‘Your children, your nephews are watching Tate right now’ … Matt Shea. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Despite constant death threats, documentary-maker Shea has been investigating the world’s most notorious misogynist since 2019. But even he was shocked by what he uncovered working on his latest film

Zoe Williams

@zoesqwilliams Mon 28 Aug 2023 00.00 EDT (TheGuardian.com)

‘You’d be forgiven for looking at Andrew Tate, especially at our age, and thinking: ‘This guy must be some niche figure,’” Matt Shea tells me, in a meeting room at the BBC headquarters in central London. What a courteous young film-maker, I think, because he is 31 and I am old enough to be his mum. “But there was a recent survey by Hope Not Hate which found that 52% of 16- and 17-year-old boys in the UK have a positive view of Andrew Tate, and were more likely to have heard of him than they were Rishi Sunak.”

I struggle to believe this: Tate is an ultra-misogynist provocateur, currently charged in Romania with human trafficking and forming an organised crime ring, with investigations ongoing into the trafficking of minors. He is also an obvious blowhard and attention-seeker, and I know enough teenagers to think that surely more than half of them would despise him on that basis alone. I’m wrong, though. Shea continues: “And that number goes a bit higher when [the respondents are] younger, similar surveys all across the world. US, Australia, India: he’s huge all across the world. You may not have heard of Andrew Tate, or you may have heard of him but think it’s universally accepted that he’s a bad person. But your children, your nephews, they are watching him right now and they may not have the same view.”

Shea has been researching, following, interviewing and embedding with Tate since 2019, long enough that Tate supporters send constant death threats, on- and offline, and have a moniker for him: DNG (DorkNerdGeek). He meets them often, by chance – an Uber driver, the other day, three security guards at Glastonbury this year who surrounded him, saying he’d stitched up Tate.

Shea grew up in Boston with an English mother, who taught English, and a half-Irish father, who worked as a biologist, then moved to London to study history at King’s College when he was 17. “The first question I always get is: ‘Where the hell is your accent from?’” and it is, indeed, all over the place. But there’s something else that makes him hard to place, a kind of dual nationality of sensibility. “The sensation of being American in England can feel a little bit disconcerting,” he says. “All the values that are considered positive in America – enthusiasm for life, a can-do attitude – are almost considered bad things here.” That is true: I can feel myself recoiling as he says them. “Being American in England feels like wearing a Hawaiian shirt at a funeral.”

He started as an intern at Vice magazine, and was soon fronting films about drugs and counterculture, with a distinctive, young-millennial style, a break with what we might call the long arc of Theroux-vibe naif. “Gone are the days where, as a presenter, you can come in and play dumb and just ask questions and be curious. These days, audiences expect you to go in critically,” he says. He has a mild delivery but a steely, non-pushover core, and is handsome but doesn’t play up to it, “like the hot best friend of the lead in a romcom”, a colleague from the Vice years observes. That person remembers Shea as extraordinarily hard-working and hands-on, doing research, outreach, contributor calls, shoot prep, shooting, hosting and editing himself, and his early reporting was marked, from a layperson’s perspective, by its bravery. The first person to interview the Albanian mafia on camera, he also spent time with cartels in Colombia.

In his Pink Cocaine Wave documentary, a cartel member forced him at gunpoint to try the drug Tuci, which is “basically a mix of every other drug – MDMA, ketamine, LSD, speed, benzos, everything – all in one, like a mashup, and sometimes fentanyl as well”. In the film about Tate, he ended up in a cage with a professional cage fighter: he was embedded with Tate’s War Rooms, his Transylvanian retreat for men who wish to be manlier, and they were enjoined to get into the cage or risk humiliation. He never thought he was in danger around Tate, he says. “I did crack my rib but that was it. It allowed me to gain deeper access to his organisation, to play their game for a little bit.”

The morning after Shea and I met, BBC News published the Romanian prosecutors’ pre-trial transcripts, in which Tate’s brother, Tristan, appears to say he’ll “slave these bitches”, with testimony from women living in the Tates’ house near Bucharest who allege they were forced into webcam sex work for which the brothers kept the money.

If you have seen Shea’s documentary from February this year, The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate (BBC Three), this will be eerily familiar – one of Tate’s lieutenants describes the ideal day of a woman: she sleeps, she cooks and cleans, she makes online content people pay for and gives him the money, she has sex with him, she smiles at the end of the day and says “thank you”. It sounded, though, like a fever dream he was unaccountably sharing with a film-maker – not like something Tate and his followers actually did.

Another charge the Romanian authorities are pressing against Tate also surfaced in Shea’s first film: two women give detailed accounts alleging rape, which they reported to the police in the UK. The Crown Prosecution Service didn’t pursue the allegations despite the fact that, as Shea recaps, “part of the evidence submitted to the police were text messages and voice notes where Andrew Tate appeared to be discussing the rape”.

If it sounds like Tate was already hiding in plain sight, that first film “didn’t even scratch the surface”, Shea says. “I have this sensation of trying to explain to people how important this is. And I can never quite convince people. Hopefully this next documentary goes some way towards answering that.”

Tate lacks the dimension and complexity of a compelling villain. “This is a guy who pretends to be a character in The Matrix. His right-hand man pretends to be a wizard,” Shea says. “They are all wearing tight-fitting shirts. I’ve asked his fans, do you ever think this is all a bit cringe?” Yet the phenomenon of his success does throw up questions that are increasingly urgent: how did he acquire this global reach and popularity with his cartoon toxic misogyny and narcissistic Taliban-lite delusions of domination? Where is the money coming from and where is it going? What are the consequences for women who get close enough to him or his followers to experience his worldview first-hand? Where does this end?

It doesn’t seem long since Tate was a Luton kickboxer who got thrown out of Big Brother after a video surfaced of him hitting his girlfriend; in fact, that was 2016, which is an age in the life of an influencer, but it was only after TikTok took off, in 2018, that Tate went global. “The speed and relentlessness with which TikTok shows you new things is unprecedented,” Shea says. “It’s not like other social media. You could be an adolescent boy and you’d be seeing Andrew Tate videos within hours, where he’s saying things like, ‘Women who choose not to have children are miserable bitches’ or ‘Virgins are the only women worth marrying’.”

Tate was kicked off all the major platforms last year for infringement of their various hate-speech policies, although Elon Musk has since let him back on to X (Twitter). It doesn’t make any difference because, Shea says: “It’s not him who’s posting his videos – it’s his army of followers.”

TikTok alone didn’t make Tate, however: it was also “audience capture”, Shea explains, “where the feedback from an audience makes the person creating the content increasingly extreme. It explains a lot of what’s happening in this world. You could say that it explains Trump, to a degree, Andrew Tate as well. They reflect back a tantrum that we’re all having inside.”

Having amassed his army of followers, between 2018 and 2022, “Many of them get filtered to buy his app, The Real World, which used to be called Hustlers University, which promises to teach you to become wealthy: it turns out one of the strategies to becoming wealthy is to share content of Andrew Tate with a sign-up link for Hustlers University.”

Followers see him as a spiritual leader. He saved them from the depths of their insecurity

Tate weaves together everything, from Covid to feminism, to illustrate why young men are the victims of the Matrix – his theory that the world is controlled by a conspiracy of politicians and mainstream media. “A common refrain of the Tate supporters is that they don’t teach you how to make money in school because they don’t want you to know. They would rather teach you bullshit about biology and English literature. Tate’s message is: ‘I hold the key to teaching you how to do that, but you have to buy my courses.’ So he has weaponised the hyper-capitalised American dream and reframed it as somehow rebellious. This is very similar to Trump as well.”

The reason I never took Tate seriously is that toxic masculinity arguments are so riven with contradictions. The message is one of self-discipline, the gym, self-denial, physical endurance and almost monastic self-abnegation – yet the big prize at the end, the thing it’s all in the service of, is tits and cars.

That is not even the half of it, Shea says, rattling through the logical failings of the creed: “Traditional masculine men are stoic and don’t have emotions, but they also somehow whine constantly about how the world is stacked against them. Men are protectors of women, but then if the women who are making these allegations against Tate are correct, then who protects women from men like Andrew Tate? Family courts are unfair towards men because women often get custody of children, but that’s exactly because of the traditional gender roles that they themselves are espousing. It makes no sense, but it doesn’t need to make sense.”

Examining Tate’s nonsense gives you the creeping sense that he is enjoying how irrational and contradictory it is. He knows that winds the “libtards” up more than anything: people who brazenly don’t make sense. He is trying to choke us on our own indignation. Besides, reason and ridicule do not deter Tate’s followers; the rule of law makes no dent on them.

“This is the thing people need to understand: followers don’t have a political interest in Andrew Tate – they see him as a spiritual leader, as a messiah. He saved them from the depths of their insecurity and brought them out of whatever it is that they were struggling with. I’ve asked, ‘What threshold of evidence would you accept that Andrew Tate has potentially committed these crimes, if it was presented to you?’ and they said nothing bar Andrew Tate himself saying, ‘I did these things.’ And that’s an incredible amount of power for one person to have over your mind.”

Shea tells me about female teachers who have lost control of their classrooms because boys are asking what they are doing teaching when they should be in the kitchen. He has been in touch with women who say their boyfriends have become abusive after following Tate. He tells me that counter-terrorism experts have warned of a huge increase in the number of referrals about Tate followers, but misogynist extremism doesn’t reach the threshold for anti-extremist action unless it’s connected to the “incel” [involuntarily celibate] movement. Can this possibly be right, I ask, that we don’t fear misogynist, extremist violence, unless those misogynists aren’t getting laid? “Yes,” Shea says. “That is what I’m saying.”

He reveals that they have uncovered in this forthcoming, second film that Tate’s organisation has been training men to groom women, peddling an ideology that centres on enslaving them. “This isn’t just, ‘Oh, women should stay in the kitchen and the gender pay gap is a lie.’ This is advocating the subjugation of an entire gender into slavery. If you imagined an extremist group with a similar ideology aimed towards an ethnic group, you would think this was one of the most dangerous extremist groups in the world.” Tate’s representatives describe these as “false accusations” that “insult the massive community that considers Andrew Tate a life-changing, positive force”, adding that Tate “will not stand idly by while the media attempts to drag his name through the mud”. In Tate’s corner, seemingly promoting him as a free speech warrior, are two of the richest men on Earth: Elon Musk (on X) and Peter Thiel (on Rumble). It is incredibly dark.

I wonder about something else: Tate seems quite fixated on Shea, making videos about him, whipping up mobs. Does Shea think Tate needs him, as a kind of Clark Kent nemesis to his super-villain? “I can tell you the people around Andrew Tate are very aware of the history of mythology and comparative mythology. They are very aware of this idea of a hero and an antihero as part of crafting him into a mythological being. But funny you should say that, because he thinks I need him. In fact, he just messaged me recently.” He reads out the message from Tate: “‘The entire world is interested in me. You are not unique. I don’t care what you publish. Neither does anybody else, unless I speak to you. I’m your only chance for relevancy.’ And, of course, he’s right. Because that’s why you’re here today.”

 This article was amended on 29 August 2023 to clarify that Matt Shea’s mother is English and his father is half Irish; that he did do a cage fight, and that the drug he was forced to try was Tuci, not 2CB as an earlier version said.

 Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World? is on BBC Three at 9pm on 31 August, then available on BBC iPlayer, with an Australia screening to be confirmed

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