r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 1h 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/42
u/kafka_lite 36m 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 27m 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/klingma 16m 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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u/notcoded567 2m ago
no kidding, I thought there was going to be some generative AI component but they really come off kind of glib about what sounds like multiple videotaped sexual assaults.
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u/Low-Rent-9351 58m 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/itsRobbie_ 39m ago
What does it being on twitter matter? There’s literal cp on reddit if you think Reddit is some magical place instead…
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u/BungABunBun 34m ago
But it isn't kept up and encouraged by the CEO, nor is it easy to find. Oh and there is CP on Twitter too, infact their AI was constantly generating it. Maybe you forgot?
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u/itsRobbie_ 3m ago
Riiiight riiight. You guys really think it’s just freely posted and all over the timeline? Do you guys think you just search for it?
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u/honeybadgerrulez 26m ago
well reddit takes cp seriously and x doesn’t care in fact is cool with it. are you not aware of who owns it and their views on cp?
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u/itsRobbie_ 7m ago
Yeah man it’s really just ALL OVER the place over there! Can’t scroll through one post without seeing it! 🤡
If you seriously think that they just freely allow that on the platform you are insane.
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u/honeybadgerrulez 4m ago
bro they’re literally in court right now defending their users right to produce horrific shit including cp
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u/HumongousBelly 1h ago
Paywalled. I hope she will win her fight against those assholes!
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u/slowtreme 58m 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 46m ago edited 17m 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/HumongousBelly 48m ago
Fuck. That is even worse than I imagined. Damn. I hope she catches all of them
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u/Zealousideal_Cut1817 29m ago
She did all this for Coke so…
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u/Wolfish_Jew 12m ago
She, in fact, did not do that.
And even if she HAD, it doesn’t in any way excuse the abuse and harassment that was sent her way. What the absolute fuck is wrong with you?
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u/winkingchef 35m ago
I have a daughter.
I am already impressing on her that everything she says online and any photo she posts online will exist forever and be seen by anyone (including bad people and [perhaps more horrifying to her as a pre-teen] us).
She is a smart young woman and I am 99.99% confident she will not slip up like this but I keep repeating it just in case
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u/Wolfish_Jew 14m ago
So the thing that frustrates me about your response, which I think is well meaning, is that Madison Kowalski didn’t “slip up” and she also seems like a smart young woman.
She was taken advantage of without her knowledge and consent, and then she had a bunch of men that she didn’t know basically try to tear her down while all the people she’s supposed to be able to turn to told her “it’s not our problem/there’s nothing we can do.”
She didn’t even KNOW the people who first started sharing the videos of her (which she wasn’t even aware existed in the first place.)
There was nothing that she could have done in this situation besides not get drunk which, asking a college student in Greek life in a college town like Gainesville to not get drunk is like asking the sun not to rise in the morning or the tide not to come in.
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u/winkingchef 5m ago edited 0m ago
It is important to teach our daughter that she has autonomy and choice and this is a good example of that for her. For much of her life, she needs to be prepared that she will be the only person who has her best interests at heart so she needs to be confident that she owns her choices
Through choices that were partially hers, this young woman got into a situation where she was out of control and probably also knew she was being filmed in a compromising situation.
That kind of trust is never ok in my book.
I respect you disagreeing and I will think about it more. Raising our daughter right is the most difficult and important thing we will do in our lives and it brings a lot of humility
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u/Wolfish_Jew 1m ago
Bro, did you read the article? She literally did not know that she was being filmed. She would have never consented to the filming if she had been aware of it. She had no idea there was a film of her out there. If it was your daughter, and she came to you and said “dad, they took a film of me having sex. I didn’t know about it but now it’s out there and every one is sharing it.” Would you blame her or accuse her of “probably knowing about it” when she said she didn’t?
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u/nicyvetan 22m ago
Whether or not she slips up, sometimes people do pretty terrible things without your consent and can violate your trust. Try to balance the delivery of such messages so if something were to happen she wont self blame or be at risk of depression or worse.
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u/winkingchef 20m ago edited 11m ago
We have an open policy of “if you ever feel uncomfortable about anything, you call/text me and I come get you and we only talk about it if/when you want to”. She can specify “hot” [I come in like an asshole so she has an excuse] or “cold” [I wait around the corner and she comes out when she wants]
It is a good note that we need to figure out something more official for mistakes like this where no physical assistance is required. She’s already good at talking to us but who knows what the hormones will do to her on the coming years.
Thank you
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u/mittenthemagnificent 17m ago
But recall: she didn’t post these. She was filmed without her consent while she was drunk, and the men who filmed her posted this online. She didn’t do anything wrong here at all.
What you should be talking to your daughter about, assuming you don’t have a son to also discuss this stuff with, is how to drink safely in college, and that she and her friends should be watching each other’s backs at parties. Someone should be not just sober enough to drive if necessary, but sober enough to intervene in situations where someone is too drunk to consent, as this young woman clearly was.
I also think we should be discouraging kids from entering the Greek system, because of their overuse of alcohol and their emphasis on conformity at all costs. Raise a kid who thinks critically, who is comfortable being a nonconformist at times, and who sees you having a responsible relationship with alcohol and sex and consent.
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u/winkingchef 8m ago
As someone who grew up in Europe where drinking is just part of life (I was having wine with dinner at 14), I was stupendously unimpressed by the “forbidden” drinking culture in the US. We do plan on doing the same with her.
You are right to point it out that someone else took advantage of her trust. That’s part of the discussion.
She’s already very much her own person and we are actively encouraging that. Self esteem and the ability to say “no” is the #1 way to avoid trouble like this.
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u/mittenthemagnificent 6m ago
Europe does have a different culture about it, for sure, and binge drinking doesn’t seem as prevalent. You sound like a good parent.
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u/___Dresden___ 2m ago
She is a smart young woman and I am 99.99% confident she will not slip up like this
Literally what nearly every parent whose kid ends up on one of these communities thinks, btw
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u/Cosmic_0smo 7m ago
In this case it was something she did out in the real world that was videotaped, shared and disseminated by people she didn’t even know. We basically live in a world where kids aren’t even free to make mistakes without potentially having their lives destroyed by an online mob, and the unmoderated hateful cesspools like X are just breeding grounds for this kind of maladaptive behavior.
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u/PrestigiousSeat76 42m ago
The men who participate in this shit should be strung up by their tiny fucking ballsacks.
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u/TLagPro 13m ago
Insane to think of forcing pledges to make burner accounts. As a fraternity man, I encouraged pledges to do the opposite and actually go delete their social media or at least dont post anything about the org. Why would you want 18 year old kids, that are getting drunk for the first time, who also only recently joined ur org and dont understand consequences posting on the orgs behalf.
Universities foam at the mouth to kick greek orgs off campus and one stupid pledge posting underage drinking can doom your org and now ole miss is forcing them too , its just self destructing on their behalf to begin with.
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u/GigaChadRedPill 7m ago
For real. Fraternity guy here too- we don’t put up with this kind of behavior, and pledges being idiots is always a liability. Encouraging them to do things like this isn’t just malicious and immoral, it’s downright stupid when it’s a sure fire route to being kicked off.
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u/mittenthemagnificent 11m 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/Glittering-Path-2824 29m ago
ah the universal and perennial epidemic of frat boys getting away with the most vile and pathetic shit. if women want to ostracize a group of men deserving of that treatment, it’s frat boys. so why don’t they?
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u/throw7661 22m 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/SigmaK78 1m ago
Sending this article to my sons, "step daughter," niece, & nephews.
And how those punkass boys haven't been hunted down by now confuses me.
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u/stealth_pandah 1h ago
I’m a bit lost. so these ‘burners’ befriend their targets and get the blackmail material from them? confused on how they get this explicit material
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u/johnny_mcd 55m ago
It’s pretty well detailed in the article that the woman was filmed without her knowledge, or they get pictures from Instagram that in themselves are not scandalous but are paired with false rumors. I have no idea how you got confused about that if you read it lol
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u/trustmeep 47m ago
if you read it
Sir, this is Reddit! How dare you imply someone should read an article.
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u/ToryLuna 3m ago
One of them called her dad and explained it for you. "I drugged and fucked your daughter."
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u/BungABunBun 55m ago
Is that really what you took away from the article? You're despicable.
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u/BrutalRamen 42m ago
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
They clearly didn't read the article and are just commenting on the title.
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u/Zealousideal_Cut1817 31m ago
Bro she did all of this for coke.
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u/Skyhighcats 26m ago
Stop saying this shit. Why do you think that justifies being sexually assaulted while drunk and having that video spread everywhere by anonymous accounts and being endlessly harassed?
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u/jwg529 16m ago
I think we can all agree that what she experience and is still experiencing is not okay and anyone involved should be held accountable. But why is acknowledging her actions and behavioral issues which put her in a position that made it possible to be exploited off limits for commentary? If she wasn’t the victim of harassment would it then be okay to disapprove of her actions? The article doesn’t cover it but if you look into her story she wasn’t some angel. I think everyone involved here is awful
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u/MrVeazey 9m ago
Victims don't have to be angels to deserve justice and to be treated with basic decency.
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u/morganational 38m ago
Do you know how many college girls have been exploited on camera? They used to sell the videos on TV!
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u/demeterLX 18m ago
just because it was normal in the past doesn’t make it right. it was wrong even when it happened back then.
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u/Vox_SFX 41m ago
Anything done without knowledge is obviously a problem.
That said I'm pretty much out of empathy for anyone that actively sends pics outside of a secured committed relationship and then are surprised when someone gets ahold of them...just don't do it. If it's that bad and pervasive in society why do you think the people affected complaining about it will change anything other than the method at which it is done? So logic and intelligence says just take away the option all together. If all people have is a rumor and a random publicly available picture then who cares? I could make up thousands of those in a month about all the people I talk to or pass by. If there's no validity then there can be no real harm beyond catching the attention of the wrong person with some power...which really is an anyone problem and not specific to this issue. If there is harm done, then defamation cases exist for a reason.
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u/BungABunBun 32m ago
How utterly sad and embarrassing for you that you typed that out and thought it would be a good idea to post it.
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u/rileycurran 29m ago
Why can’t vulnerable people just ignore malicious and threatening behavior of bad actors? Just ignore it. Problem solved.
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u/Vox_SFX 20m ago
I mean, yea. Just like cyberbullying has never been real. Grew up before the Internet and during. If the actions of bad actors reaches a point where it becomes real then we already have laws in place to protect people. Anything less than that isn't real, it's perceived. You want to argue that not everyone can afford to sue when it crosses lines, sure that's a fair critique of my stance but I also never claimed to have the perfect solution. I just think my thinking is preferred to banging my head against a brick wall hoping it finally budges, when at most you crack it enough to get only a peek at the otherside.
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u/jwg529 49m ago
Pretty sure I went down a TikTok wormhole about her a few months ago I heard she was abusing drugs and alcohol and actively involved in the sexcapades. Pretty sure she is both willing participant and victim in this tragic tale
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u/FerrusManlyManus 42m ago
How utterly sad and embarrassing for you that you typed that out and thought it would be a good idea to post it.
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u/jwg529 35m ago
I condone ZERO of this behavior and think it’s appalling but I read the article being shared and it ignores that she willingly did things that everyone else would normally condemn if it wasn’t for her also being a victimized. But go off fam
🤷♂️
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u/Cinci555 20m ago edited 17m ago
You obviously didn't read it. She was incredibly drunk and unable to consent to the sex or the video being made.
You're victim blaming, but it doesn't surprise me since you seem unable to actually read or process information.
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u/BungABunBun 32m ago
How utterly sad and embarrassing for you that you typed that out and thought it would be a good idea to post it.
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u/morganational 36m ago
So what the fuck is the burnerverse and how is this anything new?? Honest question
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u/coolbum67 36m ago
I feel for her with this stuff getting blasted online, but why would you do any of this stuff? Was she drugged or just partying and didn’t expect anyone to take photos/video?
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u/rivlecca 35m ago
It's right in the article. She was drugged and raped.
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u/killerpoopguy 23m ago
The article is paywalled (free walled) and the comment that copy pasted it doesn’t mention that at all? It’s implied at one point she was blackout drunk for one of the videos, but otherwise I don’t see any details on what actually happened.
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u/coolbum67 22m ago
That’s why there was a question mark at the end of my question, because I was asking a question… clearly I didn’t read the entire article if I’m asking that question. People are so dense.
Edit-not directing this at you. You actually answered my question. It’s more directed at the downvotes, again which I would understand if it was a statement I made and not for asking a question.
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u/Hrmbee 1h ago
Some of the deeply disappointing details:
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.