Content warning: This piece includes descriptions of nonconsensual sex and intimate image abuse.
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 @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, @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. @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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
For many of these accounts, the ultimate objective is going viral, through whatever means necessary. “They want to see something go viral that they created, and they say things like, ‘The burnerverse has made it big time,’” one person with a burner account, who asked not to be identified, tells WIRED. “They take pride in that in a twisted way. Getting their stuff on Barstool and ESPN is the goal.”
Sometimes, this involves scouring their school’s incoming students’ Instagrams and posting photos of young women for the purpose of mocking or humiliating them. But the most surefire way to go viral is to dox stereotypically attractive young women like Kowalski—even better if they’ve transgressed sexual norms in some way. There’s a sense that the health and vibrancy of the community is contingent on the sexual humiliation of women. “Feels like the beev is slowly dying,” one tweet from this past May reads. “We need another college girl to get exposed for a revival.” Another: “Feels like a national holiday every time a new whore gets exposed on the BV.”
The most well-known case is Mary Kate Cornett, a then 18-year-old University of Mississippi student who went viral in February 2025, after an X user with the handle @thekendallroy tweeted, “Anyone else hearing rumblings of this Ole Miss girl banging her boyfriend’s Dad?” The rumor was false, but @thekendallroy’s post exploded, racking up 313,000 views in just under two days. It didn’t take long for other burners to post her full name.
Prior to being doxed, Cornett tells WIRED she was largely unaware of the burnerverse. “It’s like they have this blueprint for what to do every time they decide to destroy a girl’s life,” she says. “That excites them, for some odd reason.” Cornett became a top trending topic on X, thanks to the story being boosted by former NFL player Antonio Brown and the prominent ESPN talking head Pat McAfee, a former Barstool personality. McAfee repeated the rumor on a special taping of his talk show—without naming Cornett, though he did name her sorority—and then posted that clip to his YouTube channel, which has nearly 3 million followers.
Four months after spreading the false rumor on his show, McAfee apologized and deleted a tweet featuring the clip of him talking about it; the video itself, however, is still up on his YouTube channel. (Neither Barstool nor McAfee responded to a request for comment, and ESPN declined.) But the damage had been done: Cornett was barraged by thousands of harassing texts, calls, and voicemails; a SWAT team was even sent to her mother’s house the day after McAfee’s show. She has spent the past year and a half working with lawyers and forensic experts to identify burner accounts. “There’s very little accountability,” says Cornett’s mother, Leslie. “You can lie online and do whatever you want. Then your life moves on, and [the girls’ lives] stop.”
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The BV “whoreverse,” as some burner accounts call it, started to coalesce in June 2024, when an account named Arthur Cacciatore posted the name of an undergrad at a large Southern state school, who was falsely rumored to have slept “with like 35% of the SEC.” The girl’s name became a trending topic on X, with Barstool Sports writer Jack Mac amplifying it to his 146,000 followers; the post got 815,000 views. (Due to the traumatizing nature of the burnerverse’s campaigns against these women, WIRED is withholding their names and altering details to protect their anonymity, unless they’ve gone public with their experiences, like Cornett and Kowalski.)
From there, the burnerverse started systemically seeking out young, attractive college women to shame on a national stage. These women attend colleges across the country, ranging from the Big 10 to the Atlantic Coast Conference; some have had pornographic images and videos of them posted without their consent, while others have gone viral simply for unverifiable rumors about their sex lives. Whoever the victim, whatever the details of the campaign, the treatment is relentless, and unsparing.
The burnerverse efforts are often highly organized, says Adam Ludwin, Kowalski’s attorney, who specializes in cyberharassment. “When you look at some of these cases, things escalate so much more rapidly than the other types of cases that I’ve dealt with,” he says. “The volume of views and reposts and comments—it’s not the kind of thing that would happen in such a short time without some level of coordination.”
In Kowalski’s case, coordination appears to have taken place on X Spaces, the platform’s live audio-based conversation feature. One of the earliest X posts about her, for instance, features a screengrab from one such Space: “Kowalski Analysis” (a reference to a character from the 2014 film Penguins of Madagascar). Though no public recordings exist, a screengrab shows that at one point, more than 220 X users were participating in a discussion of Kowalski’s nonconsensual intimate images (NCII) under the veil of anonymity.
It doesn’t help that X, the burnerverse’s platform of choice, is famously subject to little moderation. Since Elon Musk acquired the social network in 2022, its algorithm has regularly boosted racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic content, making it the ideal petri dish for a coordinated harassment campaign. On X, it’s extremely easy for defamatory or outright illegal content, such as Kowalski’s NCII, to spread far and wide before someone can issue a complaint or file a takedown request. “The platforms tend to be pretty hands-off,” says Ludwin. “They’re also financially incentivized by followers, by views, by clicks … they’re making money off this.” (X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)
Most burnerverse victims remain silent following their harassment, hoping for the uproar to blow over. The majority did not respond to requests for an interview, or declined to go on the record. They’ve spent thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, on legal fees, therapy, and reputation management firms. “We are unfortunately navigating something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” one father of a victim tells me anonymously. “I just don’t think she’s ready at this time.”
Even months or years after they go viral, the victim’s NCII are still widely available on leaked amateur porn sites; their names, linked to graphic and defamatory rumors, are eminently googleable, their faces edited over those of dead presidents to make memes with names like “Mount Rushwhore.” Cornett says the burnerverse continues to post about her on a near-daily basis, taking screenshots of her Instagram posts and making memes. Now 20 and in her junior year, she’s still hounded whenever she goes out on campus, and she lives in fear of someone taking a photo of her and posting it online. “It’s a terrible feeling to never not feel like you’re being watched or observed or talked about,” she says. “I read every single post, every single comment, every hashtag. It consumes my whole life.”
Maddie Kowalski has always felt like an outsider. She was adopted at birth and her family moved around a lot; when she was 7, her father was diagnosed with stage-four cancer, which caused her to act out in school. “There was a lot going on at home, and I didn’t have a lot of friends,” she says. “I would play alone during recess. I was definitely a weird kid.”
At the start of middle school, Kowalski’s family relocated to an affluent Floridian suburb. She disliked it almost immediately: “All the kids are beach kids whose parents are old money,” she says. “And they think you’re poor if you don’t live in a $20 million house.”
After Covid, she became heavily involved with theater, appearing in her high school’s productions of Kiss Me, Kate and High School Musical. But she struggled to adjust socially. “She was definitely sheltered,” Blake says. “She didn’t drink or go out very much, and she’d get grounded if she had a drink. She was very straight-laced, and that was probably seen as a little weird or awkward at the time.”
Kowalski worshipped the cool older girls at her school with their “little Pinteresty Instagrams,” most of whom ended up in Greek life at UF. When it came time to apply to college, UF was one of her top choices. “I was like, ‘I wanna join a sorority and wear a cute blue and orange outfit.’”
Like most SEC schools, UF has a strong focus on Greek life: Frats and sororities are the hubs of campus culture, with approximately 21 percent of the 41,000 undergraduate student population rushing. Kowalski loathed rush: She hated traipsing from house to house in high heels, her makeup sweating off in the Florida humidity. But she didn’t want to be like the “weird” kids who hunkered down in their dorm rooms or the library all day. She accepted a bid from the sorority Delta Zeta, which has a reputation for being “proper,” one student tells me; it’s a stereotypical SEC sorority, where members attend tailgates in cowboy boots and flouncy minidresses.
At first, Kowalski’s college experience was typical. She majored in theater, worked part-time as a server and bottle girl, and volunteered at a camp for kids whose parents had cancer. But Blake says Kowalski had a “strong need to fit in” and seemingly wanted to prove she wasn’t still a sheltered theater kid. “I think it was probably a little intimidating for her to go to college with so many people who’d gone to our high school and already had a preconceived notion of her,” she says.
Kowalski became deeply immersed in the party scene, going out to bars every night and sometimes drinking heavily. The bar-hopping took a tremendous toll on her mental health; her grades started plummeting, prompting her to temporarily withdraw from classes in late October, shortly before the burnerverse targeted her. “I was so inebriated I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I barely remembered my own birthday,” she says. Of that particular period of her life: “I was making bad decisions. And I trusted the wrong people.”
For Kowalski, the weeks following the leak were hell. Students shouted slurs as she walked to class; one even threw an egg at her. Kowalski says many of her Delta Zeta sisters blocked or unfollowed her on social media. She alleges that the sorority held a chapter meeting where they discussed how the incident would reflect on the organization—rather than talking about her welfare. (Delta Zeta did not respond to a request for comment.)
“A lot of people were sad for what happened, because it shouldn’t have been filmed and posted,” one UF student tells me. “But there’s obviously people who are blaming her and saying she was doing these things for drugs or that she was crazy.”
Almost immediately after the video leaked, Kowalski reported the harassment to campus police. They assured her they would launch an investigation, then handed it off to the Gainesville Police Department. She says UF administrators also promised to launch an investigation into how the content spread. According to Kowalski, though, they told her that unless the police filed charges, the administration couldn’t take any action against students.
A Title IX investigation was dropped after about a month because, she says UF told her, the video had technically been filmed off campus. UF assistant director of public affairs Blake Trauschke declined to comment on the Title IX investigation, except to say, “UF is committed to creating a sense of belonging and safety by fostering an environment that is safe, secure, and free from all forms of harassment.”
The Kowalskis say they have spent tens of thousands on reputation management and legal fees, hiring a lawyer almost immediately after the video was posted as well as a company to help scrub the illegal content from the internet. Kowalski’s mother, Mandy, says it was surprisingly difficult to find a lawyer to take on the case. “I think people assumed it was just a simple revenge porn case,” she says. “They didn’t understand the scope of it.” Over and over, she says, the family was told that going after the men behind the video’s spread would cost more time and money than it was worth.
There were also multiple accusations at hand, making it hard to focus. Should the family go after the men who had sex with a clearly intoxicated woman? Whoever shot the video? The people who’d shared it in private group chats? Or the burner accounts who made Kowalski’s humiliation a national news story? Real harm had been done to Kowalski, and her family, but identifying who was most culpable was nearly impossible.
Kowalski wasn’t thinking about legal ramifications at the time. To her, the implied message—from the burners, some school administrators, her sorority sisters—was clear: What happened to her was her problem, and her problem alone. The harassing phone calls to her parents, the on-campus bullying, the fact that she had been filmed having sex without her consent in the first place: No one was going to face the consequences but her.
“Nobody fucking cares,” she says, summarizing the past 10 months. “You can do literally whatever you want [even] if it’s illegal, except for literally kill someone. No one gives a fuck.”
By last December, Kowalski had officially withdrawn from the semester’s classes at the University of Florida and moved back in with her parents. Soon after, her hair started falling out. Mysterious rashes showed up all over her face. She started doing intensive outpatient therapy and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. “There’s only so much therapy can help,” she says. “Maybe it will, long-term. But not now.”
Nonetheless, Kowalski felt compelled to say something, against the advice of some in her family, who worried that a public statement would reinvigorate the harassment. “I just didn’t think it was fair,” she tells me. “Everyone else was making videos about me, and I couldn’t make one or say anything for myself.”
On December 19, she tied her newly dyed blonde hair back into a ponytail, took a deep breath, and decided to introduce herself on Instagram: “Hi, my name is Maddie Kowalski, and you may or may not know me personally, but you may have heard a little bit about me over the past month,” she said, staring directly into the camera.
Wearing a simple gray tee, small hoops, and a gold-plated bow-tie necklace, Kowalski explained what happened, how “several videos from two nights that I could barely remember had been posted on the internet for everyone to see.” She described in detail how she had not consented to the acts in the video, nor to them being filmed; how she and her parents had been relentlessly harassed; how she, in the span of just a few weeks, had felt her “whole world collapse.”
“These last few weeks have been the darkest and hardest moments of my life,” she said in the video, before directing fellow victims of NCII toward a website for legal resources. “But I’m still here, and that’s something that I’m really learning to be proud of.”
The video got tens of millions of views, as well as many positive comments from people expressing support and applauding Maddie for her courage. But her parents’ fears were also well founded: For every encouraging comment, there was one from a burner making crude jokes or propositioning her for sex. The backlash surprised Kowalski. “I’d said everything I wanted to say, and I thought I said it in a way that was appropriate,” she says. “But I still got so much hate.”
Who would want to ruin my life?
It was the main question Kowalski asked herself as she began to process what had happened to her. She had a vague understanding of how the video had circulated on campus among group texts and fraternity DMs. But she didn’t know who @SteveCumfull was, how they got the video, or why they would have publicly posted it on X.
Working with Ludwin, her attorney, Kowalski decided not to pursue charges against the men in the video. Relitigating the events would be retraumatizing. Instead, they wanted to identify the burners. The Gainesville police would eventually file a legal request to X for the subscriber information, IP records, and account information of not just @SteveCumfull but also a few other accounts that were early sharers of the video. (A representative for the Gainesville Police Department declined to comment, saying the case was still “open and active.”) For the burners, “there is a false sense of security when it comes to anonymity,” Ludwin tells me. “And one thing I want to do is reassure victims that just because [the burners] are hidden doesn’t mean we can’t find them.”
Kowalski had assumed that the burner accounts sharing her video were UF students—people she knew personally. From what she learned through police charging documents, she was half right. According to affidavits obtained by WIRED, the @SteveCumfull account was allegedly linked to a 19-year-old named Kamran Ahmed, a first-year UF student from Tampa who was a member of Theta Chi. Kowalski says she had never met Ahmed and had no idea who he was.
Per the police affidavits, the same went for another burner that had been among the first to post the video on X:
@arnie_grape16 was linked to UF freshman Brendan Pitfield, a former star high school soccer player from Atlanta and fellow Theta Chi. Police also identified a third person behind a burner: Jacob Gomberg, a junior from nearby Coral Springs. Gomberg was a relief pitcher for the UF Gators, a Division I baseball team, before transferring to UNLV and later Indiana University. Kowalski didn’t know them either.
It’s not clear how these men allegedly obtained the sexually explicit content, but there is evidence to suggest that two may have known each other. Kowalski’s father, who has been tirelessly collecting evidence, shares a screenshot of an interaction between two Instagram accounts that appear to be linked to both Pitfield and Ahmed, respectively. One commented “SC” (which Kowalski believes is short for Steve Cumfull”) on a November 3 post by the other. (In early September, Ahmed’s Instagram was briefly deleted; it has since been reinstated but is private.) Kowalski says she saw both Pitfield and Ahmed at a bar in the spring. Ahmed looked at her and laughed, Kowalski says, while Pitfield approached her and said: I’m a huge fan, can I get a picture with you?
In December, Kowalski emailed UF’s Office of Sorority and Fraternity Life to make sure they were aware that she was a victim in an ongoing criminal investigation and that it allegedly involved fraternity members. Their response referred her to the Office of Student Conduct, saying it did not “oversee the organizational or individual conduct processes” regarding fraternity members. The Offices of Student Conduct and Sorority and Fraternity Life did not respond to requests for comment.
Kowalski says most of the people involved in the video are still on campus. The spokesperson for Phi Delta Theta could not confirm if this includes any of its members, saying that due to university confidentiality policies surrounding Title IX investigations, it had “not been made aware of the names of any individuals ever affiliated with our organization who are accused of these heinous acts.”
Around the time that Kowalski’s video went viral, Phi Delta Theta was suspended until at least 2030 following the culmination of the hazing investigation. The UF chapter is being reconstituted with a new advisory board and will continue to operate independently of the university. According to one UF student, a huge sign in front of Fort reads “Rush Phi Delt.” On August 13, the frat posted on Instagram to promote Fall 2026 rush: “We’re back.”
When I first began talking to Kowalski in June 2026, she told me the Gainesville police investigation into the burnerverse accounts was on hiatus, as the officer assigned to the case was on leave. She had amassed theories about the identities behind @SteveCumfull and some of the other burners, but no charges had been filed. As such, Kowalski could not publicly comment on the status of the investigation.
“The people who did this to her are living a normal college life—they’re going out and posting and doing whatever they want,” Mandy tells me. “She’s having a really hard time with the idea that they are able to live their lives with no repercussions, while she’s judged for literally everything she does.”
In early August, however, I received a text from Kowalski: After nine months, the Gainesville police had charged Gomberg, Ahmed, and Pitfield with sexual cyber-harassment, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Additionally, Ahmed has been charged with a third-degree felony: sexually cyber-harassing for financial gain. Per a sworn complaint from the Gainesville Police Department, Ahmed and Pitfield used university IP addresses to access their burner accounts—an allegation that was maddening to Kowalski, as UF had told her they dropped the Title IX investigation because the video was shot off campus.
Kowalski has also brought civil lawsuits in the Northern District of Florida against all three men, alleging sexual cyber-harassment and asking for financial damages.
According to LinkedIn, as of September 3, both Ahmed and Pitfield were still students at the University of Florida. When asked whether they were in good standing despite the charges against them, Trauschke, the assistant director of public affairs for the University of Florida, declined to comment. “Any details regarding a student’s complaint or a student’s disciplinary process or record is protected information under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA),” he wrote.
Both Gomberg and Ahmed declined to comment through an attorney. Pitfield did not respond to repeated requests, but he filed a plea of not guilty to the misdemeanor charge last week. The LinkedIns of both Ahmed and Pitfield were deleted or edited after being contacted by WIRED. Before their accounts were altered, they listed themselves as current members of Theta Chi. And according to the Gainesville PD’s sworn complaint, as of last summer, Ahmed’s address was listed as that of the Theta Chi fraternity house.
When reached for comment, Theta Chi CEO Michael Mayer told WIRED that “the allegations made within the complaints describe abhorrent actions that run completely contrary to Theta Chi’s ideals,” referring to the charges as “reprehensible.” He added that Ahmed and Pitfield had been placed on “interim suspension” pending the results of an internal investigation.
Still, Kowalski says she’s terrified of seeing Ahmed and Pitfield on campus now that she’s back in Gainesville. “My parents are worried I’m just going to stay in my room all day and not leave,” she says. “But I like to be alone. I like lying down with a face mask on with the lights off, in my own space with the blinds closed. A lot of times in public, people come up to me, and it doesn’t really feel safe.”
But Kowalski is determined to make it work at UF and find a way to move on. She has “an ability to be sunshine in a room of thunderstorms and clouds and shitty people,” Blake says. “And every single person that said something, DM’d something, emailed something, participated in the video, shared the video, talked about the video, watched the video—every single one of them took advantage of her kindness and her ability to forgive.”
In the weeks leading up to her return to school, Kowalski mostly slept or scrolled on TikTok, posting the occasional video of herself unboxing Squishy Dumplings or belting “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a friend’s car; she trained her new puppy, a mini goldendoodle named Rosie. She doesn’t have a job, because she quit her part-time gig as a bottle girl and server after the burnerverse harassed her employer. “It’s hard enough for my friends who don’t have this on their record to get a job,” she says. “None of them can get hired at all right now. So how am I supposed to get one?”
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. “It would be cool if I had 2,000 followers as a result of doing TikTok dances or something like that,” she says. “But being known for this? This is not fun.”
She recently took a trip to Dublin with her family, and then went to London to celebrate her friend Blake’s birthday. While there, she saw Moulin Rouge and posted cute TikToks dancing in front of the Saltburn mansion. In London, Blake says she and Kowalski went to dinner at a restaurant with panoramic views of the city, and someone even recognized her there, interrupting them to take a photo. Another night, they met a cute guy at a bar who asked for her number and social media handle. She just gave him her first name, terrified he’d find out who she was and leak it.
“She has so much trauma that she can’t even have these normal experiences,” Blake says. “She can’t meet someone and not have her guard up.” Kowalski is plagued with panic attacks, and worries that she’s never going to have a partner or a family or a semblance of a normal existence. The burners “stole her life,” Blake says. “They stole her girlhood.”
In March, another girl was doxed by the burnerverse. We’ll call her Addison King. Like Kowalski, King was a student at a large university with a Division 1 football team; her name and identity went viral on X after a video purportedly showing her having sex in a bar bathroom started circulating.
The moment the video hit X, the burner accounts swung into action, reposting it, unearthing her old Instagram posts, commenting on her body, spreading rumors that she had cheated on a boyfriend back home. Kowalski saw it on X at 4 am. Her guts roiled as she lay in bed, scrolling through tweet after tweet. She found King’s Instagram and, even though it was private, DM’d her offering support. King DM’d her back, giving thanks.
Kowalski knew from her own experience what would come next: The men who’d doxed her had taken a victory lap on X Spaces, and she suspected they were doing the same thing to King. She logged on to X, joining an X Space where members of the burnerverse were plotting further ways to embarrass the young woman.
The 19-year-old sat in bed with her phone, listening to the disembodied voices casually discussing frat gossip and the Texas Rangers. “I was like, seriously? Get a life,” she says. Then the burners moved on to King. “Tell that bitch to hang from a tree,” one of them said. “Hang and dangle!”
Irate, Kowalski left the Space and turned on her camera—no makeup, her hair unbrushed. “This network of men that posted me … are doing this to more girls, just as they did to girls before me,” she says in the clip posted in late March, which now has over 271,000 likes. “And nobody seems to care.” Her fury at the people and institutions that had failed her—social media platforms, “old-ass men up at 4 in the morning talking about women’s bodies” on the internet—unfurled in torrents. “Genuinely this could happen to anyone,” she concluded. “And it’s gonna continue to happen … [unless] we stop it.”
As expected, burners descended on Kowalski’s comments section, salivating at the opportunity to continue their harassment campaign. “Bro where is the videoo [sic],” one said. “Everytime i see u speak i am always reminded of that one glorious day,” commented another.
But she was also flooded with thousands of comments of support; the burners’ insults were pushed down to the bottom of the pile, becoming a small minority. “Sometimes life takes an unexpected turn, and you find yourself with a voice you didn’t know you had,” wrote a supporter. “You have a chance [to] push for change and I’m so proud of you for taking it.” People told her they cared, that it was not her fault, that she should stay strong. The empathy from strangers wouldn’t make everything OK again; not yet, at least. But it would be a reminder that just as the burnerverse would keep going, so would she.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
