Trigger warning for depictions of rape and sexual assult.
It’s alarming when anyone uses a popular social news site to confess to a rape. Yet a man called “meatbowling” felt comfortable enough on Reddit to post this hookup story, claiming to have brought a woman home and ignored her when she said she didn’t want to have sex. “I just raped her instead,” he wrote.
Meatbowling had no reason to expect redditors would hand over his info to police. Reddit is so stern about its anti-doxing policy that several subreddits banned links to Gawker Media after writer Adrian Chen “unmasked” Violentacrez, moderator of infamous subreddits r/Creepshots and r/Jailbait. And there was a precedent for confessing to rape on Reddit: Last year, a popular AskReddit thread asked rapists to share “the other side”). Meatbowling also told his story to r/TheRedPill, a hub for a controversial group (men’s rights activists) that’s been criticized for misogyny and tendency to trivialize rape.
Here’s what meatbowling wrote:
Screengrab via braveathee/Imgur
Redditor braveathee spotted the post and took immediate action. He saved meatbowling’s entire comment history in a .zip file and deduced that he lived somewhere in Denmark. It also appeared, according to his comment history, that his post on r/TheRedPill might not have been his first experience boasting about rape on Reddit.
Braveathee began his own thread on r/TheBluePill, using a quote from the story to act as a title: “I didn’t know what that meant, so I just raped her.”
Redditors were quick to respond to the post. Redditor schmellory assisted braveathee’s detective work by finding out exactly where in Denmark meatbowling may be.
Suddenly, meatbowling himself appeared in the thread, defending himself:
Meanwhile, braveathee took the proceedings over to r/denmark, asking, “I think I have found a rapist in Denmark. Can you help me with Danish Police?“
Several redditors responded to braveathee’s claim, ultimately providing him with a link to contact information for law enforcement in the area.
Braveathee urged his fellow redditors to send emails to the police, hoping that there would be power in numbers.
Meatbowling’s comments and account have since been deleted. This story is developing.
Photo via Brian Fuller/Flickr
