Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning
It was supposed to be a sweet moment between a basketball star and her young fan. And it was, it absolutely was — that is, until certain men on the internet saw it, and ruined everything.
What happened next was a chain reaction: an internet cesspool of hateful comments, a Midwestern T-shirt store coming to the rescue, a $1,000 reward, a Boston-based reporter flying into town, a troll unmasked, and finally, a meeting between the little girl and her online bully.
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On Jan. 22, 2025, Emily and Priscilla Rebollozo brought their six-year-old daughter Kamdyn, their three-year-old son, and their toddler twin boys to Hilton Coliseum in Ames, Iowa, to watch the Iowa State women’s basketball team take on BYU. In a state that has no pro teams in any sport, Iowa’s college teams — in particular, women’s basketball — have become the epicenter of local sports fandom. It began with Caitlin Clark’s dominance during her tenure at the University of Iowa, which saw the school’s arena go from empty seats to sold-out crowds. That elevated a new class of rising basketball stars in the state — among them, Audi Crooks. Crooks is a powerful center who averages 25 points a game for Iowa State. She’s also a hometown girl who gives back to her community and is beloved by locals, including the Rebollozos.
The Rebollozos got to the game early that day so Kamdyn could show Crooks her new T-shirt. Yellow with maroon lettering, Iowa State colors, it read: “Smile like Audi.”
Kamdyn had been going through a tough time the year prior, getting bullied at school for her weight. But standing in front of Crooks, she beamed with pride. It was such a lovely moment that Tommy Birch, a sports reporter for the Des Moines Register, took a picture and posted it on X. In the photo, Crooks, her back to the court, is talking to Kamdyn, taking her seriously as a fan and, most importantly, a human being.
The family settled in to watch the game. Iowa won over BYU, 82-59. Crooks scored 24 points.
After the game, a friend texted Emily to say, “Kam is famous!” Emily, who had deleted X from her phone long ago, had to re-download the app to see that the picture had gone viral.
The Rebollozos don’t live their lives online. Their world is diapers and snack time, work and family. That’s why Emily didn’t think twice before handing her daughter the phone so Kamdyn could see how many people loved her.
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As Kamdyn scrolled through the replies, she asked Emily, “What’s a diet?” mispronouncing the word di-eet. She was only six, after all.
Emily grabbed the phone and looked at the replies. The first one she saw was a picture of a mother cow and a baby cow, posted by someone using the name “Howard Stevens, CPA.” It got worse. A lot worse.
“2 fat bitches”
“And this is why Iowa State fans who promote Audi’s lifestyle should be deported. Little kids think it’s cool to be overweight since Audi is.”
“Tell that ‘fan’ to lay off the happy meals”
“I’m surprised Audi didn’t try to eat her.” (Howard Stevens.)
“Who weighs more, her or Audi Crooks?” (Howard, again.)
When they got home, Emily went into her room and shut the door so Kamdyn couldn’t see her crying. She tried to defend her daughter online, and others did, too, but that just made the trolling worse. Birch, the Register reporter, did eventually reach out and offer to take the photo down, but Emily knew it wouldn’t help. This was an internet pile-on. Like flies on carrion, you couldn’t make them go away.
That night, after the kids were in bed, Emily opened the app again. There is a kind of morbid curiosity to watching the internet spiral into hatred. It feels like hearing people talk about you in a restroom when they think you aren’t there.
Crooks is often the target of racist and fatphobic comments, has been ever since she was an 8th-grade basketball star at her small high school. Once, an Iowa State Cyclones fan account posted a picture of Crooks at the state fair with a steer, and the onslaught of hateful comments that followed was too much; the picture disappeared. One of the trolls screenshotted it and bragged about getting it deleted. He was proud of his work.
Common advice is to just ignore it. To walk away. Don’t let it get to you.
But it does get to you, eventually.
THE REBOLLOZOS AND Crooks were already friends before the trolling incident, bonded by another cruel fan encounter. The family had met Crooks at the Ames farmers market in July of 2024, when the couple’s twins were just two weeks old. They’d brought Kamdyn to get her shirt signed by Crooks, who was there with Mackenzie Hare, another Iowa State basketball player. The Rebollozos struck up a conversation with Hare and Crooks, who asked to hold the babies. Hare is also a twin; they had a lot to talk about.
While they were chatting, Emily recalls that an older man walked up to them. “I don’t want to be derogatory,” he began. The Rebollozos are a two-mom family, and Iowa is a deep-red state, with anti-LGBTQ book bans in schools. Emily braced herself. Then the man looked at the baby in Crooks’ arm and said, “Your baby’s ugly.”
Emily was shocked. Everyone stared in silence at the man’s rudeness. When he walked away, Crooks and Hare apologized as if they were to blame. Emily recalls them saying, “We’re really sorry. We couldn’t really say what we wanted to say. We have to act a certain way.” Meaning that as Iowa State basketball players, they are representatives of the team in public and held to a higher standard of conduct. They couldn’t tell that man exactly what they thought of him. Instead, they told the Rebollozos that they would babysit.
For the past two years, Emily and Priscilla have had members of the Cyclones team over for food and family time, with Crooks babysitting in return. The couple don’t consider themselves mother figures to the college girls, who are roughly just a decade younger than them. But maybe they’re like aunts or older sisters. Either way, they are family. And the Rebollozos try never to miss a game.
For Kamdyn, Crooks isn’t just her hero; she’s her friend. And that friendship has meant a lot to her because of the bullying she’s suffered at school. One girl told Kamdyn she was adopted since she has two moms. (Kamdyn is not adopted.) Another called her fat in the lunch line. Eventually, she stopped wanting to go to dance class and put on a leotard because she was afraid of the comments that kids might make.
Now, Emily could see not just the hatred toward her own child, but a glimpse of what Crooks deals with every day. A 2024 NCAA study found that female basketball players receive three times as many threats as their male counterparts — many of them sexualized, racist, or both. Add to that Crooks’ physical presence: In a country that wants women to be lily-white and Ozempic-tiny, she is big, strong, and powerful, unafraid of taking up space. And she is Black. In America, that can be a recipe for punishment, online or otherwise.
Crooks takes the bullying in stride, but even she was shocked by the way commenters attacked Kamdyn, too. “The harassment that I get is disgusting, but I know that I signed up to be in the public eye,” Crooks said in a text message. “Kam is an innocent little girl standing next to her idol who was caught in the line of fire. I have never been more disgusted in my life.”
As Emily scrolled through each post, some telling her daughter to lay off the McDonald’s and calling her a horrible parent, she surmised the harassment was not just from anonymous bots, but from men who lived in the community. She guessed this because of the way they talked about women’s bodies, sexualizing and degrading them. She also noted, by going through their posting history, that they posted a lot about Hawkeye sports, often negging Iowa State fans in a way only locals know how to do.
Emily wanted accountability. If they were going to taunt her daughter’s face, she wanted to see theirs. That night, Emily slid down the internet’s black hole. She clicked on the profiles, all seemingly fake, of the trolls who had commented the most on the image of Kamdyn and Crooks. She identified a cohort of accounts that seemed to coordinate their attacks: Howard Stevens, Tony Jacobson, Hawkeye Harry, Dale Edwards, Coardelle Doyle, Cody Schrader, and Hawkeye Enjoyer.
Here is what she noticed:
They posted about going to class at the University of Iowa, whose mascot is the Hawkeyes.
They loved to harass Iowa State players and fans.
They bragged about being banned for violating X’s terms and conditions, those that restrict advocating for self-harm and threatening violence.
When they expressed political opinions, those opinions were all right-wing.
They loved to post POV pictures of streams of urine going onto bathroom floors and walls, anywhere but the toilet.
In one video posted by Hawkeye Enjoyer, a stream of pee hits a bathroom wall at Hickory Park restaurant in Ames, not far from the Rebollozo home. These were not bots, Emily concluded. They weren’t accounts based in China. These were human beings in her state, in her own town. Emily decided she needed help.
THE NEXT DAY, EMILY reached out to a local T-shirt company called Raygun. It may seem random. But if you live in Iowa, you understand.
Raygun is more than a T-shirt shop; it’s a blue stronghold in a red state. It brands itself as the “greatest store on earth” — a cheeky slogan for a cheeky place that trades in cheeky shirts that spoof Midwestern culture, politics, geography, and more. They have a shirt that reads: “Dear America, sorry about Charles Grassley.” When Donald Trump called supermodel Chrissy Teigen a “filthy-mouthed wife,” they made a T-shirt with those words on it.
Raygun was founded by Iowa native Mike Draper. He started selling shirts when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and grew the business into a mini T-shirt empire with 11 stores across the Midwest. A lot of Raygun’s merchandise traffics in shitposting internet culture, but from a liberal point of view. For example, they sell a shirt that reads, “Is he dead yet?” — seemingly a reference to the president. (For legal purposes, who can really say?) Another shirt featured Elon Musk in a hot dog bun and the phrase “Elon Musk is a weiner.”
In a shitposting world, Draper isn’t afraid to shitpost in response. He’s defended criticism of his business, saying people just need to “have a sense of humor” about it. And not all of his merchandise is provocative. Raygun had also made that “Smile like Audi” shirt — the one Kamdyn was sporting in her photo with Crooks.
So, it makes sense that when Emily was spiraling about online bullies, she would reach out to a brand that she saw as fighting for her side. She sent the shop a DM, asking for help. Mike Draper replied personally to set up a call.
What came next was a plan.
If these Iowa fans were going to troll this young girl, with burner accounts, Draper would troll them right back. Using the Raygun account, he challenged them to show their faces: If “Howard Stevens” came into a Raygun store and outed himself, Draper would give him a check for $1,000. It’s a stunt he’d tried many times before, when people trolled the Raygun account, though no one had ever taken him up on the offer.
Emily says the plan made her feel like there was a community willing to stand up for her. Maybe, she admitted to me, Draper could be a little over the top. “But he kept saying, ‘If this was my kid, I’d want someone to do something.’”
On Jan. 23, the Raygun account posted a picture of the check and began calling out Howard Stevens and his swarm. An hour after the post went live, Stevens replied, “The tampon who runs their twitter account is beyond retarded.”
What came next was a back-and-forth between the troll group and the Raygun account. At one point, Stevens appeared to waver, asking Draper for the address to the store. But when another account commented, threatening to show up to Stevens’ business class at the University of Iowa, it seems he got scared. After all, this implied that someone knew Stevens’ real name and was close to outing him. Stevens briefly deleted the account. But it came back online hours later, with Stevens back to calling Draper a “pussy.”
IN THE WEEKS THAT followed, no one showed up to claim the money.
But Emily kept watching the trolls online. Not just their replies to the Raygun post, but everything they were posting, even the inane things about college life and drinking beer on patios. Emily does some part-time work for a private investigator, so she knows how to comb through social media meticulously. She dug through the replies, screenshotting and saving.
As she watched, she saw Stevens and his friends participate in an internet troll campaign focused on a student at the University of Mississippi, Mary Kate Cornett. After sports commentator Pat McAfee, who had never met Cornett, amplified a false rumor that she had slept with her boyfriend’s father, the story traveled far and wide. Cornett was soon lost in an onslaught of harassment. Notes were slipped under her dorm door, and people left her nasty voicemails, text messages, and emails. (McAfee later apologized, both publicly and to Cornett and her family, for his role in perpetuating the rumor, saying he “deeply regrets the pain that was caused.”) Stevens joined in briefly, screenshotting a DM he’d sent Cornett on Instagram and posting it online. The DM appeared to be supportive, but he also mocked her in posts to his friends: “Please help, I’m being cyberbullied because I fucked my boyfriend’s dad.”
Emily watched as the same accounts that had harassed Kamdyn made racist comments about immigrants, called women “whores,” and told people to “kill themselves.” Stevens and his friends commented with a wood emoji under pictures of girls. Not women, girls. The emoji meant “would,” as in, they would fuck her if given the chance. Also, it’s a double entendre for a boner. Get it?
Emily noticed something else, too. Stevens and his friends, although they remained anonymous, posted pictures of college professors and students — creeper shots of real people, seemingly taken and posted without consent. Sometimes they’d call the people in the photos “retarded” or “gay.”
At least when someone comes up to you at a farmers market and insults your baby, you see their face. You can avoid them if you see them again. You can say to your friends, “That’s the asshole who insulted my baby.” But when it’s done anonymously, it could be anyone. Your neighbor. A student. The guy following you a little too closely in the aisle at the grocery store.
ON FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2025, a man walked into the Des Moines Raygun store with a cameraman (really, just a friend toting video equipment). The man had the same face as the guy in Stevens’ profile picture. He said he was there for his $1,000.
It had been two and a half months since Draper had posted the picture of the check. Stevens’ picture was still on a bulletin board next to a sign that read “Raygun’s ‘Too Scared to Take Our Money Hall of Fame.’”
The man’s name was Billy Baker, and no, he wasn’t Howard Stevens. He is a features writer for The Boston Globe. And he was there to figure out why his face was all over the internet. A month prior, he’d gotten an email alerting him that his likeness was being used by an account that had harassed a little girl, and some T-shirt store in Iowa had put a $1,000 bounty on the true identity behind the account. It was a weird email for anyone to receive.
Baker got online to confirm. Sure enough, it was his face right next to Howard Stevens’ bio, which read: “Father, divorced 💔💍, self made man who enjoys talking ball, 134 connections on Linkedin, Hawkeyes 🐥, Vikings, #skol”. And sure enough, that account had been harassing a six-year-old girl.
The picture was an author photo taken for the jacket of the book Baker wrote about male loneliness. Some online sleuths had discovered it and assumed, incorrectly, that he’d been the guy trolling Kamdyn. Baker did a little internet sleuthing of his own to determine Howard Stevens’ identity, and then he set off to Iowa to set the record straight.
“I flew across the country to confront Mike Draper,” Baker tells me. “I assumed he would apologize [for escalating things], and then we would go grab a beer.” He adds of Stevens, “Finding the kid was a last-minute bonus that literally came together the night before our flight.”
Baker and his friend arrived in Iowa on April 2. The next morning, they walked into a class at the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Business that Stevens had posted pictures from. When Stevens saw Baker, he panicked and fled the room.
Stevens did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. But one of his friends, another troll, who went by the screenname “Tony ‘Real Steel’ Jacobsen,” wrote a Notes app story that he tweeted on April 4 and later deleted. In that note, screenshots of which were shared with Rolling Stone, he explained that Stevens had created the X account in 2023 to “cause havoc on the internet at both the high school and collegiate level.” When making the account, he Googled “random guy,” saw Baker’s picture, and used it for his fake profile.
According to the Notes app post, when Stevens left class that day, he ran back to his house and started Googling Iowa’s media laws to see if he could be sued for anything. But Baker reached Stevens by phone and assured him that he wasn’t interested in punishment or revenge; he just wanted to understand what was going on.
The two men met face-to-face at Stevens’ college house. Baker says, “The kid was very apologetic.” He accepted the apology, but says he told Stevens, “If that little girl were my kid, I’d hold your head under water until the bubbles stopped.”
Baker says he also told Stevens that he owed Kamdyn and the Rebellozos an apology. And Stevens agreed.
After they talked, Stevens and his friends took Baker out to a bar. In a picture from that day that Stevens posted online, he covers his face with a photoshopped cutout of Baker’s face; Baker is next to him, face uncovered, throwing up two peace signs. Another man, apparently one of the trolls, covers his face with his anonymous account’s profile picture.
The next day, Baker and his friend drove to Des Moines to speak with Draper. But when they got to the store, Draper wasn’t in. Baker explained to the store manager how he’d found out about the $1,000, about how his face had been used without his knowledge. How he’d been an innocent bystander caught up in this whole mess. How he was owed an apology. The employees apologized, and one wrote him a check for $1,000. Baker took the check and left, leaving behind his contact information.
The following day, Baker was back home in Boston when he received an email from Draper asking him to collaborate on a podcast about cyberbullying. (Baker notes, “The email did not contain an apology.”) In the meantime, the swarm of online trolls in the Raygun thread got bolder and meaner. They claimed that Baker had found them “hilarious” and that he’d given them the $1,000. Baker says, “That is simply not true. I used it to pay for the trip.”
Draper was furious. He started sending Baker emails demanding to know what he did with the money, accusing Baker of misrepresenting himself. Draper threatened to get lawyers involved and talk to Baker’s editors at the Globe. Draper doesn’t deny any of this. He showed me an email he sent to Baker on April 8, where he wrote, “My rage is that these dudes seem to think that you are their buddy and that we are the standard ‘libtards’ mad at Twitter trolls for no reason.”
Eventually, the two men talked on the phone. It didn’t go well. Draper accused Baker of downplaying troll behavior. Baker accused Draper of being another troll himself.
In the end, Baker says, he told Draper he’d urge Stevens again to apologize to Kamdyn and the Rebollozos.
ONE NIGHT A COUPLE of days later, Draper got a call from a blocked phone number, which went straight to voicemail. He sent the voicemail to Emily, who later posted it online.
“Hey Mike, this is, I guess, Howard Stevens. I just talked to Billy or whatever. He told me to call you. If you’re willing to call me back, I’m at work. You can call me back late tonight or pretty much anytime tomorrow. But yeah, I kind of wanna talk and own up to, I guess, like, my, like Twitter account or whatever. And see if there’s anything me or anybody else can hopefully do to smooth things over. I guess, as you probably know, that we all, like, all deactivated our accounts. So, yeah, I guess. Just call me back probably tomorrow. I’ll probably call you again tomorrow since I think I blocked my number.”
But Stevens never called back.
When Draper texted Baker in a second attempt to coordinate a conversation between Stevens and the Rebollozos, Baker said he was done being involved.
A few days later, the trolls deleted their accounts. But it wasn’t enough. Because in the middle of all of this was a little girl who had been bullied by a group of men, and her mother wanted an apology.
If Baker could find Stevens, then Emily and Draper decided they could, too. She combed through Stevens’ posts and sent them to Draper on a jump drive. Iowa is a small state. And someone always knows someone. Stevens had posted a picture of his laptop on a porch, and just beyond the porch was a street. One of the people helping Draper recognized the street. Draper hired a P.I. who went to the street and found a house with a matching porch. He then ran the plates on the cars in the driveway and found Stevens, who did, in fact, appear to be a 21-year-old male business student at the University of Iowa.
Draper emailed. He sent a letter. Stevens didn’t reply. On April 22, he sent a letter to Stevens’ parents. And then, on April 29, he sent Stevens a letter, a copy of which has been reviewed by Rolling Stone, listing precise steps he could take to make things right:
Stevens needed to sit down for an interview for a podcast Draper was planning to make about the incident.
He had to reactivate the Howard Stevens X account, post an apology, leave it up, post a video of himself cleaning a toilet, and go through his whole account and apologize to everyone he’s trolled in the past two years.
Stevens had to get his troll friends to take the above steps, too.
Stevens and his friends needed to apologize to Kamdyn in person.
If Stevens checked off all the items on the list, Draper wrote, he would remove him from his “People to Destroy or Dwell on for the Next 10 Years List.”
Draper also lectured Stevens on how to apologize (“I know apologizing sounds like a cry-baby thing. But it is actually pretty empowering when done correctly. Here is what I mean: Before you write these apologies put yourself in the headspace of a father who sees his little girl being bullied by 20-somethings in college”) and threatened to make a video of all of Stevens’ worst tweets and send it to everyone at the business school where Stevens was a student, maybe post it online, if the steps he’d outlined were not taken.
Sure, maybe it was a little over the top. But so were Stevens’ posts.
At first, Stevens and his friends complied with Draper’s demands.
Stevens called Emily and apologized. He agreed to meet with Kamdyn and promised to bring two of the other young men who had also participated in the harassment.
But as soon as Stevens and his friends began posting their apologies, their online friends turned on them. “Worse than 9/11” replied one account to a video of a toilet being cleaned. “I’d rather kill myself than do what Howard Stevens CPA is doing RN” wrote another. Others accused Stevens of being censored by the “woke mob.”
One day into the apology tour, Stevens and his friends deleted their accounts again.
And then, Draper got a letter from a lawyer.
The letter, dated May 1, 2025, sent from Angela Campbell at Dickey, Campbell, & Sahag Law Firm in Des Moines, accused Draper of extortion and demanded that he cease and desist all contact with Stevens.
That letter was sent just days before the Rebollozos were supposed to meet with Stevens.
On Sunday, May 4, Emily and Kamdyn went to a coffee shop near their home to meet Stevens. Kamdyn brought a pink teddy bear, the bear’s tiny beach bag, and a little box of kinetic sand. Small treasures that a child holds onto for safety and comfort.
Stevens had brought reinforcements, too: his parents and his lawyer.
Emily was flustered and scared. She called Priscilla, who had stayed home with the other kids; she wanted help. Priscilla changed plans and began making her way to the shop. Meanwhile, Emily and Kamdyn sat down with Stevens. Emily doesn’t recall much of the apology. It was generic and bland. But she does recall how Kamdyn stood up for herself. She told Stevens how much he hurt her. She asked him why he did it.
He stumbled through his apology, Emily recalls. He’d made the account in high school; he didn’t think about how it might hurt others. He regrets and regrets and regrets.
As the apology was wrapping up, Priscilla finally walked in, and then, as a family, Emily, Priscilla, and Kamdyn left.
I AM NOT NAMING Stevens, even though I know who he is. I reached out multiple times to offer him a chance to tell his side of the story and didn’t hear back. I don’t want another mob. Another swarm of people seeking some sort of justice for whatever crime they feel was committed against whoever they feel is the victim in this situation.
In a story this complicated, where everyone from a little girl to a grown man from Boston is begging for their humanity, even Howard Stevens deserves some, too.
So, here is what I know:
I know Stevens created the account in high school so he and his friends could say things without being observed or judged.
I know a lot of his posts were about sports. This happens often: A boy loves a sports team. He bonds with other boys through sports, through jokes, through teasing and taunting, seeking approval from one another, a cheap laugh at the expense of a player, another fan, or someone online. Then, sometimes, it gets out of control.
I know Howard Stevens is just a guy who wants to belong.
I know he is not the only one doing this.
Here is what I don’t know:
I don’t know at what point performing for friends and rooting for your team falls over the edge into something darker.
I don’t know at what point we forget that the person on the other end of our comments is a human being.
I don’t know at what point our rage becomes more important than the object of our fury.
I don’t know when comments turn into a swarm, turn into a mob, turn into a cancellation.
I don’t know if you fight a mob with a mob. And is the mob you agree with a good mob? Or is it still bad because it’s a mob?
I don’t know how to raise a child so he doesn’t do this. I wish I did.
MORE THAN A YEAR later, the Rebollozos still show up for Iowa State women’s basketball. At a January game against Oklahoma State, they had to move sections because the fans shouting abuse at Crooks got so bad, their son, now four, was shouting back, “No, hers not. Hers a nice person!” He wanted to protect his friend.
When they went to a game against the University of Iowa, Emily felt uncomfortable, looking around, wondering if any of the men around her were the ones who had harassed her daughter. Reflecting on everything that happened, Emily wrote on her blog: “When it comes to aggression, we are raising men; when it comes to accountability, we are raising little boys.”
Emily knows Kamdyn still thinks about the bullying, too. Still deals with it at school. Writing on her blog, Emily said, “Kamdyn shows flashes of aggression and explains it with ‘if people are mean to me, I can be mean to them.’”
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