A woman in the US accuses Tristan and Andrew Tate of conspiring to coerce her into sex work, luring her to Romania and defaming her after she testified before Romanian authorities, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.
The civil complaint was filed in Florida. According to The New York Times, it marks the first lawsuit against the Tate brothers to be filed in the United States. The Tate brothers have had civil and criminal lawsuits in Romania and the United Kingdom.
The charges against them include forming an organized crime group, human trafficking, child trafficking, sexual relations with a minor and money laundering. They have denied any wrongdoing, Reuters reports.
The woman who filed the lawsuit in the United States remains anonymous in the court filing, being identified as “Jane Doe,” but the Tate brothers previously sued her for defamation in 2023. In the lawsuit filed on Monday, she claims that the brothers tried to “intimidate and harass” her through the defamation lawsuit.
The New York Times reported that Doe, 23, and her parents were granted anonymity by the court for safety reasons. Joseph D. McBride, a lawyer representing the Tate brothers, said, according to The New York Times, that there is no evidence that his clients were involved in human trafficking and that the truth is on their side.
Last month, a Romanian court lifted the house arrest order against Andrew Tate, replacing it with a lighter preventive measure, pending the outcome of a criminal investigation. He had been under house arrest since August, when prosecutors opened a second criminal investigation against him, his brother, Tristan, and four other suspects.
An initial criminal case failed in December, when the Bucharest Court of Appeals ruled against Andrew Tate’s trial and sent the case back to prosecutors.
The Tate brothers, both former kickboxers with dual American and British citizenship, were the most publicized suspects tried for human trafficking in Romania, Reuters notes.