Lauren Southern, the Canadian YouTuber who was once a rising star on the far right thanks to her hardline anti-immigrant and anti-feminist views but later retreated from the scene, has alleged in her new self-published memoir This Is Not Real Life that she was sexually assaulted by embattled misogynist influencer Andrew Tate in 2018, when she was 22 years old.
The accusation, detailed in excerpts Southern shared on her Substack page Tuesday, adds to an already lengthy list of allegations of rape and human trafficking against Tate and his brother Tristan, some of which have resulted in criminal prosecutions. The pair have successfully blocked an indictment in Romania, where they live, from going to trial, but currently face further investigation by authorities in the country. Once those proceedings conclude, they will face criminal charges in the U.K. that include human trafficking and rape. The brothers deny all accusations against them. The Tates’ attorney did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the claims that Southern has made in her book. Tate himself has not publicly acknowledged the new allegations.
In the chapters published on her Substack, Southern describes traveling from the U.K. with the British Islamophobic activist Tommy Robinson to Romania around February 2018 to meet with the Tates and their team about a supposed opportunity to launch a new right-wing media venture with the siblings’ investment. Nervous about their lack of preparation for a pitch — and because, as she alleges, Robinson was heavily impaired by cocaine that he managed to smuggle aboard the plane — Southern recalls being surprised by the Tates, whom she did not know at the time, when they turned up at the airport in Bucharest. “Two sharply dressed men leaned against polished sports cars,” she writes, saying they “stood out like sore thumbs against the washed-out Balkan backdrop.”
Andrew drove Southern to a dinner for just the two of them at a steakhouse, she claims, and was excessively complimentary of her work, “flirtatious” and even somewhat “charming.” She notes that they “really did get along” during these conversations, though eventually, she adds, things started to feel “off.” Later, she, Robinson, and their video team were taken to the Tates’ compound, which Southern describes as a building that “looked like it had been designed by edgy Reddit mods and anime nerds turned Marie Kondo minimalist fanatics,” with an imposing samurai statue for decoration and a small army of “crypto bros” studying market fluctuations on their computer screens. “It almost seemed like the brothers were the muscle and drivers, while the crypto guys were the ones doing the actual work,” she writes.
Southern says the meeting about a potential new media company with the Tates and their chief crypto partner was a complete bust, despite her efforts to refocus the conversation and compensate for Robinson’s erratic behavior. The group returned to their hotel convinced they had blown it, but then the Tates messaged that they wanted to talk more with Southern. She returned to the compound, where she claims Andrew demanded a photo with her and posed with a hand wrapped around her waist “like we’d been dating for years.” Instead of discussing business, she alleges that the brothers whisked her to a nearby nightclub, assuring her that they would also send cars to bring Robinson and the other members of their crew along — but that her traveling companions never arrived. Southern alleges she had one cocktail and a shot of liquor before feeling nauseatingly drunk and having someone carry her to a bathroom, where she vomited. At some point after, she claims, Andrew carried her to a car, drove her back to her hotel, and then carried her up to her room.
There, Southern alleges, Tate asked her to sleep beside him on the bed, to which she agreed — while “incredibly intoxicated,” she adds. “He kissed me. I wasn’t expecting it, and I wasn’t looking for it, but I kissed him back briefly and then told him I wanted to sleep. I was extraordinarily tired. He wanted to go further. I said no, very clearly, multiple times, and tried to pull his hands off me. He put his arm around my neck and began strangling me unconscious. I tried to fight back. He repeatedly strangled me every time I regained enough consciousness to pull at his arms,” she claims. “I’d prefer not to share the rest. It’s pretty obvious.”
“This wasn’t a case of mixed signals or intoxicated blurred lines,” Southern writes. “I fought back. I was pleading. I just didn’t realize there was a point of no return, a moment where my voice would no longer have any power.” Years later, she would read a Vice News report about how Tate had been arrested on suspicion of rape in the U.K. in 2015, with one alleged victim telling the outlet that Tate had strangled her on multiple occasions, and that she’d seen him choke other women some 10 times. Southern found this claim of repeated asphyxiations consistent with her own story.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
In the aftermath of the alleged assault, Southern explains, she tried to minimize the incident, in part because she felt that her anti-feminist brand precluded her from coming forward as a victim. “I wouldn’t have believed another woman who made these exact set of claims,” she admits. Tate, she claims, warned her before she returned to the U.K. not to go to the press about what had happened. Southern contends that she reached out to law enforcement back in the U.K. but was told an investigation could only proceed in Romania, where she believed the Tates had the police “paid off.” She also went to a women’s hospital to get a report on the alleged assault about a week later. But she remained in touch with Tate, who she alleges continued to send “veiled threats” before finally offering an apology of sorts.
The following year, Southern announced her “retirement” from activism, indicating that she wanted to turn her attention to academia and in-person relationships. Then the far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos published a piece smearing her, asserting that Southern had been a “secret leftist” all along and sexually manipulated unnamed men in order to advance her career as a political commentator. Southern claims she soon got word that Tate was telling his private online networks that he was one of the sources for Yiannopoulos’ piece, and joking that he’d never had any intention of funding the media project she and Robinson had tried to pitch in Bucharest, writing in a group chat message, “Do pimps give girls money?” Southern claims she later realized that Tate had messaged her on social media a year before they had been introduced, and she had casually corresponded with him like any other fan, but she hadn’t connected the dots when they came face-to-face. She was left wondering if Robinson was in on a setup to make her available to Tate. “Was I trafficked?” she writes. “What the fuck?”
While Tate rose to fame as a “Top G” by doling out toxic advice on masculinity to young men, Southern says she found herself disillusioned with the right-wing movement she had supported with her staunchly xenophobic content, seeing how it held women to an impossible standard while men reveled in hypocrisy. “[Y]ou get endless monologues from self-styled ‘truth-tellers’ insisting that men are supposed to sleep around while women must remain chaste, as if that’s not completely antithetical to the conservative, religious, and family values the space generally claims to champion,” she observes.
Yet, Southern concludes, “I don’t hate Andrew.” She expresses the belief that he might yet change as a person, writing, “I hope he becomes the soul he could have been, instead of the one consumed by his vices. Whether behind bars or free. But I don’t think he even realizes he’s been consumed. Like so many in his position, he’s likely never let himself dig that deep because there’s too much pain waiting there.”
From Rolling Stone US
