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That evening, the Tates took Southern to a club, where they ordered bottle service.
After a couple of shots of vodka, she recalls, she suddenly felt "like my consciousness
was collapsing."Tate carried her to his car, and when she came to they were on the
bed at her hotel.
Tate started kissing Southern and pulling off her clothes. She told me that she tried
to push his hands away, but he wouldn't stop. Then he hooked his arm around her
neck and started to squeeze. She remembers thinking, "Oh, ----, this guy actually is
going to rape me." Southern was anti-abortion, and was terrified of getting pregnant.
She began pleading with him: "I know what you're gonna do here. Please just wear a
condom. Please."
Southern remembers fading in and out of consciousness as Tate raped her
unprotected and choked her. Afterward, he sat on the edge of the bed and said,
"Don't tell the press I raped you." She remembers saying, "My whole brand is literally
talking about how stupid bitches get themselves in situations like this. There's
nothing I can say without destroying my career. So congratulations."
In the car to the airport, Southern said, she discovered burst blood vessels around her
eyes and marks on her neck. Back in Toronto, she was examined by a nurse who
specialized in sexual assault. On an assessment form, the nurse recorded that
Southern had been raped and strangled by a "well known male" at a hotel in Romania
and had suffered an intimate injury. She noted that Southern seemed to be
experiencing "personal struggles with her belief system" as a result.
Southern told me that she tried to apply her political convictions to her experience,
telling herself that she was at fault for drinking with a man she didn't know. A month
later, she texted Tate. "It was really ---- what you did that night in Bucharest," she
wrote. "I'm not going to tell anyone obviously because I was an absolute moron, but I
hope you don't do that to anyone else."
Tate denied raping Southern, but he bragged to the War Room about spending the
night with her, saying that he had invited her to Romania to discuss a business deal
but "didn't invest a ---- penny."
Southern came to wonder if his proposal had been just a pretext. She thought back to
her confrontations with women protesting sexual violence and felt regret. But, she
told me, "I knew one hundred per cent there was no world in which I spoke about
this where I got to retain my status within the right-wing world." For years, she
remained silent.
https://bsky.app/profile/michaelhobbes.bsky.social/post/3moaw4vdsps2h
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Lauren Southern's story of being raped by Andrew Tate (She is a conservative woman now questioning her status in right wing politics)