Ruining a young woman’s life for sport
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What happened to Maddie Kowalski and how did the non‑consensual videos surface?
Maddie Kowalski is a student at the University of Florida. Last November, someone put non-consensual, intimate images of Maddie on the internet. There were videos of me.
Um naked out there. People had very obviously purposely put them out there.
Ли, канію мажне авіація на тінь єрсот. And a video that you don't even remember shooting, let alone consenting to. goes viral nationally along with your name and your sorority. And your parents, your grandparents, everybody in your life sees it. It's a humiliation and and a privacy violation that is kind of incomprehensible.
Coming up on Today Explained from Vox, a reporter investigates both the online network that humiliated Maddie Kowalski and the difficulty of doing anything about it.
This is today explained.
E.J. Dixon is a senior culture writer at Wired. E.J. recently wrote about The Burnerverse. This is a network of anonymous online accounts created to talk about college sports. At times, though, these accounts are involved in something much darker, which warning we're going to discuss on today's show. The dissemination of videos and rumors aimed at shaming young women. Maddie Kowalski is one of them.
Maddie is I I mean I'm I'm smiling because i she's she's a typical teenage girl in a lot of ways. You know, when we first met, she ordered like three different side dishes with three different condiments and uh at this at this Southern Food restaurant. And um, you know, we talked about dance moms and we talked about streamers and Trisha Paytas and she's a theater kid. She spent high school doing theater productions. She loves Wicked, but she also is incredibly strong and resilient and courageous. And when this horrible, horrible thing happened to her, She had the foresight and the wherewithal to say, you know, I have nothing to be ashamed of. It's um the people who did this to me who should be ashamed.
And I think that's really powerful for somebody that young.
What happened to Madikowski exactly?
Maddie had a difficult time adjusting to college as many college students do. She grew up kind of sheltered, didn't really drink in high school, didn't really go out and party in high school. So the way she tells it, when she got to UF and she really just wanted to be accepted by, you know, the sororities and the fraternities, she kind of went all out on the Greek life party scene and developed a substance abuse and alcohol problem. And as she puts it, you know, that put her in situations where she trusted people that she shouldn't have. And there were two separate uh non-consensual intimate images uh that circulated of her. One in which she was at a house that a bunch of kids who were in the same frat at UF lived in off campus, performing a sex act, and another in which she was pictured having sex with two men who did not go.
Yeah. And these videos were stitched together to create a viral clip.
What is the Burnerverse and how does it operate within college‑sports fandom?
Take me back to last November when Maddie, who is then nineteen years old, learns that these video clips of her are circulating. What happens?
The way she tells it it was a Sunday, the weekend after Halloween. She was at a friend's house when she when a friend received a phone call saying, Did you know that there are nude images of Maddie circulating around at FSU? And she was like, Well, uh oh my god, what's going on? So she goes on to Yik Yak, uh, which is this anonymous campus forum where college students post about each other. And she saw a bunch of people describing a video of a redhead from her sorority that was going viral and she was really freaked out because she had no idea what that video was. She didn't remember filming a video.
I didn't really like understand what was going on and everything was happening really, really fast. Um and I especially couldn't comprehend like what I was supposed to do. So I was just super overwhelmed. Within
About an hour or so, that video had been posted onto X. And that was the first time that Maddie saw the video, actually, was when it was posted onto X and it became a national trending topic.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened to Maddie Kowalski and how did the non‑consensual videos surface?
0:01–3:27
2
What is the Burnerverse and how does it operate within college‑sports fandom?
3:27–6:26
3
How did Maddie and her family respond legally after the videos went viral?
6:26–9:44
4
What challenges did they encounter when trying to get the content removed from platforms like X?
9:44–14:13
5
How did the university, police department, and Title IX investigation handle Maddie’s case?
14:13–17:03
6
What criminal charges were eventually filed against the men responsible for the harassment?
17:03–21:09
7
What broader patterns of misogyny and online harassment does the Burnerverse reveal?
21:09–24:44
8
What steps can individuals and institutions take to prevent and address this type of abuse?
24:44–27:20