An Australian soldier taught Andrew Tate’s inner circle to ‘recruit’ billionaires. He’s now turned his back on the manosphere

A former Australian soldier who once taught secret courses to Andrew Tate’s inner circle on “exploiting” the vulnerabilities of billionaires to get ahead has become the first of Tate’s trusted “generals” to speak against his misogyny.

Joule Sullivan, who became one of Tate’s closest friends and advisers, told this masthead he had now turned his back on Tate and the so-called “manosphere”, having grown concerned “there might be something” to the charges of sex trafficking, abuse and rape Tate and his brother Tristan are now fighting in multiple countries.

“There are no answers in the ‘red pill’ and the manosphere,” Sullivan said. “It’s just a bunch of grown men complaining. I bought into Tate’s message. But I went to therapy and got help for my issues with women.

“I have to believe innocent until proven guilty, it’s hard to reconcile these charges [against Tate] with the good friend … and polite man I knew, but the scale of the allegations now, especially involving minors, are disturbing.”

Secret courses recently leaked from inside Tate’s online “university” reveal that paying disciples of the British-American former kickboxer were taught not only how to manipulate women into sex work for financial gain, as previously uncovered, but also how to dig into the private lives of the elite for “leverage” in business too – using the tactics of intelligence agencies and private investigators.

Video lessons, obtained by this masthead, teach men how to dig up the vulnerabilities of multi-millionaire “targets”, and encourage them into “taboo, hedonistic” activities by supplying women, as well as discussing the benefits of tax evasion and insider trading.

Tate and his inner circle of War Room generals have cultivated close relationships with US President Donald Trump’s sons and advisers and other wealthy figures in America. As the Tates sit in detention in Miami fighting an extradition request from British prosecutors, their War Room network and university “The Real World” continue to run, charging subscribers thousands of dollars a year for access to Tate’s “secrets to getting rich”.

Data leaks show many of their students are teen boys, including from Australia. And this masthead can reveal at least three Australians were key generals and “professors” inside Tate’s operation.

They include the former Australian Defence Force soldier-turned-security specialist Sullivan, who taught the “penetrating the elite” and “operator” classes to Tate subscribers, adapting covert intelligence skills for networking, personal security and financial gain. He denies they were “blackmail courses”.

“There are no answers in the ‘red pill’. It’s just a bunch of grown men complaining.”

Joule Sullivan

There is also a self-described “economic astrologist” who runs one of a suite of cryptocurrency courses inside Tate’s university, which have since been linked to “pump and dump” scams where investors lost money.

Another wealthy Australian in Tate’s inner circle is ex-porn star Stirling Cooper, who teaches courses on how to sexually dominate women and has also been revealed by this masthead as a senior figure in Australia’s main neo-Nazi group.

For many years, Cooper and Sullivan were two of Tate’s staunchest defenders, frequently pictured with the Tate brothers smoking cigars on private jets and partying on yachts.

Inside Tate’s exclusive War Room, leaked chatlogs previously published by the BBC and obtained by this masthead suggest Cooper and Sullivan both took part in discussions about grooming women into online sex work in order to make money and disciplining those who stepped out of line. Neither man has been charged as part of investigations into Tate’s alleged trafficking operation. The Tates deny any wrongdoing.

Cooper did not respond to requests for comment and continues to defend the brothers online, but Sullivan told this masthead he has since drifted apart from the Tates over the past two years, as the allegations mounted against them. He denies pimping out women himself, questioning the authenticity of the leaked chats.

“Look, some of that was five years ago, maybe I wrote things, maybe I didn’t, it could have been doctored,” Sullivan said.

The key thing, he said, was “I’ve never made a single cent off any of that [pimping] stuff. There were two sort of sides to the War Room. There were those who thought that was cool, and those who thought that was a liability.”

Sullivan claims he “never saw anything illegal” and the women doing online sex work for the Tates “all seemed healthy” and content, but he concedes “those charges [against the Tates] are dark”.

He said he was also upset to see “young men essentially being poisoned in their view of women” by Tate’s brand of toxic masculinity, which tells men to “take the red pill”, referencing sci-thriller The Matrix, in order to understand “the real world” where men must fight back against feminism.

“These red pill guys, they don’t have healthy relationships themselves so who are they to teach you?” Sullivan said. “Men should protect the wellbeing of women.”

But seven years ago, he admits he “completely bought into” Tate’s message, having trained the Tate brothers in weapons and defensive tactics in Ukraine while working in private security. “I was jaded from a messy divorce and I still had childhood issues to deal with,” he said.

Sullivan quickly became a leader in the War Room, which he still defends as a place of mentorship and brotherhood. His video lessons on “penetrating the elite to get paid” were available only to a small group of War Room members and leaders.

In them, Sullivan often appears on camera from various exotic locales – by an infinity pool in the Maldives in one seminar, “at the best resort” on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, in another. He tells students that women are often the wealthy’s “biggest vulnerability” and “the main currency in this environment” – and so a key opportunity for leverage over the elite lies in supplying them.

“Ultra-high net worth will have hookers and mistresses or sugar babies, they’ll always have mistresses, typically they’re always paid,” he says in one video. But “hotels often have issues [with] privacy”. “If you’ve got a big house, let them know that they can bring their chicks over to your house and f— them … And ‘if you want ladies, this is the number to call’ … Partake in taboo activities with them. If they’re going out in the town to pick up some hired help, go do it with them … something that could get you into trouble. It does cement the trust.”

Other Sullivan lessons discuss tax evasion and insider trading (“Insider trading is the only trading, [says] a mate of mine who’s soon to be a billionaire”), as he brags of the wealth he has made personally by penetrating venture capitalist circles, and “running” movie producers, sports stars and even royalty as “assets”.

Sullivan denies the courses encourage illegal activity, but rather detail his insight from a lifetime climbing the social ladder, after growing up poor in Adelaide and building a fortune in Dubai. “The War Room was anti-drugs, and everyone was too alpha to pay for sex,” he said. At other points in the course, he explicitly told students not to break the law. But he concedes some of the material “looks bad”, and his views on women have since significantly changed.

At times, Sullivan’s lessons also delve into the “pimping principles” of Tate’s secret War Room “Phd”, or “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree”, in which select men close to Tate were coached through the “lover boy” method of grooming women from dates into sex work on the site OnlyFans, in order to take the lion’s share of the profits. Tate himself called it “sexual slavery”, and bragged it had made the men of the War Room hundreds of millions of dollars. Dozens of women around the world have now alleged abuse at the hands of the Tates.

In his lessons, Sullivan assures students that the wealthy will be dazzled by their “ruthless … street pimp” mentality. All followers of “Tate’s tenets” should have at least one woman “trained” to “serve you” and “bring you money and status”, he says, with her life under “your complete control” from “the clothes she wears, the friends she hangs out with, how she eats”.

Sullivan told this masthead this was based on consensual dom-sub dynamics, but he regretted using Tate terminology. It was “a bit cringe now”, he said, that he’d moved on “from all this ‘red pill’ nonsense”. The concept of ‘training’ in the dom/sub realm relates to physical and sexual development,” he said, but “it’s not for everyone”, and it has to suit both partners.

In another lesson, Sullivan’s face is blurred as he sits before a chessboard, with a spider sculpture backlit on the wall, to talk through interrogation tactics – “how to take a person’s fear up” or “pride and ego down”. In another, Sullivan teaches students how to set up a covert network of “sock puppets” – fake social media accounts and shell companies using burner emails and phones – with which to investigate people online. “For example, if you are looking to collect information on … if someone who you’re going to go into business with would be easily susceptible to a honey trap,” he says.

Sullivan discusses how he used extensive background research on a target – in this case, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company he was bodyguarding – to plan a conversation for the brief seven minutes he had alone with him that successfully exploited the man’s “chip on his shoulder” and father issues.

Long segments of the courses are also devoted to explaining fashion, fine dining etiquette, personal security and the opera, as well as spruiking Sullivan’s own interest in tailoring.

In another War Room course on networking, Tate himself has bragged of having “access to the president’s son” and knowing “every big person in politics on the right”.

But Sullivan told this masthead he had “no political connections” himself and Tate didn’t take his courses. The lessons reflected the reality of “how business is done at that level”, he said, but they also stressed the need for discretion and integrity. Anything illegal would attract risk, Sullivan said, which was against the spirit of the course designed to make someone secure and untouchable.

“I don’t mean ‘exploit’ [the rich] to set up some kind of Mossad sting or honey trap,” he said. “It can be win/win”, finding a way to help, and add value to the rich man’s life.

Sullivan grew up on welfare wearing secondhand clothes “deeply insecure” of his own poverty, he said. Learning to fit in wealthy circles changed his life. “That’s what I put into the course.”

The secret courses were recently discovered by a security researcher, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals, after they were inadvertently listed on an external hosting site, rather than behind a paywall. “I thought some of Tate’s rich friends might be interested to see this,” the researcher said, calling the discovery “significant” as it revealed a new side to how the secretive War Room cultivated ties with the mega-wealthy.

Another course unearthed by the leak, taught by a different War Room leader, coaches men to identify “exploitable” and submissive women, and up their “cold outreach” on dating sites to an industrial scale, by messaging about 20 women a day.

Tate’s other main Australian lieutenant Stirling Cooper featured in a video from a course previously leaked from inside the War Room where he, Tate and their close friend Justin Waller, ran through how to “isolate” women from their family and friends so they became wholly dependent on them.

Sullivan said he didn’t agree with that kind of control in relationships.