Andrew Tatethe “toxic” influencer, who likes to call himself Top G (in street slang the G stands for gangster), after months in a Romanian prison on suspicion of organized crime and human trafficking, won an appeal to have his sentence replaced with house arrest.

The Court of Appeal in Bucharest ruled in favor of an appeal by Tate, who challenged a judge’s decision last week to extend his arrest for a fourth time by 30 days, said a spokesman for Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT.

Tate, 36, who has 5.4 million Twitter followers, was initially arrested in late December in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, along with his brother Tristan and two Romanian women.

All four won their appeal on Friday 31 March and will remain under house arrest until 29 April. None of the four have yet been formally charged. The court ruled in favor of their immediate release. Prosecutors cannot challenge the appeals court’s decision, which is final.

He was arrested on December 29 on charges of human trafficking and rape. Officers raided his hideout and say they found guns, knives and large sums of cash. Top G and his younger brother, 34-year-old Tristan, were led into jail in handcuffs. Two Romanian women, Georgiana Naghel and a former police officer named Alexandra Luana Radu, were also arrested.

Andrew Tate is a social media phenomenon. His TikTok content has been viewed more than 12.7 billion times. No one else on the platform comes close to him. He claims to have mastered social media algorithms and his posts are like a cyber plague. His career didn’t start on the internet. He was a successful kickboxer. In 2009, it was the first in its category in Europe. Experts spoke of his “multi-layered techniques” and “sharp punches to the body”. But by 2016, Andrew Tate, as the “Guardian” newspaper writes, had left the ring and entered another arena: television, specifically a well-known reality show.

He has repeatedly argued that Romanian prosecutors have no evidence and claimed their case is a “political” plot to silence him.

DIICOT said in a statement after the December arrests that it had identified six victims in the human trafficking case who had allegedly been subjected to “acts of physical violence and mental coercion” and sexually exploited by members of the alleged criminal group.

The agency said the victims were lured under the pretense of love, romance and later intimidated, put under surveillance and subjected to other control tactics, while forced to participate in pornographic acts for the financial benefit of the particular group.

When Tate first arrived in Romania six years ago, aged 30, he was asked why he chose to move. “I like eastern Europe as a whole,” he said, “because corruption is much more accessible.” In the UK, he reasoned, only the high profile get away with crime, implying that Romania was open to all.

Tate was born in the US, his parents immigrated to the UK when he was about five years old. His father, Emory, was a pioneering African-American chess champion who died suddenly during a tournament in 2015. His mother worked as a caterer in Luton and is now said to be in Kentucky, where she lives with her sister Tate. a lawyer.

Known for his misogyny, Tate has a huge following, despite being banned from most social media platforms. His Twitter account was reinstated last November after Elon Musk took over the company.