Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of rape in the UK in 2015, but authorities dropped the case

• Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of rape in the UK in 2015, police confirmed to Insider.
• Prosecutors said they investigated claims by two women but decided not to take Tate to trial.
• Vice World News spoke to Tate's accusers, who said the authorities mishandled their case.

Andrew Tate was arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault in the UK in 2015, seven years before Romanian authorities started investigating him on human-trafficking charges.

The arrest, made long before Tate was famous, was reported by Vice World News, which spoke to two women who accused Tate.

Tate, an influencer known for flaunting wealth and egregious sexism, was accused by one of the women or rape, while the other says he strangled her.

Police in Hertfordshire, England, told Insider they arrested Tate twice — first on suspicion of assault and later on suspicion of rape. Neither arrest resulted in charges.

Both women told Vice they thought prosecutors in the UK mishandled the case. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) told Insider it decided not to charge Tate because it saw "no realistic prospect of a conviction."

Tate denied the women's claims, telling Vice via his lawyer that they "wanted money because I fired them."

Tate was making his money from a webcam business in 2015

In 2015, Andrew Tate was running a webcam business in Luton, a city not far from London, where he would pay women to make porn on the internet.

The two women who spoke to Vice said this is where they were sexually exploited and manipulated by Tate.

One said she had been strangled, and saw Tate do this to other women at least 10 other times. 

"Me and another girl would wake up in the morning with these, like, red, I can only describe them as freckles around our eyes," said the women, who given the pseudonym Sally. "It was from when he choked me so hard that my blood vessels had literally just burst."

The second woman, whom Vice called Helen, said Tate raped her and Sally saw it. Both said they stopped working for Tate shortly after. Neither addressed Tate's claim that he fired them.

They alleged that Hertfordshire Constabulary seemed not to take the case seriously until Tate appeared as a contestant on the reality show "Big Brother" in 2016. He was removed from the show after five days after its producers were told about the allegations against him.

In a statement to Insider, police acknowledged "some delays" in its investigation, and said that it had apologized to Tate's accusers. The case was closed in 2019.

A spokesman for the CPS told Insider the agency "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."

In his statement to Vice, Tate alleged that evidence from the accusers' phones exonerated him.

"The police understood after the investigation that I am innocent and the police found messages from the girls' phones where they were talking between themselves and planning to lie about me," he said.

The women told Vice this was a reference to voice notes where they women discussed whether to tell police alcohol was involved in the situation. They told Vice they did tell police, and that the detail was true.

The women said the CPS cited the voice notes as a reason they dropped the case. The CPS spokesperson did not comment directly, but told Insider "it would be wrong to say there was just one issue" that drove the decision.

Neither police nor the CPS have said they think Tate is innocent — the CPS said only that it didn't think it could convict him.

In its statement to Insider, Hertfordshire Constabulary defended its approach to what it called a "complex and challenging case," saying it was fully investigated by a team dedicated to sexual offenses.

"We acknowledge that there were some delays to the investigation," the statement said. "This was addressed at the time and apologies were made. At no stage was the investigation closed and officers take all allegations of sexual assault seriously."

It said its officers were willing to meet with the women again.

Tate is currently being held in a Romanian jail for 30 days

Tate, his brother Tristan, and two women were arrested as part of a human-trafficking investigation in Romania on December 29, 2022, again related to webcam porn.

They are accused exploiting women to produce porn for their online business. Tate and the others were initially held for 24 hours, which a Romania court extended to 30 days.

Tate has not publicly responded to the allegations yet, other than a cryptic tweet casting the investigation as a conspiracy, a claim which many of his followers have repeated.