Natalie Rupnow and the blight of ‘virtual molestation’

This Monday, a fifteen-year-old named Natalie Rupnow murdered Erin M. West, a substitute teacher, and fourteen-year-old Rubi P. Vergara, a fellow student, injuring six others — two critically — at her school in Madison, Wisconsin. Before the police could intervene, Rupnow shot herself.

It is not a bold prediction to say that this tragedy will not meaningfully shift our national conversation. These events blur together in the American psyche, like car crashes, their horror dulled by repetition. That Rupnow was female and younger than the median age of school shooters does not disrupt the pattern. It is — to my increasing horror, every time I write an article like this one — another story in our endless churn of violence. Consider that Luigi Mangione murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson this month and already his moment is receding into the background.

On X, the aftermath of the Madison shooting was nothing short of surreal.

If you were shocked by how people lionized Mangione — praising his “good looks” and even valorizing the murder — you would be even more stunned by the blithe cruelty with which some joked about Rupnow’s murder-suicide. Users deliberately spread misinformation, competing for narrative dominance and social clout. One malicious rumor implicated the controversial social media figure “Radfem Hitler” purely out of contempt for her posting style. Teenagers and “Terminally Online” adults alike participated in this chaotic spectacle of gossip. Even if Radfem Hitler wasn’t involved, more than one user chirped, this is ultimately a moral good — anything to get her off X. It was as though linking someone to a mass murder, including the deaths of two children, simply because of her “bad opinions” wasn’t evil. One of the few moments of relief came from journalist Anna Slatz, who shared what was allegedly Rupnow’s authentic manifesto, sent to her by Rupnow’s supposed online boyfriend.

Then came a more disturbing allegation. 

A researcher known as Bx claimed to have traced what she believed was Rupnow’s account to a Telegram group linked to “764,” a clandestine network described in a joint investigation by Der Spiegel, the Washington Post and WIRED. These groups thrive on Telegram (often called “Terrorgram”) and Discord. They infiltrate spaces popular with children and younger teens — Roblox servers, eating disorder communities and other vulnerable corners of the internet — exploiting their targets’ insecurities and encouraging self-harm, animal abuse and sometimes homicide. According to the Washington Post, 764 and similar networks have persuaded children as young as eight to injure themselves or others. Earlier this year, a young man named Samuel Hervey livestreamed his own self-immolation on Discord while twenty-four people within this network watched.

These groups do not merely lurk online; they groom. 

They target children struggling with mental illness or social isolation. Authorities have yet to confirm Rupnow’s active involvement with 764, but the possibility alone is disturbing. This does not mean the internet singlehandedly “caused” this tragedy, or any other one like it. Some reports have alluded to a troubled home life for Rupnow and experts on mass casualty events say they can’t be disentangled from serious childhood trauma. But it would be naive to consider her story in isolation. She may stand at the extreme end of a continuum we might call “virtual molestation,” a concept I recently discussed with the comedian Charls Carroll. 

“Virtual molestation” is a systematic assault on a young mind’s innocence, not through physical violence, but through relentless exposure to dark content.

Spend even a few hours online and you’ll notice subtle markers of normalization of disturbing themes. Young people on X and Instagram often place warnings like “zoos/pedos DNI” (“zoophiles and pedophiles do not interact”) in their bios. Such warnings should be unnecessary — it boggles the mind that people feel the need to say something like that at all. Young people know all too well that truly disturbing content can appear without warning. Grooming by cult-like groups or lone-wolf predators is — hopefully — more rare than not. 

But many are exposed to this type of content on their own terms. Kids are curious and angsty and want to push the envelope and the internet offers everything for people who know how to look. Collectively, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more aware of darkness than their predecessors — and that awareness itself can be corrosive.

This is not to say earlier generations were spared. Many millennials—especially the “Very Online” ones — remember stumbling into dark corners of the internet. A number of millennials have a story about encountering pedophiles on Yahoo! Messenger or Kik, receiving unsolicited shock images or seeing gore on LiveLeak. What’s changed is the scale and proximity. The once-subterranean edges of the internet have expanded and more people are online. The odds of encountering something horrific haven’t been nil for many years. 

It’s easy for a teenager — precocious, angst-ridden, maybe lonely — to slip from observer to desensitized participant. At the mild end of the continuum, they see grotesque content. At the extreme end, networks like 764 deliberately cause them to harm themselves and others. In the Washington Post report, they recounted a story of a girl who was goaded into killing a hamster on stream, with one participant threatening her to bite its head off. But even those not technically “groomed” may emulate the cruelty they see, either to fit in or to gain the twisted social capital it confers online.

The phrase “virtual molestation” may feel jarring, but I believe it captures what is happening: a violation of psychological and emotional boundaries through pervasive, unwanted exposure to brutality, including sexual content. Like physical world molestation, it doesn’t happen to everyone. Over time, these exposures numb young people to suffering and warp their sense of right and wrong. It’s hardly surprising that some young people seek refuge in authoritarian ideologies — whether on the left or right. Authoritarian belief systems can offer a comforting structure amid what feels like a moral freefall.

What’s to be done? 

A growing chorus of public intellectuals, cultural critics and trend forecasters insist that we must log off the internet (or suggest that we are already logging off). It seems like every day I see another Substack essay or book urging us to give up our smartphones. This call to unplug is also, for some, good business sense: as the online market grows louder and more frenetic, it becomes advantageous to make space. It happens for the same reason people are consolidating into networks or bundling, there are simply too many voices. Plus, as the Covid-era internet oversaturation implodes, there’s a profitable niche in selling alternatives, like membership clubs.

Still, there’s something real at the heart of all of this. Yet perhaps logging off completely may become a luxury: Marc Andreessen’s description of “reality privilege” hovers in the background when I think of this. To log off requires a stable physical reality that not everyone has anymore — the internet, for many people, can still be a giant step up from their immediate environment, even at its worst.

 Rupnow’s tragedy, tangled as it is, will likely not be a national turning point — at least not on school shootings. Our collective attention is too short, and the details are already too messy. It will become an urban legend among certain online subcultures and true crime enthusiasts, just like the suicide of Sol Pais. However, the Madison, Wisconsin, shooting and the reaction shows the spectrum we now live on: some scramble to disconnect and find solace offline, some remain trapped in fourteen-hour screen times, and others — like Rupnow may well have — hit the bottom of the internet rabbit hole.