Today, Explained - Ruining a young woman’s life for sport

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

It’s called the “burnerverse": an online community of anonymous college sports fans who mostly trash talk other teams, except when things turn very, very dark. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Avishay Artsy with help from Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Bridger Dunnagan and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. A man looking at his phone. Photo by Petri Oeschger/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast⁠.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 naked out there. People had very obviously purposely put them out there. Like, can you imagine a violation you're 19 years old 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 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. I'm Ina Garden. I have a new podcast called Happy Hour with Ina. Each week I'm inviting a really interesting guest to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with actors, chefs, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. You can watch by searching for Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. Don't we all need to have more fun? This is today explained. E.J. Dixon is a senior culture writer at Wired. E.J. recently wrote about the burner verse.

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 mean, I'm smiling because she's a typical teenage girl in a lot of ways. When we first met, she ordered like three different side dishes with three different condiments at this Southern Food Restaurant. And, you know, we talked about dance moms and we talked about streamers and Tricia Pitas. 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 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 Maddie Kowalski 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 fraternity, 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 non-consensual intimate images 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 to UF. and these videos were stitched together to create a viral clip. Take me back to last November when Maddie, who is then 19 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 out of front'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, oh, my God, what's going on? So she goes on to Yikyak, which is this anonymous campus forum where college students posts 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. 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. I was just watching dozens of people reposting them,

saying these horrible degrading things about me. It was a huge, huge violation, and it happened. I mean, her life changed virtually within a couple hours. People started digging up things about my friends and my family and posting our private pictures, you know, making AI deepfakes and memes, taking anything I've ever done or said out of context and making fake posts as me. And then people started calling me and harassing me and calling my dad and harassing me. And it just all felt very overwhelming.

There wasn't anything I could do to stop it. Eventually my dad drove to Gainesville and he left his phone at home so that I wouldn't see his location. And, you know, my roommates let him in. And that, I remember, was a very, very overwhelming experience having to see him for the first time because I was just so humiliated and embarrassed. And I knew the impact that all of this had had on my family as well. She developed PTSD. Her hair started falling out.

She developed rashes on her face. She was getting her rest constantly on campus. She couldn't leave her house without somebody cat-calling her or screaming from their car. Somebody threw an egg at her. And it was ultimately too much for her to handle. And within a month, she left campus and moved back home. I wanted to stay in Florida after college. That was kind of my plan before.

Now I just kind of want to get out of here, move somewhere where, you know, less people, made me know who I am or I've seen those things about me. Your story describes how Maddie has, without even realizing it, entered into something called the Burnerverse. This is something I think a lot of us prior to your piece had not heard of. What is the Burnerverse? Yeah, I hadn't heard of it either. The Burnerverse is an online community of anonymous accounts. And essentially, these are college sports fan accounts.

They talk about the coaches, the players, new. recruits. They share memes after their team loses. But there's a corner of the community that has emerged that is pretty violently racist and misogynistic and anti-Semitic. You guys familiar with the Burnerverse? It's this place where fraternity dudes ruin lives. And if you guys don't know what the Burnerverse is, it's essentially a group of unlovable fucking losers who go around and basically harass random young college girls and make up rumors about them about being like whores and sluts. And one of the things that's, they've started doing in recent years is doxing young college-age women like Maddie.

Why is it called the burnerverse? Because it consists of burner accounts, anonymous accounts. Okay, so the reason that whoever is spreading these videos of Maddie and others feel comfortable doing that is because they're anonymous. Nobody knows who's behind them. Yes, exactly. And I also want to be clear, this is a small segment of the college sports burner community. there are a lot of these accounts that are pretty innocuous and would never dream of doing something like this to a young woman. I would say probably the vast majority of these accounts are not like that, but it is a sizable enough segment that they're able to make these types of narratives go viral. What do we know about who is part of the Burnerverse? Is it all college kids? Is it all college kids who follow?

college sports? Like, who is likely to be part of this? That was one of the most shocking things that I learned from my reporting, actually. I had assumed that these were largely frat kids. I assumed that they were largely SEC frat kids because a lot of these young girls who have been doxed were students at SEC schools. But when I actually started looking into these accounts and who was behind them and who was sharing these images and making these jokes about Maddie, I learned it was way more wide-ranging than that. There are a lot of college students who are involved in the Berners, but it's also men who are 10, 20, 30 years out of college. Sometimes they have wives.

Sometimes they have children. Sometimes they have grandchildren. They're from all over the country. You know, it's not limited to one race or economic demographic. Like, it's really very broad and wide-ranging, which is kind of what. What makes it so terrifying? And it is not just Maddie Kowalski. What did you learn about other young women who are targeted by this?

No, it's not. So perhaps the most well-known case is this girl named Mary Kate Cornett, who was a student at Ole Miss in February 2025 when this salacious campus rumor about her sex life started going viral. And the rumor was false and it was clearly defamatory. but it went so viral that it kind of escaped containment from Ole Miss and went viral among SEC schools and then went viral nationally. Like to the point where her name was trending nationally on X. Having the entire internet, half of the country hating you and calling you disgusting things, telling you to kill yourself, telling you that you're a horrible person that you deserve to die, that's a really hard thing for a girl to go through. And this very famous ESPN personality, Pat McAfee, talked about her, without using her name, but talked about her and the details of this rumor on his podcast.

This is what is being reported by everybody on the internet. And a lot of these athletes and college sports personalities tweeted about it as well. So what started as like an unverifiable and false rumor about a college girl's sex life, was just blown up and amplified to the degree that it was a national news story, like, within a couple of hours. The speed with which this happens, like she was telling me that basically a few hours after she learned that she was going viral, her parents' house was swatted. The speed with which this community works toward making these women's lives a living hell is really, really rapid. Did you come away with an understanding of how an online community that is meant to be talking about college sports descends into this? I think part of it is just a consequence of how internet subcultures work.

Even fairly innocuous large internet subcultures and communities, there's always going to be like a small part of any online subculture that splinters off and forms its own community. that is going to skew a little bit more extremist. Like, that's not surprising in itself. But I do think that there is something about the discourse surrounding college sports, particularly the media ecosystem that's represented by Barstool, that does create a space for this type of rampant misogynity to foment. Like, I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the accounts that, I have seen posting really horrible defamatory content about Maddie are smaller barstool accounts that are associated with individual colleges.

Like, I do think that has definitely played a role. Why did Maddie become the target of these people in the Burt ofverse? Because she's young and she's attractive. Basically, the criteria is these women are young, attractive. They're usually white for some reason. and they are perceived to have departed from a sexual norm in some way. They're either subject to some sort of rumor about their sex life or their sexual behavior or maybe like a text message leaks about them or a photo.

And then it just these guys take it up and they blow it up and it goes viral nationally. And they're very purposeful about it too. Like I can't tell you how many tweets I've seen that are just, like tweets of a girl's name, and they're like, make her famous, make her go viral. It happens to more girls than you would think. I mean, there's new girls on this burner verse every single day. Even just, you know, searching myself and seeing what I need to try and get down about myself off the internet. I just see so many new girls every single day.

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And they have really held up over the years. Bombas also has T-shirts, underwear, footwear. You can go to bombus.com slash explained and use the code explained for 20% off your first purchase. That's BOMBAS.com slash explained. Code explained at checkout. This is today Explained. We're back with E.J. Dixon. E.J. wrote an article for Wired Magazine about how the Burnerverse targeted a Florida sorority girl named Maddie Kowalski.

E.J., what did Maddie and her family do once these videos of her were online and going viral? How did they respond? They sprang to action pretty much right away. I mean, Maddie really had, despite how traumatized she was, she had the clarity of thought to go to the police department pretty much immediately and file a report against the people who were harassing her and to launch an investigation and try to figure out who was behind the posting of her non-consensual intimate images. And they also hired a lawyer and a reputation management firm to try to get the video. scrubbed from the internet, which was easier said than done, because you can file takedown requests to get non-consensual, intimate content taken down from platforms like X, but it's kind of like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Like, if you get one taken down, another five or six will invariably pop back up.

That definitely made me realize how inaccessible it is probably for lots of victims to be able to get resources like that because, I mean, we had to hire a team that was working around the clock 24-7 to get these videos down. It wasn't easy, despite the videos being illegal in nature. So it was a really arduous process. Meanwhile, her school had told her that it had opened a Title IX investigation, and then about a month after it happened, according to Maddie, they said they closed it because they could not find any evidence that the videos were shot on campus. So there were a lot of different investigations going on at the same time.

And it was extremely frustrating for Maddie because she felt that there was very little movement or accountability because she figured out some of the identities of the young men behind some of these burner accounts, but these guys were still enrolled at school. So she felt pretty helpless and isolated and frustrated. that there didn't seem to be much happening in terms of accountability. If it had been a simple non-consensual porn case, if it had been an instance of an ex-boyfriend or something, posting a video of Maddie without her consent, that would have been much easier to deal with. But this involved hundreds, if not thousands, of anonymous online accounts sharing these images,

who were seemingly not connected to Maddie, right? who seemingly had no idea who she was, who were just doing this for sport. What happened when Maddie and her family or her legal team contacted X and tried to get it taken down? Yeah, I mean, I think that X was fairly responsive. According to the Take It Down Act, which President Trump signed into law last year, platforms are legally required to take down non-consensual intimate images, basically immediately after survivors report them. We will not tolerate online sexual.

exploitation and especially it's gone on at levels that nobody's ever seen before. It's getting worse and worse. And I think this is going to hopefully stop it. So it very clearly was not legal for X to host these images. So I think X was pretty compliant. But again, it's the speed with which the internet works. It's this game of whackamol. And because X's algorithm tends to amplify by outrage-inducing or divisive content, I think that it probably saw Maddie's name was trending and amplified it to an even wider audience, making Maddie's name go viral,

and I don't think X did a very good job curbing that at all. So ultimately you have involved in this, a university, a police department, a tech platform. Who do you think ultimately failed Maddie here? Or did everyone? That's what I was struck by the most is just how many levels of failure there seems to have been here. And I don't want to ascribe malice on anybody's part or malintent on anybody's part. But I really do think that people really had no idea just how viral these videos were and just how coordinated of a campaign this was to make these videos go viral.

And I think that there was a large degree of helplessness on behalf of a lot of these institutions in terms of, you know, leaving this 19-year-old girl hanging out to dry. Where did the police investigation end up? Some men were implicated in this, attached to this? What happened? Yes. So after many months and after subpoenaing the IP addresses of some of these accounts that initially posted the images, and initially made them go viral. The police charged three young men,

two of whom were U.F. freshmen at the time, with alleged sexual cyber harassment. What are the consequences? What are they facing? So the investigation is still open. All three were charged with first-degree misdemeanor, sexual cyber harassment. One of them was charged with a felony of sexual cyber harassment

for financial gain because he was alleged to have promoted a crypto coin with Maddie Kowalski's name. That was worth $11,000 at the time that he posted it. Maddie has filed federal civil lawsuits against all three men. When I reached out to their fraternity for comment, their fraternity Feta Kai said that two of them had been placed on interim suspension. The criminal cases are still open and unsolved.

These are charges and allegations. They are not convictions. These Burnerverse communities, they center around school sports, college sports. Are university athletic programs taking any kind of action here, can they? Not that I'm aware of. One of the things that I learned is that at other schools, there are allegations of a relationship between some of these more prominent burner accounts and college athletics departments where they sort of function as like influencers, I guess.

Like, you know, they'll invite them to an event for new recruits and be like, hey, you know, you should post a photo of this guy and see how your audience reacts. Because there is, I mean, essentially fan accounts, right? And like I said before, a lot of them are pretty innocuous. So for college athletics departments to engage some of these accounts on a promotional basis is just smart marketing. But I do wonder whether or not the relationship runs deep. than that for some of these college athletics departments and how aware they are of the activities of the burn-averse. My gut instinct is that a lot of college athletics departments probably have a pretty high awareness of the activities within the burn-a-verse. What recourse is available

to victims of this kind of abuse? What can they do? The Federal Take-It-Down Act requires platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours, but that's easier said than done. a lot of the time. Because again, victims can submit a takedown request, but it doesn't prevent somebody else from reposting the image and having that go viral as well. Most U.S. States also have specific statutes prohibiting sexual cyber harassment, including revenge porn, but the wheels of the criminal justice system are very slow, as Maddie's story demonstrates. I mean, these guys weren't charged until nine months after the incident took place. And it's, really difficult for laws to keep a pace with like the speed with which these campaigns go viral.

You know, in an ideal world, this kind of thing would, you know, it just would be stopped before it even happened. So knowing that there is not much that victims can do, what are the methods of preventing this? That's a very complicated question. I know that there are platforms developing various AI tools in order to prevent non-consensual intimate images from spreading. But I imagine that would be pretty difficult to regulate, especially with the rise of deepfakes and with the rise of AI-manipulated non-consensual images. So I don't have a lot of faith in that. I mean, honestly, I think that the biggest path toward prevention is, can I say?

this, parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit. Can I say that or no? You can say that. You can absolutely say that. Yeah, I mean, I think that the biggest course of prevention is parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit, honestly, to just set a clear line and say it's not okay to view women as commodities. It's not okay to talk about women like this. It's not okay to view social media engagement as the ultimate goal without thinking about the lives that you're impacting by spreading this content. I think that parents need to have conversations with their kids about that. And I think that there needs to be education within fraternities and sororities and universities because it's not like what happened to Maddie Kowalski as an

isolated incident. I was able to identify almost a dozen other young women who have been targeted by the burn-a-verse in this way. And I think that there just needs to be more discussion of this in general, because it's not just the burn-a-verse, right? It's this larger ecosystem that is socially ordained at this point of men saying horrible things and doing horrible things to women with impunity. That's the real problem to me. Maddie, how are you doing now today?

Things have definitely gotten better. We'll say that. Things always get better. But I think that, you know, the impact this has had on me will never go away, you know, no matter how much therapy I've done. But I think that the PTSD I have and the trauma from this will probably kind of shape the way I moved through my life forever. But I've found things that bring me joy. I've started to. doing kickboxing classes and I adopted a dog. And so I'm trying to find ways to just bring joy back into my life and find things and activities that I can do to kind of remove myself from the noise of everything. So that's been really helpful. Maddie Kowalski, thanks to her for sharing her story. I think Maddie is a very bright future.

E.J. Dixon reported on the Burnerverse for Wired. Avashai Artsy and Hadi-Mawagdi produced today's show with an assist from Miles Brian. I'm an El Sadi edited. We were fact-checked by Gabriel Dunitov, and our engineers are David Tadishore and Bridger Dunnigan. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.