Andrew Tate has been charged in Romania with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women.
There are also separate charges still under investigation which could lead to a separate indictment, including money laundering and trafficking of minors.
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.
But assertions that Tate’s rise is a product of today’s young men and their views are wrong. In fact, Tate repeatedly failed to build a personal brand until TikTok gave him the means to saturate news feeds.
Archives of his website show that his business and his pitch to young men was the same four years ago as it is today. As far back as 2019, his website promised courses that would “have your girlfriend obey every command”.
So if Tate’s ambitions and pitch to young men have stayed the same, what changed? The answer lies in how Tate learned to game TikTok’s algorithm, allowing his content to flood millions of news feeds.
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.
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