Last month, the cryptocurrency-based online casino Duel aired a blackjack livestream that it said would be hosted by former pro kickboxer turned controversial masculinity influencer Andrew Tate.
But while the dealer—a bald man with dark stubble, wearing a black T-shirt, tight suit, and sunglasses—bore a resemblance to Tate, he didn’t act much like the swaggeringly macho and voluble streamer. His mostly silent performance was punctuated by sudden bouts of singing, vigorous twerking, and still more ridiculous dance moves, the most impressive being a full split on the blackjack table. He also spontaneously made out with a male assistant posted to his side, pulling him in for the kiss by his necktie.
The performance went viral, but sometime after the livestream began, Duel’s founder and owner, Ossi Ketola, claimed that the casino had been duped by an influencer management agency. “We were promised a deal where Andrew Tate would deal blackjack for one of our live games,” Ketola wrote in Duel’s Discord server. “When he arrived at the studio, we realized we had been rugged. The person that stood in front of us bore some resemblance, but he wasn’t the real Andrew Tate. It was an impostor. By this point we are too far in and the costs have been incurred, so we are forced to run with it to save face.” Duel did not respond to a request for comment regarding the alleged bait and switch.
But just who was that “imposter”? His real name is Brian Michael Hinds, though many quickly recognized him as “Bottom G,” a half-German, half-Barbadian social media star who, while looking like Tate, acts in every way as his exact opposite, flamboyantly twerking and twirling from Miami Beach to Barcelona, ready to burst into song at any moment. Even the name “Bottom G” is a queer-coded play on Tate’s self-applied title of “Top G.”
Photograph: Ekathep Michaels; courtesy of J. Connor Management
Hinds, 29, tells WIRED that Duel fully understood it was hiring Bottom G, not the real Tate, who has separately advertised the casino on terms that are not publicly known. In a statement to WIRED, Duel denied deliberately hiring a lookalike.
“Of course that was the whole request,” Hinds says of his Duel livestream on a Zoom call from Istanbul, where it’s 2 am. An avowed night person, Hinds, whose résumé includes singing on Germany’s version of American Idol and dancing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, says he has no fixed address, traveling wherever opportunity knocks. “I’m for the streets,” he declares. “I’m everywhere.” Because of how the Duel clips blew up, Hinds says, he now has offers to perform his songs at a show in Bangkok and at a wedding in Las Vegas—less because people want a Tate look-alike per se and more because they’re thrilled by his joie de vivre. “My true fans, they get it,” he says. Hinds also plans to work with Duel again.
Such is the surreal life of an aspiring gay pop star who found accidental fame through a strange connection to a man notorious for his extremely misogynist views. (Both Tate and his brother have been charged with rape in multiple countries; they have also been charged with human trafficking in the UK. The pair have denied all allegations.)
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