r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 28d ago
Society A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work | Maddie Kowalski is one of countless young women who’ve had their lives destroyed by the burnerverse, a loosely connected online community of sports fans. Now she’s fighting back
https://www.wired.com/story/burnerverse-maddie-kowalski/2.0k
u/Hrmbee 28d ago
Some of the deeply disappointing details:
The women targeted by the burnerverse were private citizens before their names, rumors, explicit images, or videos went viral. WIRED has identified 10 women who have been doxed by the burnerverse, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms. Sometimes, the content has even made national news, with aggregation websites like TheSportsGrail or Barstool Sports employees amplifying the victim’s humiliation.
Communities of burner accounts crop up around most large schools with prominent sports teams. Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. Kowalski’s video went viral within the SEC burnerverse before spreading nationally.
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There’s also evidence that some college sports athletics departments are aware of the burners and even maintain cordial, semi-symbiotic relationships with them, akin to the dynamic between a brand and an influencer account. According to McCarthy’s piece, one prominent MSU burner account alleged that the school invited burners to an event unveiling the football team’s new alternate uniforms. Athletics staffers would even send him photos of meetings with potential recruits: “It was like, ‘Wink, wink, nod, nod, if you want to post these pictures, feel free to do so,’” they said in the report. (A top official at MSU told McCarthy that this was not “part of athletic department strategies.”)
Many burners are run by school alumni or casual fans, but a non-negligible number of them are associated with fraternities, as evidenced by the photos of Greek events they post or the affiliation in their bios. Blake, who is involved in Greek life at Ole Miss, says it’s an open secret on campus that potential new members are strongly encouraged to create burner accounts in order to pledge. (Ole Miss did not respond to a request for comment.) These are “guys who would buy you a drink, who’d take you out on a date, who are your little brothers or your best friend or your boyfriend,” she says. “It could literally be anybody. It’s not mean or troubled guys doing it, or guys who need validation. It’s guys with wealthy families and support systems and college educations.”
Pretty disgusting and yet also disappointingly predictable online behavior here especially with the lack of social sanctions or legislation to indicate that this kind of stuff is unacceptable.
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u/thetwoandonly 28d ago
I went to a "good school" and honestly that last line is exactly the kind of people I learned to avoid. They're often effectively dead behind the eyes. They've been shuffled forward their entire life, never learned, never developed, never grew. Just marched predictably forward, did as told and are fairly well rewarded for it.
But they lack something human. Like there's no failure state to fear for them, no mistakes they can make that would really effect them.
Then they're out in society and often higher up the ladder than their abilities would afford but again society just churns along regardless.
Maybe that's why everything is turning to shit, death of meritocracy.354
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u/Jemnite 28d ago
Chalmers meant it as a hypothetical. You aren't supposed to apply to real life because then it becomes a tool for dehumanization and othering. People have, of course because if there's anything groups of people love to do to other groups if people it's dehumanization (see the quote unquote "NPC meme"), but in ways that largely discard the actual core essence of the thought exercise (what is phenomenal consciousness, what is access consciousness, etc) to just imply that large swathes of people they don't like don't have a soul
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u/SchemataObscura 28d ago
I'm pretty sure early zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead were supposed to be a criticism of consumer culture with the mindless habits and never ending hunger that goes along consumerism.
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u/CriticismSelect9292 28d ago
tbh what small percentage of people nowadays aren't existential zombies? 10%?
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u/SufficientOwls 28d ago edited 28d ago
This is deeply harmful thinking. This is no different than when fascists call other people NPCs. Everyone has interiority. The evil these men do has nothing to do with lack of thought. They made these choices and need to be held accountable.
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u/WorldEaterYoshi 28d ago
I want to say that I'm not but so much of my time is taken up by the grind of capitalism that it feels like I am even though I don't want to be. Like can I even say I'm alive for the hours when I have no choice in how to spend my time?
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u/PhantomNomad 28d ago
That's how I feel also. Would be nice to actually have time to pursue other interests and still have enough time to clean the house, make meals, take the kids to activities. When I look back to when I was a kid in the 80's, I think my parents had the same problems.
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u/0kids4now 28d ago
This really resonates with me. In high school and college, I was always one of the nerds. I had a small group of friends and we'd talk about video games, take apart radios, and keep to ourselves. We didn't talk to or about girls because they didn't want anything to do with us. But somehow we were seen as the creeps. Meanwhile, the rich kids on the lacrosse team were sharing pictures to the whole school of naked girls passed out at their parties.
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u/DukeOfGeek 28d ago
Frat culture is a big part of what's wrong with the world. It's where all the rich selfish assholes and their wanna be future flunkies get together and form the unseen conspiracy that will go forward from there to fuck over everyone else.
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u/imarc 28d ago
I, for one, am surprised to hear that this is pervasive in the University Greek System.
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u/Saneless 28d ago
And Barstool. Like, of all the sites, that was the source of shitheads? No wayyy
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
If anything this explains a few odd things to me. Why is such a weird offbrand sports blog like Barstool even such a juggernaut in the industry? There are plenty of legit reporters from all the news outlets (national and local and even sports-specific ones) who will report the hell out of everything happening at major colleges. Where does Barstool actually fit in? Turns out, its a front for a lot of terrible shit, using alleged interest in mainstream sports to pump the notoriety of not just shitheads, but complete criminals. I hope this burns them to the fucking ground. I know it wont, but i hope
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u/averagetulip 28d ago
Genuinely, it’s because Dave Portnoy has an extensive roster of rape allegations against him. Like, EXTENSIVE, and largely from very young women in their late teens-early 20s such as the ones who were targeted in this story. He’s such a big deal in the college sports world because he makes these college-aged guys feel like they’re super cool by emulating his behavior and associating with him, and of course he has a vested interest in normalizing sexual assault and rape culture. Other normie sports reporters aren’t going around throwing parties and enabling that shit for these college guys.
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u/shitkabob 27d ago
I am surprised a rapist like Dave Portnoy would support spreading videos of rapists raping. But I don't understand rapists like Dave Portnoy, because I'm not a rapist. You really have to have a rapist's brain (ie "Portnoy Encephalos") to get it, I guess.
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u/userhwon 28d ago
It's run by abusers, and abusers pick up on that.
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u/throwaway2987650 28d ago edited 28d ago
Never forget that Barstool is primarily responsible for the PR rehabilitation of Rapist QB Jameis Winston. Winston had 3 allegations of sexual misconduct, one of them being a rape allegation, while at FSU that were swept under the rug by the TPD. That’s not even mentioning the Uber incident. But Barstool and Fox present him as a lovable goofball.
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u/spinbutton 28d ago
Good sarcasm :-)
Frats support and cover for crimes that arise through their misogynistic pack mentality
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u/ampersand355 28d ago
This happened to my friends little sister. She was a pole vaulter and they leaked all of these photos and videos of her when she was in high school, 16 years old and people were zooming in on her crotch and stuff, disgusting. They ended up following her all through college.
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u/DigNitty 28d ago
I’m confused.
I still don’t understand what these burners are actually doing?
Collecting photos and spreading them? Are they somehow collecting nude photos of students? Why would they care about new uniforms?
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u/ivo004 28d ago
They excuse poor performance by their chosen teams by amplifying campus rumors that such-and-such slept with the starting RBs girlfriend and that's the reason he didn't make that block that led to the fumble that cost us the game. It's all the fault of this harlot!!! Then Barstool and Pat McAfee talk about it on air and some girl's life is ruined because she purportedly hooked up with a football player at a frat party and it's all over Twitter that Middling SEC U won't win the championship this season solely because she couldn't keep her legs together.
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u/doc_skinner 28d ago
The burner accounts were set up ostensibly with the "primary purpose of discussing college sports." Of course if you get a network of college aged boy with anonymous Twitter and YikYak accounts, they are going to talk about other stuff.
In the text you are referencing, the article was explaining that these "burner accounts" are legitimized by the school athletics departments who give them scoops like first look at uniforms or news about an athlete's status to share throughout the network.
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u/Boring-Researcher167 28d ago edited 28d ago
Please explain it to me like I'm old and do not understand any of this, because that's what is happening.
Who is taking these pictures and videos? Where are they coming from? How are they being accessed? Women are making consensual group sex videos but then those videos are released without their consent? Some of us genuinely cannot understand the very basic logistics of what is being discussed, because everybody seems to be starting on page 5.
Edit: So people have explained to me that alcohol was involved, which does provide some context. But I'm assuming the mods assumed they were victim-blaming, so their comments get deleted. For the record, I didn't think they were at all, and it wasn't my intention to. Thanks for the answers.
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u/Murky_Hornet3470 28d ago
a pretty solid portion of what gets spread by these types of accounts are girls on campus that have an onlyfans or something like that, someone finds out about it somehow & buys access and then spreads all of her stuff on campus.
Another big portion are nudes, etc that are consensually sent (after dates, etc) that the guys post as revenge, or just for no reason to be cruel.
Then another big category would be girls who had sex at a party or something and someone took a video and spread it around.
These types of accounts are extremely recognizable once you've been around twitter for a bit because they all have almost exactly the same naming format (something like Brandon "Big Hamburger" Jones or Danny "The Blickie Sucker" Davis), it's like a regular first and last name with a weird thing in quotes in the middle and it's a batsignal to block them lol
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u/outer--monologue 27d ago
Okay but the part that I'm not understanding is that like....the schools are ENDORSING THIS in some capacity??? And these accounts send the stuff to actual sports blogs...who publish it??
Maybe I'm just too fuckin old, they world is ceasing to make any sense to me.
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u/Masta-Blasta 28d ago edited 28d ago
I have sadly seen the videos and they are incredibly exploitative, cruel, and disgusting. Basically, a young, drunk college girl went to a fraternity house. At some point, text messages in the fraternity chat circulated stating that the girl was naked and willing to do anything for cocaine (unconfirmed). There were photos of her completely nude on the floor, with multiple men standing around her. To be clear, she is very VERY visibly intoxicated in the photos. This was not consensual. The rapists invited other fraternity brothers to come join them in exploiting the poor girl via group chat. A video was circulated of them gang raping her.
Then, they spread these videos on twitter to shame and humiliate her for being “desperate” and “slutty.” A big part of the fun for the men on the burner verse seems to be taunting the fathers of the women whose lives they destroy. They dox her relentlessly and spam every man in her family with the videos and place bets on their suicides. It’s genuinely some of the most disturbing shit ive seen.
And then they find a new girl and make her viral. Scuba girl… etc. so the videos are from the fraternity dudes who raped or at a minimum took advantage of Maddie. They sent them in a group text to everyone in their fraternity. Video traveled and got posted on X where jt became viral.
Justice for Maddie. I hope each one of those boys loses everything.
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u/sum_dude44 28d ago
that's the crazy part--the video was w/o her consent. And shared w/o consent. And might have been rape.
Yet nothing happened to those guys
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u/rekniht01 28d ago
The article explains. The main young woman was inebriated, engaged in activity she could/did not consent to. This includes sexual activity and filming of said activity which apparently happened inside the fraternity building. The young men then shared that content, most likely among themselves, and then further in the burner universe where it spread to YikYak, Twitter, SnapChat, etc.
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
Barstool and the other completely degenerate non-anonymous platforms use affiliation with the anonymous accounts to stay relevant, they are edgy and college kids with underdeveloped prefrontal lobes eat that shit up and beg for seconds. Its a symbiotic content circle where the they dont officially do business with each other but recognize the need to keep each other in existence out of mutual benefit.
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u/PereMilon 28d ago
This has also been going on for over a decade at this point.
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u/freedcreativity 28d ago
Yea, I knew about something like this in 2010, when I was a college freshman, but with grainy cell phone videos and emails. Don’t go to TKE on jungle juice night.
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u/thephotoman 28d ago
I am even older, and we just avoided TKE and PIKE and screamed to the top of our lungs to tell people not to go to their parties.
Nothing good ever came from TKE and PIKE.
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u/freedcreativity 28d ago
Which is kinda weird, because I'm betting we didn't go to the same school! Our PIKE was small and might have been officially censured by the university admin or something.
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u/ranthria 28d ago
It's wild that TKE and PIKE are known as the rape frats, but they still manage to get people to go to their parties. My friends and I didn't always make the best decisions at that age, but we were at least consistently nailing "Don't go into the rape house".
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u/whatigotinmyhandnowb 28d ago
If you take out the part of sharing it on YikYak and Snapchat, this kind of shit has been how frats have always operated their serial-rape rings.
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u/Budget_Lavishness301 28d ago
Decade is light partner
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
it was 2010 that serial shithead Dave Portnoy proclaimed "Even though I never condone rape if you're a size 6 and you're wearing skinny jeans you kind of deserve to be raped right?"
he hasnt changed, in fact he has been rewarded continuously. why would he change? the whole thing needs burned down
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u/hellolovely1 28d ago
Is...is...he implying that a size 6 is too "fat" to wear skinny jeans? Does he own a mirror?
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u/visigoth67 28d ago
i think i remember hearing somewhere that later he said he didn't actually know what size a size 6 is, and that its pretty small. he was just saying stuff
edit: because he's an idiot
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28d ago
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u/Cosmic_0smo 28d ago
He’s named prominently in the article. They even put up a photo.
Sharing nonconsensual sex material should be treated legally the same way we treat people who share child porn. If Pat had shared a CSAM pic to his followers, dude would be in jail the next day, yet he can spread this poor girl’s video and info around to millions of followers with no consequences? It’s a stunning showcase of how our government’s near total inability to update legal frameworks for the 21st century.
The people who originally posted and spread the video are apparently facing a charge of cyber sexual harassment, which is a misdemeanor punishable by a $1000 fine. They should be facing 20 years, and if they were you’d better believe many more people would think twice before engaging in the pile-on. The fact that penalties are low to non-existent for this behavior is basically a signal that society is saying "this isn’t really wrong, and we don’t care if you do it". Shameful.
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u/need_some_answer 28d ago
Is there a reason why the victims are picked? Like are they famous in some way? Or are they just random women who have had their sex lives exposed on social media?
I ask because I just don’t get why anyone would care or want this sort of content. I mean who sees “random woman sex life info” and thinks oh that’s interesting.
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u/NamerNotLiteral 28d ago
It's for the best that you don't 'get it'. It's not about thinking this is 'interesting'. It's about pure sadism and enjoying the feeling of controlling and ruining someone's life.
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u/pembquist 28d ago
I assume it has less to do with the victims per se and more to do with the relations between the "men."
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u/GamersReisUp 28d ago edited 28d ago
That's definitely a major part of it. Women barely count as sentient brings to them in the first place, but they see themselves and all men as oppressed by an unfair social demand to play along with a bullshit charade that women have human sentience, and exist to be anything other than an appliance with collection of holes that you cram your dick into, and also will silently cook, clean, birth and raise your babies, do all the shitwork chores that you don't want to do, and always look hot enough to let you flex on other men. And so they deal with their tantrum over this and bond with fellow men by "showing these uppity bitches who think they should be at university who's actually boss," affirming their superiority as men through destroying women's lives through sexual violence and harassment that the victims will never, ever escape. They specifically love the idea of men being able to permanently destroy women through sex, and want to return to a world where that was more openly a part of the social contract. (And most of them have zero qualms about doing to same to boys and men who are victims of sexual violence, beyond some quibbles about "eeew gay" if the perps are men.)
One of the more chilling lines from it, for me, was the burners celebrating and hoping for their harassment to either drive Kowalski to kill herself, or render her so unemployable in mainstream firms that she's forced to resort to OnlyFans to survive. These guys yearn for the great again old days when you could rape a girl/woman, and count on her either getting brutally murdered by her family for "bringing shame," or sold off to a brothel where guys like you could go abuse and humiliate her even more. (Or rape another man, and count on him being robbed of his social status as a man, ostracized, and/or brutally murdered.)
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
"anyone can get regular porn, all over the internet! content that doesnt involve a woman (at least not immediately) being victimized and then regretting her choices as her life crumbles. but this does! isnt that hot?"
there really should be an internet license that gets revoked when people act like that online
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u/GamersReisUp 28d ago
They love and bond over the "thrill" of using sex-shaming to destroy the lives of young women who dared to exist in public. The cruelty is the point
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u/Ejigantor 28d ago
The reason is that the people doing this are vile, repulsive scum who are upset and angry that women are considered people, and they are doing what they are doing to take their rage out on a society that dares to treat any woman as more than a disposable sex object.
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u/Murky_Hornet3470 28d ago
it's basically a grossly mutated form of the same campus gossip that back 20 years ago would have stayed completely offline and wouldn't have progressed beyond gossip behind closed doors. Not that that's good either, but its a hell of a lot better than "campus gossip that gets signal boosted to millions of people on twitter".
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u/SetoKeating 28d ago
They probably have a social media presence which makes it easier to get a lot of people to want to dig through their content after the video/images are released. That being said, one of the women mentioned in the article that they went after had no accompanying images/video.
They literally upended her life with a rumor that made it all the way to major media outlets and talking heads. I would bet a very large sum of money that she turned down some frat boy that’s part of this burner network.
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u/hellolovely1 28d ago
They are all attractive young women who were vulnerable to predators and unfortunately, someone filmed it and decided to share it. Many people just want to "slut shame."
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u/patkavv 28d ago
There are plenty of people from wealthy families with support systems and college educations that are also mean, troubled, and need validation.
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u/hellolovely1 28d ago
Oh hell yes. I went to high school with so many guys like this. Bright futures and they were just predators.
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u/lightsoff_butimup 28d ago
What the fuck is YikYak!?
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u/chief_yETI 28d ago edited 28d ago
it was a social media platform for college students in the 2010s. Basically you posted anonymously, and people nearby on college campuses could see it. It was like some kind of 4chan/Twitter hybrid.
I think it died off before COVID though
edit: oh I didnt know it got revived. Looks like it got bought out in the past couple years
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u/LowApprehensive1719 28d ago
It’s still pretty active at my college. At least a few thousand users
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u/phisho873 28d ago
Yeah, I mean — the article starts off by saying this happened in November of 2025. Not sure why the parent comment is assuming it’s dead when the article very clearly states it is not.
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
best described as 'antisocial media' the big draw was that the app aimed to be fully pseudonymous, you couldnt control how your handle appeared and weren't supposed to have any good way to find out who any of the other users were, so the content was predictably just a constant dumpster fire
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u/decmcc 28d ago
hey. at least they're acclimatizing the girls to a life of objectification and libel which rich men face no consequences for.
Their university is setting them up with life skills
/s
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u/Bae_the_Elf 28d ago
I’m hate barstool sports culture. I feel like it wasn’t that bad now you add in sports gambling money and it’s a shit show
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u/Wow_u_sure_r_dumb 28d ago
These people have everything going for them and they still want to denigrate women. There’s this idea that in-cel behavior was just limited to social outcasts but that’s obviously not true. It seems more like a social malignancy that can spread.
And isn’t that fun? I have to type in “in-cel” instead of the word. We can’t even discuss these psychopaths in one of the largest subreddits on the platform.
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u/ThatGuyFromTheM0vie 28d ago
Elite rich people circles seem to just be pedos, sex pest creeps, and human traffickers.
Like it’s becoming evident that is the open secret underpinning our world economy, and it’s fucking gross and very sad.
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u/Chubuwee 28d ago
When you aren’t exposed to consequences or people telling you no, it’s easy to feel entitled to everything and keep pushing the envelope
Especially comparing the wealthy that recently made their wealth versus the wealthy that come from wealthy parents and have been brought up with the “you can do no wrong” mentality
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u/Brodie_C 28d ago
Kamran Ahmed
Brendan Pitfield
Jacob Gomberg
May their future potential employees find them on this story.
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u/Elexeh 28d ago
Yikes. Tech and social media really is speed running the downfall of humanity.
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u/klingma 28d ago
Should the family go after the men who had sex with a clearly intoxicated woman?
For the love of God yes.
I read through most of the article before it brought up the fact that she was seemingly raped. No one seemed to make a big deal about it in this story which is kinda shocking honestly.
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28d ago
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u/klingma 28d ago
Right? It basically states she got super clearly drunk, guys had their way with her, she appeared to be out of it, etc.
She even states herself that she didn't consent to the video component but not the actual acts themselves.
Really odd.
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u/BaconatedGrapefruit 28d ago
Because these are the kind of people who will look you dead in the eyes and tell you it wasn’t rape because she said yes at some point and we live in a post-truth society.
Was she slurring her words inbetween her third puke and rally? Doesn’t matter, still said yes.
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u/Alinier 28d ago
For real. Big difference between you both had a beer VS she's cognitively impaired, slurring her words, not fully present, blacked out, etc.
The men out here acting like animals and whining like children "Well technically you never said..." It's like, bitch, even if you were right, "technically legal" is not the proper standard for how you treat somebody. One's conduct shouldn't approach anywhere near needing to argue the particulars of whether or not it was technically rape. Like jfc.
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u/Low-Rent-9351 28d ago
Surprise! X plays a big roll in this happening.
It’s so sad people feel the need to do this kind of shit.
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u/kafka_lite 28d ago
What the fuck is wrong with people? This is insane. X should ban every user that came anything close to having involvement with this stuff.
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u/lesveuxsansvisage 28d ago
If you read Maddie’s comments on Instagram, it’s clearly a societal issue. Men and boys are happily harassing her to this day, comments amassing hundreds and thousands of likes. It’s disgusting.
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u/averagetulip 28d ago
A lot of people don’t realize that even if your Instagram is private, if someone views your page, accounts you follow and who follow your back will appear in the viewer’s “recommended for you”. I say this because I became aware of the memes about Maddie when this happened last year, and when I’d respond to such comments from guys on her posts basically saying they were being weird, they’d reply to me with something as violently misogynistic as their comments towards Maddie, and then when I’d reply @ing their “recommended for you” accounts (usually people who seemed to be their friends or family), they’d immediately get freaked out and block me. These men are all embarrassing cowards who on top of it all, don’t even know to use an alt account.
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u/williamfbuckwheat 28d ago
It's been like this since forever but has clearly been weaponized now that anyone can be so easily blackmailed, harassed and exploited thanks to smartphones.
You would hear about these things 20-25 years ago but it would typically be limited to rumors and innuendo which never spread across the country like this, let alone a college campus usually, because there were no HD videos or what not readily available to share. No wonder Gen Z has apparently given up on partying compared to prior generations when the consequences can be so dire, even if they've been filmed without their consent and sexually assaulted.
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u/HeavyHighway6433 28d ago
The same site that gave previously banned nazi and white supremacy profiles a second chance and supports a child porn making AI model is going to do this...
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u/Endles5Earth 28d ago
Dude X doesn’t even take down CSAM this isn’t even on their radar is problematic
Anyone who still uses that platform is trash imo
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u/Aeroncastle 28d ago
Lmao, twitter will sell you AI nudes of them and promote it, you have absolutely no experience with it if you think otherwise
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u/williamfbuckwheat 28d ago
X is the type of place that would ban people for criticizing the perpetrators of a crime like this or the victims themselves before doing anything close to sanctioning the people actually involved. You have to keep in mind that the owner of X is all in favor of allowing AI generated CSAM content on Grok so they certainly aren't going to be calling out accused criminals in these types of situations unless they're legally compelled to do so.
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u/Maeng_Doom 28d ago
Frat culture has always been Epstein Culture at it's core.
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u/ALegendInHisOwnMind 28d ago
Crazy that this is what students and even grown adults are doing to these women. I hope I raise my kids better than that
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u/MilfordSparrow 28d ago
This story is a modern version of the Jodie Foster 1988 movie “The Accused” which was based on a true story
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u/OliveBug2420 28d ago
I was thinking the same thing. Unable to get justice from the perpetrators so instead going after the enablers.
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u/mosi_moose 27d ago
Jacob Gomberg is now at Indiana -
I wonder how Mark Cuban feels about this creep representing IU?
https://x.com/mcuban
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u/mittenthemagnificent 28d ago
We desperately need to both prosecute people who do this stuff, and we need to teach men and women exactly what rape looks like in these circumstances. This young woman doesn’t remember these events, which means she was black-out drunk, so too intoxicated to consent. While there is always some nuance about two people alone in a room who have both been drinking to a point where neither can really consent to anything, that was clearly not the situation here. She was raped, and these people are committing so many crimes by posting this. I hope she wins.
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u/HumongousBelly 28d ago
Paywalled. I hope she will win her fight against those assholes!
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u/slowtreme 28d ago
I didnt get a paywall. but here's the first 10000 char
A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work
Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of nonconsensual sex and intimate image abuse.
I
On the afternoon of Sunday, November 2, 2025, Maddie Kowalski stopped by a house in Gainesville to drop off a present. The University of Florida sophomore had traveled to Japan that summer, where she’d picked up an action figure from the manga One Piece as a gift.
Students referred to this building near the main campus, which has long been associated with the UF chapter of the frat Phi Delta Theta, as “Fort.” A brick multifamily colonial-style house, it was a typical frat-boy residence with worn hardwood floors, exposed cables, and “THIS IS FORT” spray-painted in UF’s orange and blue colors on the fence lining the perimeter. Phi Delta Theta didn’t have a great reputation on campus; at the time, they were being investigated for accusations of hazing. But the boys who lived there were Kowalski’s best friends: “It was a safe space, I thought.”
A few hours later, Kowalski, then 19, was at an apartment drinking when a friend told her something that would alter the trajectory of her life: Did she know that a nude image of her was circulating at FSU, a university a few hours away?
Kowalski would later learn that the image was making the rounds on Snapchat, and people were talking about it on the anonymous campus social network YikYak. When she opened the app, “that’s when I started crashing out,” she says. As Kowalski scrolled, she saw what appeared to be hundreds of messages about a “DZ” girl. (She was in the sorority Delta Zeta.) They were now referring to not just an image, but a video. Some were joking about masturbating to it.
The situation was about to get worse. Around 6 that night, an anonymous account on X with the handle u/SteveCumfull posted the video, saying: “Meet Maddie Kowalski, queen of Delta Zeta.” Kowalski had no idea who the poster was, but she immediately identified the setting in one shot as Fort. In the video, the floor is dirty, with debris strewn everywhere. She’s lying on the ground naked, her eyes half-closed, touching herself while flanked by a group of men in shorts. While their faces weren’t visible, they appeared to be some of the same guys she’d been hanging out with just a few hours prior, she realized with a sinking feeling in her gut. In another shot, from a different night and at a different location, she is being penetrated by two men.
The video that ended up going viral on X was a compilation of three different clips: one, mentioned above, that was taken at Fort earlier that fall, and two that were recorded during a separate sexual encounter with two strangers. Kowalski says she met the latter in October, not long before the video went viral, when she was walking home after a night out drinking. She was heavily intoxicated and only remembers “parts of” what happened: “I didn’t recognize myself at all.” She says she did not consent to being filmed, let alone have that content shared publicly.
What had been a piece of salacious on-campus gossip, transmitted via anonymous social media and group texts, was now a national story. X removed the post containing the video, but late the following day, u/SteveCumfull posted it again. Then they posted a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token they’d bought with Kowalski’s name on it, with a market cap of $11,400. “Put your children’s college savings into this,” they tweeted. u/SteveCumfull could have been anyone: a close friend, a neighbor, a mutual with an axe to grind. Whoever they were, they now appeared to be profiting from the worst moment of Kowalski’s life.
Over the next 24 hours, Kowalski sat paralyzed on her couch as anonymous people on the internet endlessly harassed her; they posted her old photos, her dad’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. They called and texted her parents all through the night, saying things like, “I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her”; one anonymous man told Kowalski’s father he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV while playing the call live on Spaces, X’s live chat feature. Another posted on X placing bets on whether, by the end of the coming week, she’d start an OnlyFans or kill herself.
The burnerverse has harassed Kowalski and her family for nearly a year, sometimes encouraging her to commit suicide.
Kowalski called her best friend, Lexie Blake, who was then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. She “wasn’t even really saying words,” Blake recounts. “She was just sobbing, hysterical.” When Kowalski’s father showed up at her apartment, she was too humiliated to face him. She tried to jump out of her fifth-floor window.
By Monday afternoon, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag. Content about her—much of it showing her incapacitated, naked, and engaging in sex acts—had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.
Kowalski had heard about this happening to other college girls before; one of them, a University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) student named Mary Kate Cornett, had been doxed in the same way nine months prior. These campaigns were the work of the burnerverse (or “beev,” or “BV”), a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X, mostly operated by students and alumni, with the primary purpose of discussing college sports.
But Kowalski was learning in real time that, outside of talking shit about athletes and posting photos of crushed red Solo cups, this faceless corner of the internet has another mission: destroying the lives of young women.
II
Kowalski is tall and slender, with blue eyes and natural red roots that peek out of her dyed hair, which is sometimes brown and sometimes blonde—her “Neapolitan thing.” Like most 20-year-olds, she’s effortlessly deadpan, gushing about the TV show Dance Moms and skewering Miami club culture (“nobody there has a job … and it’s like, I’m not willing to talk to old men for a Birkin.”)
But in many ways, she seems younger than 20 when I visit her family’s house, located in a Florida suburb where preternaturally tanned kids drive golf carts on the sidewalks. She sits on the couch next to her family’s 12-year-old dog Bailey, her knees drawn up to her chest under a pink Lilly Pulitzer blanket. Often, she deflects when the conversation veers toward what happened last November, scrolling through her phone or abruptly commenting on her false lashes, or her spray tan, or her dog’s farts.
“If I’m fidgeting or looking at my phone, it’s because this whole thing obviously makes me uncomfortable to talk about,” she says, speaking to a mainstream news outlet for the first time. “There’s a lot of emotions underneath the surface. But I am trying not to be upset.”
Her hesitation is understandable: The women targeted by the burnerverse were private citizens before their names, rumors, explicit images, or videos went viral. WIRED has identified 10 women who have been doxed by the burnerverse, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms. Sometimes, the content has even made national news, with aggregation websites like TheSportsGrail or Barstool Sports employees amplifying the victim’s humiliation.
Communities of burner accounts crop up around most large schools with prominent sports teams. Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. Kowalski’s video went viral within the SEC burnerverse before spreading nationally.
Like most online communities, the SEC burnerverse has its own vernacular, consisting of allusions to frat boy culture. The men’s designer Peter Millar, known for his preppy collared shirts and chinos, is often referenced; as are Zyn, various SEC football coaches, “bouse” and “touse” (shorthand for a “top” or “bottom”), and “bag” (cocaine). Some take advantage of their anonymity to post racist, homophobic, and antisemitic comments.
Kowalski quit her part-time gig as a bottle girl and server after the burnerverse harassed her employer. Her main source of income is now TikTok Live, where she “battles”—essentially, competes for tips—with other creators.
The ecosystem is sprawling and diverse. Many, if not most, sports burner accounts are fairly innocuous, congregating in X Spaces or group DMs to post memes about new recruits or competing teams. Some will even try to rein in the unrulier factions by denouncing them, arguing that they’re a poor representation of the team’s fandom, says Owen McCarthy, a recent graduate of Michigan State University who reported on MSU’s burnerverse. “To a certain extent there’s an awareness that it might behoove them to create a positive online environment” for the school, he says.
Like most online communities, burners adhere to a hierarchy, with some accounts amassing more clout based on their follower count or a particularly viral tweet. The men’s ages range widely. One burner fan account for an East Coast university team tells WIRED that in his group DM of around 200 people, there are members as young as 15 and as old as their mid-forties. There’s also some level of engagement between the burners and college athletics departments: Users often tag coaches or athletes to try to get their attention, and sometimes the more influential accounts will instruct people to “comment on potential recruits’ online stuff and tell them how great [the school] is,” the burner says.
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u/Regendorf 28d ago edited 28d ago
What the fuck. It was already horrible sharing revenge porn and what seems to be an actual rape video, but they really were fucking harrasing her family and making bets on wether she would kill herself or not? Holy shit
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u/DigNitty 28d ago
Imagine feeling safe around friends and getting drunk and having comradery with them. Only to find out they drugged you and timed it so you wouldn’t know they raped you, kept themselves anonymous, and then publicized the video, and then belittled you for it. Not just one guy either. Multiple, in agreement, working together.
Profoundly despicable.
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u/sump_daddy 28d ago
dont forget
"Her main source of income is now TikTok Live, where she “battles”—essentially, competes for tips—with other creators."
forced to basically perform for the online world that victimized her, just to make a living to survive
i know we say this a lot lately, but this is true Running Man dystopia shit
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u/Chundlethegrat 28d ago edited 28d ago
To be fair, she lives with her family in a wealthy Florida suburb.
That is how they are able to pursue this legally and hire her a crisis management team.
She does not need to rely on the income from this to live, I gather this is something she just likes to do, which is fine.
I don't know why the person who posted that excerpt took this out.
“Her primary source of income is TikTok Live, where she “battles”—essentially, competes for tips—with creators, including livestreams with Clavicular. (They have mutual acquaintances, but she says she only started hanging out with him because she had a crush on his cameraman.) She has around 42,000 followers. Prior to getting doxed, Kowalski harbored ambitions of moving to New York or LA to become an actor; she fantasized about graduating and landing a role on a show, or even winning an Oscar. ”
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u/GamersReisUp 28d ago
And they bragged about hopefully ruining her job prospects to the point where she would be forced to resort to OnlyFans/sex work to survive, which is something I've seen come up a lot in hate mobs against whatever Woman Internet Villain of the Day.
I don't think there's any getting through to someone who has embraced that level of utter sadism, and there are a lot of people who feel very comfortable saying it
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u/HumongousBelly 28d ago
Fuck. That is even worse than I imagined. Damn. I hope she catches all of them
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u/Lucky_Mongoose_4834 28d ago
Holy shit. That’s maybe the worst thing I’ve ever read. This poor girl. The parent in me is enraged.
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u/PrestigiousSeat76 28d ago
The men who participate in this shit should be strung up by their tiny fucking ballsacks.
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u/outer--monologue 27d ago
Definitely one of those articles I had to click, because I have no fucking clue what the headline is supposed to mean at all. I'm getting too old. The world is ceasing to make sense, even after reading the article.
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u/cruthkaye 27d ago
I went to her instagram to watch her video talking about it. I felt physically ill reading some of the comments she got. I genuinely could not believe what I was reading. We see people say horrible shit all the time anonymously, but here were all these men, using their REAL names, saying vile things with no shame or second thought.
That woman has been put through hell and back; I can’t believe how strong she is. I don’t know if I could’ve survived such evil.
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u/Ok-Car2569 28d ago
Isn't this exactly how barstool sports got big?
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u/soofs 28d ago
I don’t recall barstool but TFM was big for a while with a huge emphasis on rush boob posts
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u/HalfEatenBanana 28d ago
I mean in fairness, those posts and the video of this girl aren’t even close to the same.
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u/Electronic_Film_2837 28d ago
Yeah stuff like this, videos of college students doing dumb things while drunk, and posting pictures of college girls.
They moved away from it in recent years and deleted many posts
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u/realhumanthoughts 28d ago
A woman was drugged, raped and filmed, and it was publicslly was distributed. They know it happened at this known frat... Why can't they go in and make arrests?!?!
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u/Late-Boysenberry1471 28d ago
Other than jail, they should be barred from using computers, cell phones, or other connected devices for their entire lives. I guarantee you that would hit harder than anything else over the long run. I get this might be unrealistic but lets make them a test case.
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u/Hic_Mos_Noster 27d ago
Why the hell is the “from” email address blurred out in this article?
Her life was turned upside down by a bunch of clowns on the internet, largely because her identity was revealed in connection with these images. But the asshat who emailed her saying she should kill herself on social media gets to remain anonymous?
Do better, [u/wired](u/wired)[magazine](u/wired)
(Edit: Sorry u/wired - I tagged the wrong user originally)
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u/demoame 28d ago
It’s not a game or a joke when you dox a young lady the way they have, it saddens to boys would go so low. I wish all the luck in suits and also she will come on top this
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u/pitapocket93 28d ago
This article feels too... I don't know what the word is-are they fetishizing it? The descriptions are unnecessary
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u/BreckBenis 28d ago
I know exactly what you mean and I feel this way about a lot of articles detailing sexual violence against women and children. Quite sinister honestly, whatever gets the clicks and attention…
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u/Slamantha3121 28d ago
Ughh, I dropped out of UF. What a gross place. That poor girl.
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u/nutellaellaeh 27d ago
The frat involved still trying to recruit https://www.instagram.com/phideltuf?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
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u/throw7661 28d ago
A lot of what took place doesn't make sense to me....but the thing that I understand the least is the weird love/hate relationship so many people have with sex and sexual content.
I like porn. And I like women who (willingly) have sex.
What is the appeal of harassing someone whose nudes or sex tape is available online?
Best case, they voluntarily participated and shared. Worst case, they are victims.
But why would you want to talk to her Dad? I genuinely don't understand it.
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u/Apocalypse_Knight 28d ago
I think it’s simply creeps getting off on the humiliation of her. It’s the same crap when a porn star has a kid then suddenly there are fake accounts saying how much they regret doing porn etc. it’s a humiliation ritual
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u/Skyhighcats 28d ago
Men like to punish women for being sexually active whether it’s consensual or not.
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u/No_Ice4001 28d ago
I get that this is a serious situation but the word burnerverse makes this sound like a joke
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u/nailbunny2000 27d ago
Ive never heard of the "burnerverse", is that just a group of people with throw away accounts, or is it referencing something else?
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u/ThorOdinSon245 28d ago
If this ever happened to my daughter I’d be in jail for multiple commitments of a crime.
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u/things_U_choose_2_b 28d ago
Fuck, that was a rough read. Poor lass. I bet she probably doesn't want my pity, but my heart goes out to her.
Scumbag motherfuckers, I hope they experience karma in the end.
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u/Mother_Airline_6276 28d ago
I hope the law gets these fools. Sad that I also have to hope that they actually punish them.
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u/asvspilot 27d ago
To the wealthy we are just cattle, another disposable item. The French had some great ideas about the rich.
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u/red5 28d ago
This was an awful read.
Is there a reason Wired didn’t use the word rape? They used non-consensual a lot, but it’s clear this woman was raped and then the video of that was posted and shared. Tiptoeing around that word was an odd choice.
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u/KobeBean 28d ago
Probably legal since I don’t believe any of the fraternity members were even charged. WIRED would dragged into court.
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u/MongolianBBQ 28d ago
Kamran Ahmed, Brendan Pitfield, Jacob Gomberg. May their future potential employees find them on this story.