Maddie Kowalski, a former University of Florida student whose case received significant media attention after a series of videos allegedly from a fraternity assault she was involved in were shared online without her consent, commented on a separate but similar incident on TikTok involving a woman at a University of Kansas bar.
This online incident is referred to as the “Kansas Bar Girl Incident,” where there are college students, a girl, and a boy, engaging in sexual activities in a bathroom stall, and this incident has garnered significant backlash from social media.
@madskowalski Please listen
Maddie Kowalski started her video with a plea to the viewers.
“Okay, if nobody ever listens to another thing I say, please just listen to this video, please,” she said.
She then started to connect this separate but similar incident to the larger issue of non-consensual intimate image sharing that she believes platforms have not done enough to prevent.
“This network of men who posted me ruined my life illegally, by the way, just as I predicted, are doing this to more girls, just as they did to girls before me, and nobody seems to care,” Kowalski said.
Her target audience is the leadership of the platforms, whom she named, including X owner Elon Musk, and she demanded that action be taken against accounts she claims are operating in an online community called the “Burnerverse.”
“These accounts are posting girls’ bodies without their permission over and over and over again, and nobody is stopping them,” she said. “This is not like one-off mistakes, like, oh, it just happened to me. These are repeat patterns that these platforms are allowing to continue.”
Kowalski also spoke of her feelings about how the public had received her case.
“I feel like what happened to me was treated as just some drama or some big event, and then everybody kind of moved on,” she said. “But I need everybody to understand that this is not just a me thing. This is happening to so many girls. Sometimes these posts go viral, sometimes they don’t.”
Kowalski also expressed her concerns that not all victims of revenge porn are even aware that their images have been posted online, and that her own case only came to her attention because it had gone viral.
“I’m convinced that half of the videos on Twitter, the people in them don’t even know they’re posted on Twitter because it didn’t go viral,” Kowalski said. “Let’s be real, if the video of me did not go viral, I would not even know it was on the internet. What is going on?”
Kowalski also explained in detail how the accounts in the Burnerverse operated.
“These people on Twitter go and post these videos and find out all of this information on these girls and post it all over the internet, dox them,” she said. “And then they go into these Twitter Spaces where they can talk, and then they just degrade these girls for hours and hours on end.”
Kowalski stated that she accessed a voice chat under one of her online pseudonyms and was shocked by what she found.
“I just went on my fake Twitter account and joined one, and I’m horrified. I’m sick to my stomach about the things that these guys are saying.”
She stated that the harassment was not just coming from males, which was another thing she was unaware of.
“You know what’s crazy? It’s not just guys that are doing this. By sitting in this voice chat tonight, I’ve learned that it’s girls, too. There are girls behind these burner accounts. There are older men behind these burner accounts, up at four in the morning, talking about these girls’ bodies and laughing at them and making jokes about them, unaliving themselves. What is going on? How is this okay?”
Kowalski stated that the experience made her angry and that she was calling out the women involved in the harassment.
“And you don’t care until it happens to you. Genuinely, this could happen to anyone, and it’s going to continue to happen to probably everybody unless we stop it,” she said. “And if you’re a woman and you’re sitting in these voice chats, degrading other girls, laughing along at four in the morning, I’m just so angry. And I wasn’t that angry before. I was angry when everything happened to me, but now I’m just angry again because it’s happening over and over and over again.”
She concluded her statement with an appeal to action for all levels of society.
“I’m not sure what kind of action can be taken, but something has to be done. Something. Good night,” Kowalski said.
Sharing intimate images without the sender’s express permission is against the law in Florida and in an increasing number of states. Federal legislation addressing the issue has been the subject of revived discussion in the past few years.
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