Andrew Tate’s detention in Romania has been extended for another 30 days. This is the third such extension and in the previous two cases his appeals have been denied.

Controversial influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan have had their custody in Romania extended for a third time, and will remain in detention until at least the end of March…

Their detention had previously been upheld until 27 February, and has now been extended for another 30 days.

Two Romanian women being held with the brothers – Georgiana Naghel and Luana Radu – will be released from custody and instead kept under house arrest.

Prosecutors applied for the latest extension earlier on Tuesday. Judges had justified the previous extension by citing the capacity of “the defendants to exercise permanent psychological control over the victims”.

The other two women, who’ve been referred to in the media as Tate’s angels, are Luana Radu and Georgiana Naghel. Radu is a former police officer who went to work for the Tate brothers. Naghel is said to be Tate’s actual girlfriend, though since he claims all of the girls are his girlfriends it’s a bit vague.

The Tates’ legal team includes Tina Glandian, the attorney who represented Jussie Smollett. Over the weekend, Tate threatened to sue one of the witnesses against him for $300 million dollars in what looks like a clear attempt to intimidate witnesses.

Lawyers for the woman in the US say a “cease-and-desist” letter was sent by a US law firm in December, on behalf of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan.

The letter threatened to sue the woman and her parents for $300m (£249m) if she did not retract her statements…

Benjamin Bull – who works for the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation – says his client is a key witness in the Romanian investigation, and that the letter was designed to do “one thing and one thing only”:

“[It] was intended to shut down the witness; stop the witness from bringing testimony forward in any proceedings,” he said.

Another member of the legal team working for the accusers said Tate’s fans have been sharing videos which include identifying information on the two women. They are already in hiding and are said to be “scared to death” someone will find them.

Some accounts appear to be fully-staffed operations, regularly releasing videos and documents designed to undermine the testimony of witnesses and other women making allegations against the Tates.

Earlier this week, one of the most active accounts published the full name, social media handles and WhatsApp messages of one of the alleged victims in the investigation.

Finally, there’s a story up at Buzzfeed speculating about why Romania would have been attractive to the Tate brothers as a place to build their empire.

The US State Department has regularly criticized Romania’s response to pervasive human trafficking in its yearly reports on the issue. The latest, published in July 2022, notes authorities’ continuing efforts to improve, but concludes that “Romania remains a primary source country for sex trafficking and labor trafficking victims in Europe.”…

A prosecutor from the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, the same department investigating Tate, said one obstacle prosecutors have in combating the growing phenomenon of human trafficking was a lack of specialist judiciary police, akin to senior detectives, in the Romanian system.

“Human trafficking and modern slavery have become a national sport in Romania,” said the prosecutor, who spoke with BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity because he was not cleared for media interactions by his superiors…

“Tate probably thought that he’d be isolated from legal consequences” in Romania, the unnamed prosecutor said, adding that he believed the fact that an American woman had come forward with accusations against Tate embarrassed the local authorities and prompted them to take quicker action.

Unfortunately, despite the ongoing investigation, Tate may yet prove to be right about Romania. Alexandru Gică, a criminal lawyer in Bucharest, told Buzzfeed, “After a few months, these types of prosecutions often lose their force. He added, “The system doesn’t have the capacity to maintain the necessary commitment in complex cases like this.”

Between threatening to sue already terrified witnesses and the fact that Romania doesn’t seem set up to really make these kinds of cases, there’s a fair chance this could fall apart and he’ll walk out proclaiming his innocence.