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.
I'm not claiming she wasn't raped.