Two men raped Maddie Kowalski in Gainesville, Florida, in October 2025 while she was too intoxicated to consent, and someone filmed it. Kowalski was 19. She met the two men while walking home after a night of drinking and remembers only parts of what happened. She did not agree to being filmed and did not know the footage existed until strangers began describing it to her. "I didn't recognize myself at all," she told E.J. Dickson, a senior culture writer at WIRED, in her first interview about the case, published on 14 September 2026. Dickson's reporting is the source for the interviews quoted throughout this piece.

A second clip, shot earlier in the autumn of 2025 at a house near the University of Florida campus, shows Kowalski naked on a dirty floor with her eyes half closed while a group of men stand over her. Kowalski recognised the room as the ground floor of the house students call "Fort", long associated with the Florida chapter of the fraternity Phi Delta Theta, and recognised the men in the frame as friends of hers.

Someone cut three clips from those two nights into a single file. An anonymous account on X using the handle @SteveCumfull published it on the evening of Sunday 2 November 2025 under the line: "Meet Maddie Kowalski, queen of Delta Zeta." Delta Zeta is her sorority.

Nobody has been charged over the gang rape of Maddie Kowalski. Three men have been charged with publishing the video of it.

Sunday 2 November 2025

Kowalski went to Fort that same afternoon to hand over a present, an action figure she had brought back from Japan that summer for one of the men who lived there. Phi Delta Theta was under investigation at the time for abusing its recruits, conduct the university's records enter under the heading of hazing. "It was a safe space, I thought," Kowalski told Dickson.

A friend told Kowalski a few hours later that a nude image of her was circulating at Florida State University, two hours away. The image was moving through Snapchat. Discussion of it was already running on YikYak, the anonymous campus message board, where Kowalski found what looked to her like hundreds of posts about a "DZ" girl. By the time she opened the app the posts had stopped referring to an image and started referring to a video. Some of them joked about masturbating to it. "That's when I started crashing out," she said.

X took the first @SteveCumfull post down. The account posted the video again late the following day, then posted a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token issued in Kowalski's name with a market capitalisation of $11,400. "Put your children's college savings into this," the account wrote.

Anonymous accounts spent the next 24 hours publishing Kowalski's old photographs, her father's LinkedIn profile and his golf handicap. Callers rang her parents through the night. One told her father: "I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her." Another told him he had had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV, and broadcast the call live on X Spaces, the platform's live audio feature. A separate post took bets on whether she would start an OnlyFans account or kill herself before the end of the week.

Kowalski tried to jump from her fifth-floor window when her father arrived at her apartment. Her friend Lexie Blake, then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi, told Dickson that Kowalski "wasn't even really saying words. She was just sobbing, hysterical."

By the afternoon of Monday 3 November 2025, the hashtag carrying her name was trending nationally on X with more than 1,200 posts. Footage of her rape, and of her lying incapacitated on the floor at Fort, had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.

Florida Statute 794.011

Florida Statute 794.011 defines sexual battery as oral, anal or genital penetration by, or union with, the sexual organ of another, or penetration by any other object. Subsection 4 covers a victim who is "physically helpless to resist", which the statute defines as unconscious, asleep or "for any other reason physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act", and a victim who is "physically incapacitated". An offence against a victim aged 18 or over under that subsection is a first-degree felony, punishable by up to 30 years. The statute sets no separate offence and no aggravating factor for a rape committed by more than one person, so each participant in a gang rape would be charged individually under the same subsection.

Prosecution must begin within eight years unless the offence was reported to law enforcement within 72 hours, in which case no time limit applies. Kowalski reported the harassment campaign to campus police within days of the video appearing. On the eight-year clock, the window for charging anyone over the rape itself runs to the autumn of 2033.

Kowalski and her lawyer Adam Ludwin decided not to pursue charges against the men in the video, on the grounds that relitigating those nights would retraumatise her, and concentrated instead on identifying the accounts that published it. The Gainesville Police Department has not said whether it investigated the rape. A department representative declined to comment, saying the case remained open and active.

Two men raped Kowalski and somebody held the camera. Students passed the file through private group chats before anonymous accounts carried it to a national audience. Three of those account holders have been charged. Nobody who raped her, filmed her or forwarded the file has been.

"Nobody fucking cares," Kowalski said of the 10 months that followed. "You can do literally whatever you want [even] if it's illegal, except for literally kill someone. No one gives a fuck."

The burnerverse

Anonymous "burner" accounts on X, run by current students and alumni and organised loosely around college sports teams, call their own network the burnerverse, shortened to "beev" or "BV". Clusters form around most large universities with prominent athletics programmes. Southeastern Conference accounts reference the menswear label Peter Millar, Zyn nicotine pouches, particular football coaches and "bag" for cocaine. Michigan State accounts use "#expand" for approval and "#shrink" for disapproval, according to reporting by Owen McCarthy in The State News, Michigan State's student paper, published in March 2026. The most-followed Michigan State burner, which posts as Chief of Propaganda, had 34,800 followers at the time of that report.

Most of the accounts post memes about recruits and rival teams and nothing worse. One burner running a fan account for an East Coast university team told Dickson that a group direct-message thread of roughly 200 people included members as young as 15 and others in their mid-forties.

The Michigan State account posting as Chief of Propaganda told The State News that athletics staff sent it photographs from recruit visits during Mel Tucker's tenure as head coach: "It was like, 'Wink, wink, nod, nod, if you want to post these pictures, feel free to do so.'" Athletic director Matt Larson told the paper the practice was "not currently, nor has it been previously, part of athletic department strategies", while acknowledging that burner operators had been invited to an alternate-uniform showcase.

Blake, who is in a sorority at Mississippi, told Dickson that prospective fraternity members on that campus are strongly encouraged to open burner accounts as a condition of pledging. "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 said. "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."

10 women

"They want to see something go viral that they created," one account holder told Dickson. "Getting their stuff on Barstool and ESPN is the goal."

Dickson identified 10 women the network doxed, most of them between 18 and 21 at the time. Some had sexual images or videos of themselves published without their consent. Others were named in rumours about their sex lives that nobody has ever verified. Gossip or images surface on Snapchat or YikYak, burner accounts carry them onto X, aggregation sites and sports-media personalities amplify them, and the woman's name becomes a search result attached to sexual content indefinitely. "Feels like the beev is slowly dying," one account posted in May 2026. "We need another college girl to get exposed for a revival." Another read: "Feels like a national holiday every time a new whore gets exposed on the BV."

Mary Kate Cornett was 18 and a first-year student at the University of Mississippi in February 2025 when an X account using the handle @thekendallroy posted, using the university's nickname: "Anyone else hearing rumblings of this Ole Miss girl banging her boyfriend's Dad?" The claim was false. It drew 313,000 views in under two days. Other accounts attached her full name.

"It's like they have this blueprint for what to do every time they decide to destroy a girl's life," Cornett told Dickson. "That excites them, for some odd reason." She was sent thousands of harassing calls, texts and voicemails, and a SWAT team was dispatched to her mother's house. Burner accounts still post about her most days. "It's a terrible feeling to never not feel like you're being watched or observed or talked about," she said. "I read every single post, every single comment, every hashtag. It consumes my whole life."

Who carried it

Three accounts that published Kowalski's video early have been linked by name in charging documents: @SteveCumfull to Kamran Ahmed, @arnie_grape16 to Brendan Pitfield and a third to Jacob Gomberg. The accounts behind the other campaigns remain anonymous. Nobody has identified the person who posts as @thekendallroy, or the operator of Arthur Cacciatore, the account credited inside the network with starting the practice in June 2024.

The SportsGrail, an aggregation site that packages viral sports gossip for search traffic, published at least two articles carrying Kowalski's full name in their web addresses within days of the video appearing. Both were still live in September 2026. Pages like those are why her name returns what it returns: a search engine indexes the headline and the address, and the article outlives the post it was scraped from.

Pat McAfee raised the Cornett rumour on his ESPN show on 26 February 2025, during coverage of the NFL scouting combine, without naming her but naming her sorority. The clip went to a YouTube channel with close to 3 million subscribers. McAfee said nothing for five months, then apologised on air on 23 July 2025 after meeting the family. "I have since learned that the story was not true, and that my show played a role in the anguish caused to a great family," he said. Awful Announcing reported that the matter between McAfee and the Cornett family was settled to each party's satisfaction that July, on terms that were not disclosed.

Three Barstool Sports personalities apologised on 11 April 2025, a day after the company's founder Dave Portnoy told NBC News "morally, we were wrong" and after Portnoy's lawyers had contacted Cornett's legal team. Kevin Clancy, who hosts KFC Radio, extended his "deepest and most sincere apologies". Jack McGuire, who covers college football and posts as Jack Mac, said: "I now understand those rumors are fake and the affair did not happen. I regret these comments and want to apologize." Nicholas Longley, who posts as Nicky Smokes, posted a video retracting his comments. Awful Announcing reported that McGuire had promoted a memecoin named after Cornett, the same tactic an account later used on Kowalski.

Antonio Brown, a former NFL wide receiver, posted the Cornett rumour to his own following. Radio hosts at ESPN St. Louis discussed it on air, one of them reading out a dramatised version of a Snapchat message said to be involved. McGuire had amplified the June 2024 case before either of these, carrying the Arthur Cacciatore post to 146,000 followers, where it drew 815,000 views.

Cornett filed reports with Oxford Police Department, the University of Mississippi campus police and the FBI. Her father wrote that the family was dealing with a "coordinated cyberattack" spreading "categorically false and defamatory information".

The women who did not speak

Six of the 10 women have never been named publicly and did not give interviews. One father spoke on condition that neither he nor his daughter be identified. "We are unfortunately navigating something that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," he told Dickson. "I just don't think she's ready at this time."

Addison King, the name Dickson uses for a student at another university with a Division I football programme, was doxed in March 2026 after a video said to show her having sex in a bar toilet began circulating. Accounts reposted it, dug out her old Instagram posts and spread a rumour that she had cheated on a boyfriend. Kowalski found her private Instagram account at 4am and sent a message offering support. King wrote back to thank her. She has said nothing publicly since.

The charges

Gainesville Police Department took the case from campus police after Kowalski reported the harassment, and served legal process on X seeking subscriber information, IP records and account data.

Charges were filed in early August 2026, nine months after the video was published. According to affidavits obtained by Dickson, the @SteveCumfull account was linked to Kamran Ahmed, a 19-year-old first-year Florida student from Tampa and a member of Theta Chi. The @arnie_grape16 account was linked to Brendan Pitfield, a Florida first-year from Atlanta and a fellow Theta Chi member. A third account was linked to Jacob Gomberg, a third-year student from Coral Springs who pitched for the Florida Gators baseball team before transferring to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and later Indiana University. Kowalski says she had never met any of the three.

All three were charged with sexual cyberharassment under Florida Statute 784.049, a first-degree misdemeanour carrying up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Ahmed was additionally charged with a third-degree felony under the same statute, which raises the offence where it is committed "for the purpose of pecuniary or any other financial gain".

Pitfield entered a plea of not guilty in September 2026. Ahmed and Gomberg declined to comment through a lawyer. Pitfield did not respond to repeated requests for comment. None of the three has been convicted, and none of them is accused of taking part in the rape.

Ahmed and Pitfield accessed their burner accounts from University of Florida IP addresses, according to the Gainesville Police Department's sworn complaint. Ahmed's address as of the summer of 2025 was listed in that complaint as the Theta Chi fraternity house. Kowalski has also filed civil suits against all three men in the Northern District of Florida.

"There is a false sense of security when it comes to anonymity," Ludwin, Kowalski's lawyer, told Dickson. "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 saw Pitfield and Ahmed at a bar in the spring of 2026, months before either was charged. Ahmed looked at her and laughed, she says. Pitfield walked over and said: "I'm a huge fan, can I get a picture with you?"

"The people who did this to her are living a normal college life, they're going out and posting and doing whatever they want," her mother Mandy told Dickson. "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."

A first-degree felony sexual battery in Florida carries up to 30 years. The publication offence the three men are charged with carries up to one year, and the felony count against Ahmed up to five.

Florida Statute 914.22

Florida Statute 914.22 makes it a crime to intentionally harass a person and thereby hinder, delay, prevent or dissuade them from cooperating in an official investigation, from testifying, or from reporting an offence to law enforcement. The statute states that an official proceeding "need not be pending or about to be instituted at the time of the offense". Where the offence under investigation is a first-degree felony, harassing the victim is itself a first-degree felony, carrying the same 30-year maximum as the sexual battery.

Callers rang Kowalski's father through the night, one of them broadcasting the call live to an audience. Accounts published his LinkedIn profile, took bets on whether she would kill herself within the week and went on posting about her for the 10 months that followed her report to the police. Kowalski decided against pursuing charges over the rape. No charge has been brought under 914.22 against anyone.

What the University of Florida did

Kowalski says University of Florida administrators told her they could not act against students unless police filed charges. They dropped a Title IX investigation after roughly a month on the basis that the video had been filmed off campus. Blake Trauschke, the university's assistant director of public affairs, declined to comment on the process beyond a statement that "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."

Gainesville Police Department's sworn complaint places two of the accounts on university IP addresses. Title IX regulations issued in 2020 narrowed the circumstances in which a university must investigate conduct outside its own programmes, and universities retain discretion to act under their student conduct codes where Title IX does not compel them to.

Kowalski wrote to the university's Office of Sorority and Fraternity Life in December 2025 to tell it she was the victim in a criminal investigation involving fraternity members. The office referred her to the Office of Student Conduct, saying it did not oversee individual or organisational conduct processes. Neither office responded to requests for comment.

Theta Chi chief executive Michael Mayer told Dickson that "the allegations made within the complaints describe abhorrent actions that run completely contrary to Theta Chi's ideals", called the charges reprehensible and said Ahmed and Pitfield had been placed on interim suspension. The University of Florida's own published conduct record lists Theta Chi in good conduct standing.

Phi Delta Theta appears on the same record as suspended with eligibility to return in autumn 2030. The findings cover autumn 2025 and spring 2026, and describe forced underage alcohol consumption, forced food consumption, forced physical activity, humiliation and servitude. They also find that the chapter carried on operating after receiving notice of interim suspension.

Florida Statute 1006.63 covers any action that recklessly or intentionally endangers the mental or physical health or safety of a student for the purpose of initiation, and lists "whipping, beating, branding, exposure to the elements, forced consumption of any food, liquor, drug, or other substance" alongside "sleep deprivation, forced exclusion from social contact". Sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink are two of the five techniques the European Court of Human Rights ruled on in Ireland v United Kingdom in 1978, where the European Commission of Human Rights had found their combined use amounted to torture.

Phi Delta Theta's suspension is for that abuse of its recruits. The university's conduct record carries no finding about what was filmed on the ground floor of Fort. A spokesperson for the fraternity said it had "not been made aware of the names of any individuals ever affiliated with our organization who are accused of these heinous acts". The chapter posted on Instagram on 13 August 2026 to promote autumn rush: "We're back."

Both Ahmed and Pitfield were listed on LinkedIn as current University of Florida students as of 3 September 2026. Trauschke declined to say whether they remained in good standing, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Both profiles were deleted or edited after Dickson made contact.

"A lot of people were sad for what happened, because it shouldn't have been filmed and posted," one University of Florida student told Dickson. "But there's obviously people who are blaming her and saying she was doing these things for drugs or that she was crazy." Students shouted slurs at Kowalski as she walked to class and one threw an egg at her. Delta Zeta sisters blocked or unfollowed her, and she says the chapter held a meeting about how the episode would reflect on the sorority rather than about her welfare. Delta Zeta did not respond to requests for comment.

The Safe Campus Act

A bill put before Congress in 2015 would have written the University of Florida's position to Kowalski into federal law. The Safe Campus Act, H.R. 3403, introduced on 29 July 2015 by Representative Matt Salmon of Arizona, would have required an institution to refer a sexual assault allegation to police within 48 hours of the complainant's written consent, and provided that where a complainant declined that referral the institution "may not initiate or otherwise carry out any institutional disciplinary proceeding with respect to the allegation, including imposing interim measures".

The North-American Interfraternity Conference endorsed the bill the day it was introduced. Lobbying ran through a vehicle called the Safe Campus Coalition, registered to the law firm Squire Patton Boggs, which reported $250,000 of income across 2015, and Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, was among its registered lobbyists. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said: "The goal of any campus sexual assault legislation should be to encourage survivors to report the crimes. This bill does exactly the opposite." The conference withdrew support on 13 November 2015 and the bill died in subcommittee.

Federal lobbying continued through the Fraternal Government Relations Coalition, which reported $2m between 2016 and 2026. The Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee has given $45,500 to Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina since 2014 and $22,000 to Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia. Foxx chaired the House Education and the Workforce committee from 2023 to 2025 and Scott is its ranking member. The committee holds jurisdiction over the Higher Education Act, the statute that carries Title IX.

Representative Erin Houchin of Indiana, who sits on that committee and has taken $4,000 from the same committee since 2023, introduced the Freedom of Association in Higher Education Act on 1 April 2025. It would bar institutions receiving federal aid from penalising students over membership of single-sex organisations. The committee ordered it reported on 25 June 2026 by 18 votes to 15.

The law that exists

Federal law has carried a civil remedy for published intimate images since 2022. Section 1309 of the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, codified at 15 U.S.C. 6851, lets a person whose intimate images were disclosed without consent sue for liquidated damages of $150,000 plus fees, and permits the plaintiff to proceed under a pseudonym. It applies to the person who disclosed the images and not to the platform that carried them.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, criminalised publishing intimate images without consent and required covered platforms to build a removal process by 19 May 2026. From that date the Federal Trade Commission began enforcing a requirement that a covered platform remove reported material and known identical copies within 48 hours of a valid request. FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson wrote to 15 companies ahead of the deadline, among them X, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, Snap, TikTok and Discord.

Kowalski's video was published 18 months before that deadline took effect. The 48-hour clock runs from a valid request by the depicted person, and the material had been viewed 8.5 million times inside 24 hours. No provision of state or federal law addresses the callers who rang Kowalski's father through the night, the participants in a live audio room or the person who minted a token in her name.

Kowalski since December 2025

Kowalski withdrew from her autumn 2025 classes in December and moved back to her parents' house. Her hair began falling out. Rashes appeared on her face. She entered intensive outpatient therapy and was diagnosed with PTSD. "There's only so much therapy can help," she told Dickson. "Maybe it will, long-term. But not now."

On 19 December 2025 Kowalski looked into a camera and posted to 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 began. She said "several videos from two nights that I could barely remember had been posted on the internet for everyone to see", that she had consented neither to what the men did to her nor to the filming, and that she had watched her "whole world collapse".

"These last few weeks have been the darkest and hardest moments of my life," she said, before directing other victims to a page of legal resources. "But I'm still here, and that's something that I'm really learning to be proud of."

The video drew tens of millions of views. "I'd said everything I wanted to say, and I thought I said it in a way that was appropriate," she said. "But I still got so much hate."

Kowalski quit her job as a bottle girl and server after the network harassed her employer. Her income now comes mainly from TikTok Live, with an audience of roughly 42,000 followers. She had intended to move to New York or Los Angeles and work as an actor. "It would be cool if I had 2,000 followers as a result of doing TikTok dances or something like that," she told Dickson. "But being known for this? This is not fun."

"It's hard enough for my friends who don't have this on their record to get a job," Kowalski said of her prospects. "None of them can get hired at all right now. So how am I supposed to get one?"

"She has so much trauma that she can't even have these normal experiences," Blake, her friend since school, told Dickson. "She can't meet someone and not have her guard up." Kowalski met a man at a bar in London over the summer who asked for her number, and gave him only her first name, afraid he would find out who she was and leak it. The burners, Blake said, "stole her life. They stole her girlhood."

Kowalski saw the posts about Addison King at 4am in March 2026, then joined an X Space where burner accounts were discussing what to do to King next. She sat in bed listening to them talk about fraternity gossip and the Texas Rangers. "I was like, seriously? Get a life," she said. Then the conversation turned. "Tell that bitch to hang from a tree," one of them said. "Hang and dangle!"

Kowalski left the Space, turned on her camera and recorded a video with no make-up. "This network of men that posted me are doing this to more girls, just as they did to girls before me," she said in the clip, posted in late March 2026, "and nobody seems to care." She finished: "Genuinely this could happen to anyone. And it's gonna continue to happen [unless] we stop it." It has since drawn more than 271,000 likes.

Kowalski returned to the University of Florida for the autumn 2026 semester. The eight-year window to charge anyone with raping her closes in the autumn of 2033.

What you can do

Anyone whose intimate images have been published without their consent can have them taken down. StopNCII.org, run by the Revenge Porn Helpline at the UK charity SWGfL, creates a digital fingerprint of an image on your own device and shares only that fingerprint with participating platforms, so the picture itself never leaves your phone. It is open to anyone who was 18 or over when the image was taken. For anyone who was under 18, the equivalent service is Take It Down, run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative runs a free crisis helpline on 1-844-878-CCRI, staffed 24 hours a day, and maintains a directory of volunteer lawyers and platform-by-platform removal instructions. Anyone whose removal request was ignored, or who could find no way to make one, can file against the platform at TakeItDown.ftc.gov.

Evidence is worth keeping before anything is deleted. Screenshots showing the account handle, the post time, the view count and the URL are what police and lawyers work from, and they disappear when a platform removes a post.

The Internet Archive's Save Page Now, https://web.archive.org/ takes an independent copy of a public page at the moment it is asked and returns a permanent address in the form web.archive.org/web/20251103184500/ where those 14 digits are the year, month, day, hour, minute and second of the capture in Universal Time.

Save Page Now copies one page at a time and cannot reach anything behind a login, which covers direct messages, private accounts and posts on X that only signed-in users can see. Those still need a screenshot, ideally with the device clock visible and the file left unedited. Archive.today captures a visual copy of some pages the Internet Archive cannot.

Courts do not treat an archived page as proving itself. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in Weinhoffer v. Davie Shoring in 2022 that Wayback Machine captures must be authenticated under Rule 901 by someone with personal knowledge of how the archive works. The Internet Archive issues certified records and a standard affidavit for that purpose at archive.org/legal.