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Andrew Tate, a hyper-macho social media figure and admitted misogynist, calls the platform as ‘the greatest hustle in the world’
Published : 22 Nov 2024, 06:56 PM
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car.
Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetise sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. But a Reuters investigation found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorised and sexually enslaved to make money from the site. The findings are based on redacted US police complaints and international court files, lawsuits and interviews with prosecutors, sex-trafficking investigators and women who say they’ve been trafficked.
In one prominent case, influencer Andrew Tate, with millions of followers worldwide on social media, is accused of forcing women in Romania to produce porn for OnlyFans and pocketing the profits. He has denied the charges.
Generating less attention are cases Reuters identified in the US, where some women endured weeks or months of alleged sexual slavery in ordinary-looking homes in quiet communities. The victim sometimes was a fiance or girlfriend, abused to pad the household budget, fund a couple’s retirement or cover children’s expenses, according to accounts in police or court files. Reuters is withholding the names of women who say they have been trafficked.
The woman from Wisconsin, now 23, was abused by Austin Koeckeritz, who described himself on a blog as “a business owner, an artist, and a student of psychology.” He’s serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking.
“The two years there felt like decades, and I was in pain and alone and ready to die,” the woman said in her first public comments about the case. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed.”
At least two cases detailed in police files involve allegations of forced prostitution. A husband and wife ran a six-state trafficking and prostitution operation before their arrest in a tidy Ohio neighbourhood where they were raising two children, prosecutors say. The husband allegedly used OnlyFans to arrange sexual encounters for multiple women and sell porn he ordered them to make. He awaits trial; his wife recently pleaded guilty to related charges.
These trafficking enterprises relied on intimidation, violence or false assurances of love to press women into porn and keep them producing, say victims and prosecutors. The alleged perpetrators were mostly men – some accused of beating and raping women, others of tattooing their names and faces on their victims. They filmed in private settings, sometimes holding victims captive for a year or more, the records and interviews show.
In a note she hid in the front yard for police the day before they rescued her, the Wisconsin woman said she “was basically imprisoned in this room to keep making money” for her abuser.
On OnlyFans, sex traffickers have a “unique niche” in which to privately conduct their business, said Catheline Torres with the US-based National Human Trafficking Hotline, which helps survivors of trafficking and exploitation. Reuters identified 11 cases of women who told authorities or filed lawsuits saying they had been forced to perform sex acts on OnlyFans. But experts including Torres say the true prevalence of sex trafficking on the platform is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess. The accounts of most content creators are hidden behind a subscription-based paywall, “minimising the likelihood that they are caught and prosecuted,” Torres said.
Prosecution can also be difficult because fearful or traumatised victims are reluctant to speak up or testify in court.
One woman told a detective her fiance had forced her over months to produce porn for OnlyFans in a suburban trailer park outside Orlando, Florida. She only escaped, she said, because police showed up to arrest the fiance on an unrelated warrant last year. He was charged with human trafficking in her case. But she recanted her allegations months later, and prosecutors dropped the charge.
She told Reuters that she feared the case might affect her custody of the couple’s young son and still felt “sick” just talking about what happened. “It brings back all the feelings, the emotions – every time,” she said. “The damage is forever.”
OnlyFans did not respond to requests for comment. The company is not charged in any of the cases described in this story.
On its website, OnlyFans says it prohibits prostitution and “modern slavery,” which includes human trafficking and forced labour. It says its moderators review all content on the site and are trained to identify and report suspected trafficking. OnlyFans has led “a focus on safety for people in the adult content space,” CEO Keily Blair said during a panel discussion in March.
Under company rules, creators must have written consent from everyone in their content. But until November 2022, they didn’t have to show that proof of consent to OnlyFans before the platform allowed their content to be posted, according to Blair’s recent statements to a UK parliamentary committee. The company now checks for proof of consent before allowing content to go live, she said.
In at least one case, Reuters found, a woman’s ordeal allegedly began after the new rule was adopted. The woman, from Arkansas, told police that beginning in 2023, her boyfriend terrorised her and forced her to film sex videos for OnlyFans for hours on end, and if she resisted he “would physically attack her,” according to an arrest affidavit filed by a police detective in the city of Van Buren. Reuters couldn’t determine if she’d signed a consent form.
The man, Michael Hall, has pleaded not guilty to trafficking and is awaiting trial. His lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
OnlyFans was not the only platform cited in these cases. But its popularity and generous terms make it potentially lucrative. Creators on the site collect 80 percent of the revenue their accounts generate. OnlyFans gets the rest.
Websites accused of hosting sex trafficking face legal risks. At least a dozen lawsuits have been filed under US federal anti-trafficking statutes against social media companies and other sites since 2019, accusing them of profiting from sexually abusive content. The companies have said they’re shielded from civil and criminal liability by a federal law designed to safeguard free speech, but Congress has passed legislation in recent years to chip away at those protections.
Two pending sex-trafficking lawsuits name OnlyFans as a defendant. One accuses the company of profiting from the exploitation of two women in Nevada by a former reality TV personality. The other, detailed in a Reuters investigation in March, involved a Florida college student who claimed OnlyFans profited from video of her alleged rape posted on the site.
A judge has recommended that OnlyFans be dropped from the Florida case because of free speech protections – prompting pushback from the woman’s attorneys. In both cases, the company denies it violated sex-trafficking laws.
TATE ‘CARBON COPY’
Andrew Tate, a hyper-macho social media phenomenon and self-professed misogynist, gained international attention after being implicated in a sex-trafficking scheme that allegedly used OnlyFans to rake in money.
Prosecutors in Romania say Tate and his brother Tristan, both former kickboxers with US and British citizenship, lured seven women with promises of romance, forced them to perform sex acts on OnlyFans, and then pocketed the profits. Tate once described the platform as “the greatest hustle in the world.”
The brothers were charged in June 2023 with human trafficking and forming a gang to sexually exploit women; Andrew Tate was also charged with rape. They deny the allegations and await trial in Bucharest. In November, an appeals court ordered that some evidence be removed from the case due to legal flaws.
Andrew Tate is still under house arrest pending a second investigation into human trafficking in which prosecutors say he also used OnlyFans. No charges have been filed in that probe. The Tates’ lawyer couldn’t be reached for comment.
The high-profile cases underscored concerns among online safety groups about the potential for exploiting women on OnlyFans. And, according to prosecutors, the Tates have spawned Romanian imitators.
In June 2023, Vlad Obuzic and three other men were arrested in what a source at Romania’s anti-organised crime prosecuting unit, or DIICOT, told Reuters was “a carbon copy of the Tate model.”
Prosecutors said the men also used false romantic promises, threats and violence to make the women create porn for an adult platform, which the DIICOT source identified as OnlyFans. Some women were forced to tattoo the suspects’ names or faces on their bodies, or words such as “toy” or “dog,” according to a filing by the judge summarising the charges.
“The victims were gradually brought to a position of inferiority, mental dependence and obedience,” said the filing, which described Obuzic’s ability to “identify vulnerable people and exploit their need for affection, trust and stability.”
Obuzic has described the Tates in online videos as mentors and “very good friends.” He offered his own online “playboy” guide in which he boasted of having “more hoes in the trenches. Onlyfans, webcam. Numerous girls with my portrait tatted on their skin.”
Prosecutors said Obuzic’s 18-month operation began in 2021 and involved seven women. They said he and his “soldiers” made the equivalent of $2.6 million from posting the women’s content on OnlyFans and “kept almost all the money.”
The men were indicted in October 2023 on charges of human trafficking and forming an organised crime group. They have denied the charges. Their trial is pending. “Prosecutors must prove the accusations,” said Dumitru Badragan, Obuzic’s lawyer. Lawyers for his co-defendants could not be reached.
Prosecutors believe Tate and Obuzic made their millions exploiting dozens of women. The suspected trafficking operations Reuters identified in the US feature fewer victims and less money. But they show how OnlyFans has given people new routes into trafficking, according to prosecutors, allowing men and women to hide sexual abuse while profiting from it.
GUNS, AMMO & SEX TOYS
When the young Wisconsin woman first met her boyfriend online in August 2020, she quickly moved in with him. She thought they were in love. Austin Koeckeritz treated her well. He took her to the museum and promised they’d travel the world together.
“Boy, did he ever have me fooled,” she said in an interview.
Soon, Koeckeritz isolated her from her family and friends, police and court records show. When her grandmother died, he forbade her from attending the funeral.
Then he turned violent.
“He would dropkick me” or “crush me so I couldn’t breathe,” causing her to lose consciousness on several occasions, according to her statements in court records. When she told him to stop, he laughed. He raped her repeatedly, she testified.
In January 2021, Koeckeritz began forcing the woman to perform sex acts online, so they could “retire really, really early.”
“We could make $5 million and then just live off that,” he told her, according to court records. She told an investigator she produced sexual content for OnlyFans and other porn sites including Chaturbate and MyFreeCams, which was founded by OnlyFans’ owner, Leonid Radvinsky.
A Chaturbate spokesperson said the company cooperated with law enforcement in the case and called the perpetrator’s conduct “absolutely abhorrent.” Radvinsky and MyFreeCams did not respond to requests for comment.
Monitored by Koeckeritz, the woman worked 60 hours a week, according to court records. When she was sick and wanted a break, he refused. When she wanted to end work early, he demanded oral sex.
The woman earned more than $422,000 from selling sexually explicit content of herself on OnlyFans and other sites, according to financial records filed by prosecutors in court. Koeckeritz funnelled those earnings into bank accounts that he controlled, giving her just $2,000, prosecutors said.
Koeckeritz told her he’d shoot her family members if they tried to rescue her, according to her sworn testimony. She feared he’d shoot her, too – he kept a gun in every room, she said. One day, he chased her with a shotgun. “If I shot this, it would leave a big hole in your body,” he told her, laughing hysterically, she recalled in grand jury testimony.
“I still have dreams about it,” she told an investigator.
The final gruelling months made her contemplate suicide, she told Reuters. She said she was crushed by the demands of livestreaming for various sites and “photo shoots for OnlyFans, on top of the abuse coming from Austin and the internet.”
“My body was ready to croak,” she said. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to die from the physical exhaustion and abuse of nonstop sex stuff or if I was just going to end it all on my own.”
After her escape, officers searched the home. They found 14 guns, including a loaded rifle, up to 20,000 rounds of ammunition, tactical vests and sex toys.
In November 2023, Koeckeritz pleaded guilty to federal sex-trafficking charges, leading to his 20-year prison sentence. His lawyer had no comment.
The woman said she remains tormented by the abuse she endured.
“I’ve even been told by my abuser and some relatives, ‘No man wants to be with a woman who’s been on porn sites,’” she told Reuters. “Thankfully they were all wrong, but at the time, it made it seem like I was incapable of being loved and didn’t deserve love in the first place.”
She said she blames not just her abuser but also the porn sites themselves, including OnlyFans.
“The online porn industry truly does bring out the worst in people even in ways I didn’t even think possible,” she said.
BEATEN AND DRUGGED
In some US cases, the trafficking went beyond the domestic exploitation of a single partner and involved more complex operations with more than one victim, according to allegations in court records.
A filing in August in a federal sex-trafficking lawsuit alleged that Brittanya Razavi, a 39-year-old former reality TV personality and porn star, manipulated and coerced financially desperate women into making porn for OnlyFans, and then stole most of the profits. Fenix International, OnlyFans’ British parent company, is also named as a defendant in the suit, and accused of having “a business partnership” with Razavi that “facilitated her exploitation” of the two women.
One of the women was a Las Vegas showgirl when the pandemic struck and made her jobless, according to the suit. The other was an immigrant who had been kicked out of her adopted home as a teenager.
Razavi “groomed” both of them, finding them places to stay and making “extravagant promises of fast-cash and ultimately, wealth and fame if they would create OnlyFans content under her management,” said the suit. One of the women looked to Razavi as “a mother figure.”
The suit makes a number of allegations about Razavi: She used the women’s IDs and social security numbers to set up OnlyFans accounts that only she could access, then plied them with alcohol to get them to perform sex acts on camera, sometimes with others. When they resisted, Razavi told them, “I’ll just talk to you again when you’re drunk.” The suit also alleges one of the women was raped while intoxicated and the video was posted online. Reuters couldn’t confirm whether or where the video appeared.
The women’s OnlyFans accounts generated more than $1.3 million in revenue, of which OnlyFans took its customary 20 percent cut, said the suit. The rest was funnelled into bank accounts controlled by Razavi, who paid the women about 10 percent of their share and not the 50 percent she had promised, the suit said.
Contacted by Reuters, Razavi’s lawyer “categorically” denied the allegations and declined to comment further. OnlyFans did not respond to a request for comment on the suit.
In another case, prosecutors say a former elementary school administrator and her husband ran a violent sex-trafficking and prostitution ring involving multiple young women across six northeastern states.
Jonathan Ruiz and Charline Santiago were living with their two young children in a split-level home in a leafy neighbourhood of Youngstown, Ohio, when sheriff’s deputies and federal agents arrived with an arrest warrant.
“Don’t look in my phone,” Ruiz, 32, told officers during the June 2022 arrest, according to previously unreported court records. “Please lock my phone,” said Santiago, 29.
Their devices are now part of a trove of evidence collected by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York. According to the indictment and other court records, Ruiz forced the women to make porn for OnlyFans and used the platform to arrange sexual encounters with clients beginning in late 2020.
OnlyFans says it prohibits users from posting content that “shows, promotes, advertises or refers to escort services, sex trafficking, or prostitution.”
Ruiz and Santiago skipped from one state to the next to evade detection, according to the court records. Ruiz allegedly beat the women if they slept on the job or refused to obey orders, leaving them with cuts and bruises. He drugged them to keep them awake, withheld food if they didn’t work enough, and confiscated their identification documents to stop them from fleeing, the records said.
Santiago pleaded guilty in November to charges of attempted sex trafficking and promoting prostitution. As part of the plea, she will be sentenced to probation, and ordered to have no contact with anyone in the case and live a law-abiding life, said her lawyer, Michael Vitaliano. Santiago “fully accepts responsibility for her actions,” and is focused on “being a devoted and loving mother,” he said.
Ruiz has pleaded not guilty to charges of sex and labour trafficking, conspiracy and promoting prostitution. His lawyer declined to comment.
Ruiz created the OnlyFans accounts “without the consent or knowledge of the victims, despite OnlyFans requiring government ID to register an account,” prosecutors said in a court filing. Multiple OnlyFans accounts were registered to the same IP addresses, they said, including ones associated with Ruiz’s email account. The victims received none of the proceeds, the records said.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment on specifics of the case. But Justin McNabney, head of its Special Victims Division, said he noticed traffickers opening OnlyFans accounts, and forcing victims to create videos during the coronavirus pandemic, when lockdowns made it hard to profit from in-person sexual services.
“The point from the traffickers’ perspective is to maximise profit at all times,” McNabney said.
Ruiz’s prostitution enterprise proved tough to quash even after his arrest, according to previously undisclosed details in prosecutors’ court filings.
Over the next year, they say, Ruiz used a contraband phone to tamper with witnesses and instruct an accomplice on how to use OnlyFans to arrange prostitution dates.
All the while, he was sitting in jail at Rikers Island, New York.
