The Tate brothers—a pair of accused rapists, sex traffickers, and manosphere podcasters currently sitting in federal prison—seem very unlikely to win pretrial release before they are extradited to the United Kingdom, where they will face charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child. Though the Tates count members of the Trump administration (and immediate Trump family) among their fans, the administration has thus far ignored their pleas for aid.
They're relying on lawyer Joseph McBride to secure their release, and McBride has been implementing some unusual strategies to do so. Mostly, he's flooding X and Instagram with AI-generated images of the two men, designed to project a positive and manly image.
This is an unusual thing for a lawyer to do, to say the least. But as McBride told my colleague Anna Merlan, it's all part of the plan to free the Tates. In some of the pictures, the Tates are (as Anna put it) "manfully bearing their suffering," and in others they're sitting around a table with great men of history like George Washington and Joe Rogan.
McBride refused to tell Anna which image generator he's using, and it remains to be seen whether his AI Tate pics will do much to shift public opinion. But in the meantime, things are getting weird.
— Sophie Hurwitz
