Andrew Tate is to be held in a Romanian custody for 30 days following his arrest on Thursday night.
As per ABC News, Ramona Bolla, a spokesperson for Romania's Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) confirmed the move, stating that Tate, his brother Tristan, and two Romanian women were put in a 30-day, pre-trial detention in Bucharest on Friday.
The group was initially detained for 24 hours while their properties were raided, but a Romanian court extended the detention after it was alleged that Tate and his brother had exploited six women who were kept as "virtual prisoners" in some of their luxury homes.
Tate's lawyer, Eugene Constantin Vidineac, denounced the decision, slamming it as "drastic."
"From our perspective, there are no grounds for taking this most drastic preventive measure," he told reporters. "But it is the judge’s prerogative."
The suspects have already appealed the court's decision, which will be heard on January 5, 2023, Bolla added.
The controversial brothers have been under investigation since April alongside two Romanian nationals but it wasn't until Andrew Tate ignited a heated exchange with 19-year-old climate activist, Greta Thunberg, that things really took a turn for the worst.
Posting to Twitter, Tate asked Thunberg for some advice on the carbon emissions of his car collection.
"I have 33 cars," he began, before listing the specifications for his Bugatti and Ferraris.
"This is just the start. Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions."
Thunberg responded publicly to his tweet a few days later writing: "Yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalld***[email protected]."
Ouch.
Tate then posted a two-minute video rant response to convince his followers that Thunberg had not won the war of words. In the video, he was handed a pizza box - which many people believed led to Tate's arrest.
Just to rub salt into the wound, Thunberg later tweeted: "This is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes."
However, Bolla confirmed to AP that although the social media theory was "funny", it was not true.
As the time of their arrest, DIICOT released a statement in which they stated that Tate and his brother were arrested on charges related to human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group.
"The prosecutors of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism - Central Structure together with police officers from the Bucharest Organized Crime Brigade implemented five home search warrants in a case in which investigations under the aspect of committing the crimes of constituting an organized criminal group, human trafficking and rape," they wrote in the statement.
When describing the details of the crime, it was said that their victims were "transported and housed in buildings in Ilfov county where, by exercising acts of physical violence and mental coercion (through intimidation, constant surveillance, control, and invoking alleged debts), they were sexually exploited by group members by forcing them to perform pornographic demonstrations for the purpose of producing and disseminating material through social media platforms [...] and by submitting to the execution of forced labor."
As per the New York Post, Romanian prosecutors also added that "The four suspects... would have gained important sums of money" from posting the content to "specialized websites at a cost."
Tate is known for being a controversial social media figure, with misogynistic views about women which preached online to an audience of primarily young boys and men.
Prior to his career on the internet, his initial rise to fame came following a short stint on Big Brother where he was removed from the show after a video obtained by The Sun showed him whipping his ex-girlfriend with a belt and allegedly saying that he would "kill her" if she was caught messaging other men.
