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What happens when you put two of the world’s most outspoken commentators together? Two-and-a-half hours of self-congratulation, tedious repetition and outright lies, it transpires. Tucker Carlson jetted off to Romania to join Andrew Tate for a sit-down chat at his home on the outskirts of Bucharest, where the influencer remains under house arrest. Last month, the 36-year-old king of toxic masculinity was charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women. However, he offered Carlson and his loyal ‘Tucker on Twitter’ viewers a very different version of the allegations against him. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The former Fox News poster boy asked the self-styled “top G” to explain the accusations made against him. Tate responded by saying he’d been charged with “convincing” women to get TikTok. “I'm charged with being the head of an organised criminal group, which is in charge of recruiting girls to make TikTok videos, to steal the money from the TikTok views,” he told his sympathetic interviewer. He then elaborated: “The overall charge is that there's an organised criminal group [...], I'm the head of it. My brother is below me, and we use the loverboy method to convince women to do TikTok videos to make money so that we can steal the TikTok money.” What he means by the so-called “loverboy method” is when a man seduces young, vulnerable girls and boys over a period of time in order to sexually exploit them later on. "So, just to be clear, you are not accused of pandering, of pimping, of forcing women to have sex with anybody?" Carlson then asked. "No,” Tate replied. “Not forcing them to have sex, not for restraining their movement, not stopping them from living a full life, but the fact that we are somehow convincing them to have TikTok." We’d like to take this opportunity to “be clear” ourselves. Tate and his brother Tristan, 34, are charged with some of the most serious crimes imaginable. Last month, Tate was served with legal papers by lawyers representing four of his alleged victims who have accused him of rape and sexual assault. The four women, in their late 20s and early 30s, are pursuing civil proceedings against the former kickboxer over alleged offences occurring between 2013 and 2016 while he was still living in the UK, The Guardian reports. The legal letter sets out the four women’s accusations against him, including violent rapes, serious physical assaults, and controlling and coercive behaviour. One of the women claimed that after meeting Tate in 2014, he brutally assaulted her. She said: “While having sex, he began to choke me and choked me so hard that I lost consciousness. I thought I was going to die. When I woke up, he was continuing to rape me. It is difficult to say that because it is so upsetting, but that is what it was.” Meanwhile in Romania, prosecutors also confirmed last month that seven women had come forward with allegations against the Tate brothers, including some who say they were “misled” by “false claims of marriage and love”. The pair are accused of forming an organised crime group in early 2021 to commit human trafficking in Romania, the UK, the US and other countries. The alleged victims were later taken to buildings in Romania’s Ilfov county where they were intimidated, placed under constant surveillance and control and forced into debt, a statement from the prosecutors said. The two men then allegedly forced the women to engage in pornography which was later shared on social media. One of the alleged victims says she was raped twice in March 2022, according to the statement. Both Tate and Tristan vehemently deny the accusations against them and, in his interview with Carlson, the former went so far as to say they’d been fabricated by the media. He told the right-wing host: “The girls have come forward and said, ‘This is insane, you've just picked us because we're near Andrew and we're his friends’.” He continued: “But they (meaning the powers that be) are like, ‘Nope, you’re a victim, no matter what you say. We’re deciding you’re a victim.” He went on to accuse the “media machine” of offering thousands of pounds in bribes to anyone willing to badmouth the Tates. “The media machine, which works hands in hands with the justice machine [...] offered bribes effectively,” he told Carlson. “They'd call up and say, if you have anything bad to say about Andrew, we can pay you $50,000 for the story.” Suffice it to say, lawyers for four of the victims would categorically rubbish his outlandish claims. After serving the 36-year-old with the legal papers, one of the representatives for the women said: “Despite Tate’s outrageous claims that these women aren’t even real, on reading the papers, he should now recall how real they are. “Talk of the ‘Matrix’ and ‘false flags’ hold no weight in court. The survivors look forward to seeing him there.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

If you thought Poorna Jagannathan was not to be played with as mom Nalini Vishwakumar on "Never Have I Ever," just wait. The actress from the hit Netflix series is next set to play a mafia head in the forthcoming comedy "The Out-Laws" and an "aunty-gangster" in the upcoming series "Deli Boys."

Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav addressed the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Wednesday — and made news on a number of fronts. Here are a few highlights:

A British model has recounted her relief at escaping a kidnapping, after she was held prisoner in Italy and put up for sale on the dark web. Chloe Ayling, 25, who was on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, suffered the traumatic experience the previous year, when she was abducted and drugged by two men in Milan. Ayling was 20 at the time, and had travelled there for a modelling job. Instead, she was taken hostage and held at a £265,000 ransom in a farmhouse near Turin. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Speaking on ITV, she recalled: “I walked into the studio and there was just silence. “Normally someone would greet you at the door but I just didn't hear anything. “Before I had time to process my thoughts, that's exactly when the masked man put his arm around my neck and mouth... and another one came to the front of me and injected me in my wrists.” When she woke up, Ayling was in the boot of a car with “tape on my mouth and handcuffs on my feet and my hands”. The model also saw an empty suitcase in the boot of the car with her, which she assumed her kidnappers planned to put her in. She was held in the farmhouse near Milan for six days as she tried to convince the men to let her go. Ayling was released on 17 July at the British consulate in Milan, after telling the kidnappers about her child at home. Polish national, Lukasz Herba, and his brother, Michal Herba, were subsequently jailed after an Italian court convicted them of kidnapping Ayling. Ayling’s story will be covered in a six-part BBC series called Kidnapped. Georgia Lester, who worked on Killing Eve, will cover her time in captivity, and the subsequent court case. Lester said: “Every moment that I have spent researching this series and spending time with Chloe, learning about the ordeal she suffered both by the men who abducted her and the people who doubted her, has been shocking and infuriating. “It’s been an honour to work with Chloe and I can’t wait for audiences to finally see her courage, her charm and her unwavering resilience.” The BBC Three series will begin filming later this year. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

At first glance, Isabel Wilkerson's best-selling nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents —

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