Andrew Tate back in Romania after travel ban lifting controversy

By Irina Vilcu

Self-described “misogynist” influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan returned to Romania for police checks in an ongoing criminal probe, denying claims that the Trump administration had pressured authorities to end a travel ban and allowed them to spend the last few weeks in the US.

The Tates flew into Bucharest early Saturday morning. Romanian prosecutors lifted their travel ban in February.

The brothers are required to regularly check in with Romanian authorities under preventive judicial control measures in a human trafficking and rape investigation. Their next scheduled appearance is Monday. Both deny any wrongdoing.

“We are back in Romania because innocent men don’t run from anything. We are here to clear our names and exonerate ourselves,” Andrew Tate told reporters upon landing. “It’s amazing that people think there was American pressure required to let men go” after prosecutors “couldn’t even get a case to trial after three solid years of imprisonment. Why would you need pressure?”

Romania has come under scrutiny from the new US administration of President Donald Trump. A court decision in December to annul the nation’s presidential election became the centerpiece of Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last month, when he criticized the European Union for allegedly suppressing far-right voices.

While Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu said in February that Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell mentioned the president’s interest in Tates during a brief conversation on the sidelines of the same conference, the Bucharest ministry rejects any connection between that discussion and the brothers’ release.

Romanian prosecutors haven’t revealed the reason behind their decision to lift the travel ban, and Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said in a post on X that the US “has not made any requests to upon the legal situation of well-known foreign influencers investigated by the Romanian authorities.”

Trump denied involvement when asked about the brothers’ return to the US. Their three-week stay drew mixed reactions, with Trump allies greeting them warmly while some officials in Florida — where they flew from Bucharest in a private jet — deemed them not welcome.

The Tate brothers, who called the investigations into them an abuse of power from the “globalist system,” supported Trump’s election campaign. The Financial Times earlier reported that the US has pressured Romania into easing restrictions on the brothers, who hold US and British citizenship.