On the afternoon of Sunday, November 2, 2025, Maddie Kowalski stopped by a house in Gainesville to drop off a present. The University of Florida sophomore had traveled to Japan that summer, where she’d picked up an action figure from the manga One Piece as a gift.
Students referred to this building near the main campus, which has long been associated with the UF chapter of the frat Phi Delta Theta, as “Fort.” A brick multifamily colonial-style house, it was a typical frat-boy residence with worn hardwood floors, exposed cables, and “THIS IS FORT” spray-painted in UF’s orange and blue colors on the fence lining the perimeter. Phi Delta Theta didn’t have a great reputation on campus; at the time, they were being investigated for accusations of hazing. But the boys who lived there were Kowalski’s best friends: “It was a safe space, I thought.”
A few hours later, Kowalski, then 19, was at an apartment drinking when a friend told her something that would alter the trajectory of her life: Did she know that a nude image of her was circulating at FSU, a university a few hours away?
Kowalski would later learn that the image was making the rounds on Snapchat, and people were talking about it on the anonymous campus social network YikYak. When she opened the app, “that’s when I started crashing out,” she says. As Kowalski scrolled, she saw what appeared to be hundreds of messages about a “DZ” girl. (She was in the sorority Delta Zeta.) They were now referring to not just an image, but a video. Some were joking about masturbating to it.
The situation was about to get worse. Around 6 that night, an anonymous account on X with the handle u/SteveCumfull posted the video, saying: “Meet Maddie Kowalski, queen of Delta Zeta.” Kowalski had no idea who the poster was, but she immediately identified the setting in one shot as Fort. In the video, the floor is dirty, with debris strewn everywhere. She’s lying on the ground naked, her eyes half-closed, touching herself while flanked by a group of men in shorts. While their faces weren’t visible, they appeared to be some of the same guys she’d been hanging out with just a few hours prior, she realized with a sinking feeling in her gut. In another shot, from a different night and at a different location, she is being penetrated by two men.
The video that ended up going viral on X was a compilation of three different clips: one, mentioned above, that was taken at Fort earlier that fall, and two that were recorded during a separate sexual encounter with two strangers. Kowalski says she met the latter in October, not long before the video went viral, when she was walking home after a night out drinking. She was heavily intoxicated and only remembers "parts of" what happened: "I didn't recognize myself at all." She says she did not consent to being filmed, let alone have that content shared publicly.
What had been a piece of salacious on-campus gossip, transmitted via anonymous social media and group texts, was now a national story. X removed the post containing the video, but late the following day, @SteveCumfull posted it again. Then they posted a screenshot of a cryptocurrency token they'd bought with Kowalski's name on it, with a market cap of $11,400. "Put your children's college savings into this," they tweeted. @SteveCumfull could have been anyone: a close friend, a neighbor, a mutual with an axe to grind. Whoever they were, they now appeared to be profiting from the worst moment of Kowalski's life. . . .
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