Daria Gusa was 16 and still at school, when she says she received a private message on Instagram from Andrew Tate, a high-profile influencer almost 20 years older than her.

"It just read 'Romanian girl' and he put some flirty emoji," Daria told me. "I was confused because I [only] had 200 followers, and it was a private account."

She is one of two teenagers who have described to the BBC how Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan approached them online, apparently using a standard formula.

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In publicity for his online courses, in manipulating and exploiting women, Andrew Tate said: "I've been running a web-cam studio for over a decade… Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriends at the time and, of all my girlfriends, NONE were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me."

He describes his job as "to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her… get her to fall in love with me, to where she'd do anything I say," the publicity continues, "and then get her on web-cam so we could become rich together."

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Intelligent, articulate and disciplined - that's how secondary school teacher Charlotte Carson describes Andrew Tate, the online influencer who is a role model to many of the boys at her school in Belfast.

But the problem is, she says, Andrew Tate is also pathetic, insecure, and promotes "Taliban beliefs" about how to treat women.

Schools across the UK are encountering increasing numbers of pupils who admire Tate - and so teachers are having to work out how to respond.

Some are actively putting out guidance on how to talk about him, as part of a concerted attempt to tackle his influence.

Tate, a former kickboxer, has millions of online followers - despite being banned from sites including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube for misogynistic comments.

He's currently detained in Romania, alongside his brother Tristan, as part of an investigation into allegations of human trafficking and rape - which they both deny.

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Tate’s views have been described as extreme misogyny by domestic abuse charities, capable of radicalising men and boys to commit harm offline.

But the 35-year-old is not a fringe personality lurking in an obscure corner of the dark web. Instead, he is one of the most famous figures on TikTok, where videos of him have been watched 11.6 billion times.

Styled as a self-help guru, offering his mostly male fans a recipe for making money, pulling girls and “escaping the matrix”, Tate has gone in a matter of months from near obscurity to one of the most talked about people in the world. In July, there were more Google searches for his name than for Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian.

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‘I Love Raping You’: What Andrew Tate Told Woman Who Accused Him of Rape
Exclusive: VICE World News has obtained WhatsApp messages and voicenotes sent by Andrew Tate to a woman who accused him of a 2013 rape. She said police told her they believed her account, but authorities declined to prosecute.
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LONDON – In 2015, controversial “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate was arrested over another allegation of rape in the UK, following a complaint from a woman who supplied police with messages sent by Tate in which he wrote “I love raping you.”

World News
Exclusive: Andrew Tate Was Arrested on Suspicion of Rape in the UK in 2015
MATT SHEA, JAMIE TAHSIN, TIM HUME
01.04.23

VICE World News reported earlier this month that Tate was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and physical abuse in 2015 following separate allegations by two other complainants. In 2019 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to pursue charges against Tate for any of these allegations. The woman who supplied police with messages sent by Tate said police told her charges were not brought because there was “an ounce of doubt” in the case.

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Hertfordshire Police confirmed to VICE World News that Amelia’s complaint led to Tate being arrested on suspicion of rape in December 2015 – the second time that year he was held, questioned, then released under investigation, following earlier complaints by the other two women.

But despite the new allegation from Amelia being added to the investigation, the case moved slowly, and police did not pass the case file to the CPS – whose job involves assessing whether there is a realistic prospect of conviction – until 2019.

In response to a new request for comment, Hertfordshire Police said in a statement that the investigation had passed through the hands of 3 separate officers in charge (OICs) during those four years. “Investigations into sexual offences by their nature can be challenging and complex. Due to their lengthy nature, it can mean that investigations have more than one OIC,” said the statement, adding that despite the delays, the case was never closed.

“When a delay was identified, action was taken to progress the investigation as quickly as possible.”

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Hertfordshire Police has previously acknowledged to VICE World News that it apologised to complainants over the delays in handling the case.

In late 2019, Amelia was informed by police that CPS had finally reached a decision. She said she attended a meeting with a police officer who delivered the news that the CPS had declined to prosecute.

“I went [to the police officer], ‘Well, explain to me why you're letting a monster on the street,’” Amelia said.

Amelia said the police officer even apologised for the decision, and told her words to the effect of, “It's not that the police don't believe you. It's not that the CPS don't believe you. It's the fact that there's an ounce of doubt in the case.”

According to Amelia, the officer said the element of doubt related to the fact she had had consensual sex with Tate in the wake of the alleged sexual assault, and that in sexual assault cases, the CPS was only prepared to prosecute when it felt 100 percent confident of success, because a trial resulting in acquittal would only further traumatise the complainant.

A friend of Amelia’s – a different individual from either the one she called after she was raped or the one who initially accompanied her to talk to the police – she had brought along to the meeting as a support person corroborated her account of the police’s comments to VICE World News. Hertfordshire Police would not confirm the officer had made the comments, saying it would “not comment on the specifics of an investigation.”

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Amelia was left devastated by the decision, which she felt betrayed a lack of understanding of the psychology of abuse and of men like Tate, who – looking back, she said – exerted emotional control over her through his domineering and manipulative behaviour. Tate is facing similar allegations of using “physical violence and mental coercion” to recruit and groom women into working for his sex webcam business in Romania.

“I was like, ‘That’s your excuse for the justice system?’” she recalled. “So no one’s been manipulated before, no one's had Stockholm Syndrome before, no one's been abused before?”

Experts in the field of sexual violence say that the fact that Amelia had consensually slept with Tate again after the alleged rape should not be viewed as somehow undermining her case, and the fact that it had been was an indictment on the criminal justice system’s handling of sexual assault cases.

“It shouldn't be seen as a weakness” in the case, said London Metropolitan University’s Vera-Gray. She said due to the justice system’s “flawed” approach to rape, which heavily scrutinised the actions of the accuser, rather than the accused, the overwhelming majority of cases were never prosecuted because of how they would likely play out in court.

Vera-Gray said many rape complainants had encountered a similar response from police or prosecutors, being told: “We believe you, but something about your behaviour, either prior to the assault or during or after, makes us believe that a jury won't feel that they can convict without reasonable doubt.” Due to enduring myths around rape, survivors had to meet impossible, often contradictory conditions in order to be seen as the “perfect victim” and for their complaints to be viewed as credible, she said.

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Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, a UK-based group that has campaigned to improve how the justice system handles sexual violence cases, agreed.

“Rape myths and stereotypes inform every part of the criminal justice process and determine whether or not a victim’s case progresses or is dropped,” she told VICE World News.

She said Amelia’s story was “appalling, but unsurprising, given all we know about how rape survivors are treated by the police and criminal justice system as a whole.”

In the wake of the 2019 decision by the CPS not to prosecute Tate, Amelia has focused on putting the sexual assault behind her, but Tate’s rise to global fame has sent her recovery backwards. The online abuse of Tate’s accusers by his army of supporters was hard to take.

“Since he became famous, every day has been torture,” she said.

“I'm like, are you joking? That's not supposed to happen. Someone that's abused you, hurt you, isn't then supposed to become world famous, and then be in your face every day.”

Like the two other women who filed complaints with police over Tate’s alleged abuse, she feels that the failure of police and prosecutors to get justice in their case had allowed Tate to continue what now appears to be a clear pattern of misogynistic and abusive behaviour towards women, ultimately leading to his arrest in Romania last month.

“You know that he now has got a God complex knowing that he can get away with any of this,” she said.

Tate’s arrest in Romania, and the decision by her fellow complainants to come forward publicly with their allegations, have been the only positive developments since her ordeal began, she said – but made her hopeful that Tate would eventually be held accountable for his alleged abuse of women.

Approached for comment on Amelia’s allegations, Tate’s lawyer said he was too busy dealing with the Romanian case against his client to respond to “old allegations.” When reached subsequently by phone, he said he had been too busy to reply to an email outlining the allegations, and hung up when asked if he was planning to respond.

Tate, whose appeal against his ongoing detention was rejected by a judge in Bucharest on Tuesday, has previously said that his relocation to Romania was motivated in part by a desire to escape a liberal, post-#MeToo Western society where men faced greater accountability for sexual assault claims.

“This is probably 40 percent of the reason I moved to Romania, because in eastern Europe, none of this garbage flies,” he said in one video clip. “If you go to the police and say ‘He raped me back in 1988,’ they’ll say ‘Well you should have done something about it then’.”

Bedfordshire Police said they were preparing a response but had not provided one by time of publication.

Contacted for further comment regarding Amelia’s allegations, the CPS said it had nothing to add to its previous statement to VICE World News regarding the investigation by Hertfordshire Police. That statement read that prosecutors had “carefully reviewed all the evidence provided by the police regarding each complainant and concluded it did not meet our legal test, and there was no realistic prospect of a conviction.”