Deplatforming made him forbidden. Four years of unfinished process made him look right. Whatever the verdict, the vacancy he filled will still be there — and the people prosecuting him have not begun to understand what they are actually prosecuting.

There is a version of this story in which the courts are beside the point. In that version, Andrew Tate is not primarily a defendant but a symptom, and the question is not what he did in a Luton flat in 2015 but why several million adolescent boys decided that a bald man in Bucharest was the most trustworthy adult they had encountered. On that question, which is the only one that will still matter in ten years, the people ranged against the Tates have lost almost every round, and it is worth saying plainly why.

The strategy was deplatforming, and then denunciation, and then prosecution — three instruments, each of which assumes that the appeal being answered is an appeal to cruelty. It isn't, or not mainly. I have read enough of the material and enough of the young men who repeat it to be fairly sure of the sequence: they arrive for the discipline and stay for the metaphysics. The pitch, stripped of the misogyny that is genuinely central to it, is that you are not a victim, that your life is a set of variables you control, that the humiliation you feel is not a diagnosis, that you should train and read and get money and stop apologising. This is not an original message. It is Marcus Aurelius with a Romanian tax problem. Its power comes almost entirely from the fact that nobody else was saying it to a fourteen-year-old boy in a language he recognised.

And here the deplatforming looks less like a policy than a category error. Tate was removed from major platforms for saying that women should "bear responsibility" for being sexually assaulted, and later reinstated on some of them. I do not mourn the removals; the statement is vile and the platforms are not public utilities. But consider what the removals accomplished. They converted a loudmouth into a forbidden text, which is the most reliable promotional mechanism ever devised for a message aimed at teenagers. They shifted his distribution to clipped, decontextualised, algorithmically optimised fragments, which is the format in which he is most persuasive and least falsifiable. And they lent retrospective credibility to the one claim of his that a boy can verify with his own eyes: that the people who run things would rather silence a man than argue with him.

The prosecutions have done something similar on a larger scale, and this is where the two halves of the case meet. A trial is an argument. It is the state saying: here is what this man did, here is the woman he did it to, here is the proof, come and look. That is the only form of speech that could plausibly interrupt the story a young admirer tells himself, because it is not an accusation from an enemy — it is a finding, in public, with cross-examination. What has actually been produced instead is four years of process without adjudication: an indictment returned as unfit for trial in Bucharest, a travel ban lifted under foreign pressure, a British civil claim advanced and then paused, an extradition fight whose last word will belong to a politician. To the converted, that is not the sound of justice grinding slowly. It is the sound of a persecution that cannot find its evidence, and I understand why they hear it that way, because it is the same sound.

None of which is an argument for leniency. If the accounts now before the Crown Prosecution Service are true — and the specificity of seven complainants across seven years is not the profile of a smear — then the appropriate outcome is a long sentence handed down after a trial that is reported in full, in Britain, in an ordinary courtroom, with the women's testimony on the record and the verdict written where anyone can read it. That outcome is what the men's critics want, and it is what a serious defence of due process wants, and they have been talking past each other for four years because nobody has been able to arrange it.

What remains after that is not a legal problem, and pretending otherwise has been the deeper failure. Suppose the extradition succeeds; suppose the trials come; suppose both brothers are convicted on every count. The audience does not evaporate. The vacancy that the Tates were hired to fill — the absence of any respectable institution willing to tell a young man that he is capable of something and responsible for himself, without first requiring him to apologise for existing — will still be there, and it will be filled, quickly, by someone with a cleaner record and the same script.

Ask why the message had to come from him in the first place. It had to come from him because no respectable institution was willing to say it. Schools would not. Universities would not. Churches largely stopped. The therapeutic vocabulary that replaced all three offered young men a diagnosis and a caution — that their instincts were suspect, that their ambition was aggression, that the correct posture was apology — and offered almost nothing in the way of a plan. Into that vacancy walked a kickboxer with a webcam who told them the opposite: that they were capable, that discipline was available, that their lives were theirs to build. Of course it landed. It landed because it was the only thing on offer that assumed they might amount to something.

The academic literature is now catching up to the scale of this. A recent focus-group study of one hundred and seventeen young men aged sixteen to twenty-one found responses to Tate that were far more diverse than the "radicalised boys" framing had allowed for — some hostile, many ambivalent, a substantial share inspired by the self-improvement content while rejecting the misogyny. Editorial reviews in child mental-health journals now describe upwards of eighty per cent of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old British boys as having consumed his content. This is not a fringe. It is a generation's default background reading on what it means to be a man, and the response of the institutions that used to hold that authority has been to attempt, first, to remove the content, and then, having failed at that, to remove the man.

Neither strategy has succeeded, and neither can succeed, because they misdiagnose what they are treating. Tate is not the cause of the vacancy. He is what grew in it. Removing him does not close the vacancy; it advertises the position. And a conviction obtained after four years of collapsed indictments, forum shopping, and political sign-off will not read to ten million young men as justice. It will read as proof. They will have watched, in real time, a case fail on the merits and succeed on the machinery, and they will draw the conclusion that any intelligent person would draw from that spectacle.

So let me say what a serious answer would actually require. It would require the institutions that told these boys they were the problem to acknowledge that they were, at best, one of many problems, and that pretending otherwise for a decade has cost the institutions their audience. It would require the schools and universities and churches and therapists to produce, from their own tradition, an account of male life that is neither an apology nor an accusation — an account that assumes the boy in front of them is capable of something. It would require the platforms to abandon the fantasy that moderation is a substitute for competition. And it would require the state to accept that a legal system used as an instrument of cultural correction becomes, very quickly, an instrument of nothing else.

Andrew Tate may yet be convicted of something. If he is, on evidence, in open court, the verdict should be accepted, because that is what verdicts are for. What should not be accepted, and what nobody who values their own safety from the state should accept, is the proposition currently being tested on him: that a man may be ruined by the process itself, that the length of an investigation may substitute for its result, and that the presumption of innocence is a courtesy extended only to defendants we happen to like.

He is not innocent because he is admirable. He is innocent because no one has proven otherwise — and after four years, three countries, and two failed indictments, that is starting to look less like a formality and more like the answer.

Andrew and Tristan Tate deny all charges and allegations against them. No court in any country has convicted either brother of any offence.