accusers as well as continue to spread a violent, misogynistic doctrine around the world,” the alleged victims said in a joint statement.
Tate is facing civil action brought by the women at the High Court. He denies the allegations and has threatened to pursue the women for defamation.
Matthew Jury, their solicitor at McCue Jury & Partners, said: “The news that pressure by the Trump administration has led to Andrew Tate, and his brother Tristan, being allowed to leave Romania by its authorities is equal parts disgusting and dismaying.”
He added: “The UK government knew this might happen more than a week ago. The fact that nothing seems to have been done to prevent it is concerning. One can only hope action will now be taken. Given that Prime Minister Starmer is in the US today to meet with President Trump, perhaps his team may take the opportunity to raise this issue.”
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.
Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.
“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.
“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”
Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.
Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.
Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.
Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.
They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.
Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.
“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’
It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.
Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.
Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.
He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.
“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.