Warning: This article contains references to allegations and accounts of rape and murder. Please read with care.
It’s not often that the general public takes the side of a murderer, but there are exceptions. Like when a little girl and her brothers enact justice on the man who abused her.
This particular case is currently making the rounds on TikTok, and the opinion is universally sided with the 14-year-old victim and heaping hate on the since-killed man who raped her. At the head of the pack is creator Madison (@imadisoncity), who gleefully responded to the report with the exact energy tossed toward rape victims without fail.
She makes some great points too. Addressing the video solely to those who are “mad at the 14-year-old girl for hanging the man who assaulted her without giving him a chance to have a fair trial,” Madison pointed out that “we don’t know what he was wearing.”
After all, this guy didn’t even “have a protective neck brace on.” At that point, he’s practically asking to be hanged. Not to mention the question of why he was “alone in the first place,” and the fact that, now that things have gone public, “he’s just acting like a victim.” At the end of the day, Madison — and a weighty bulk of commenters — just can’t “understand why he’d put himself in that situation in the first place.”
It’s a stirring thing to see the horrible, warped logic so often used against rape victims instead wielded against their attackers, and Madison’s viewers were more than on board. Her comment section is rife with stellar takeaways, all framed as blistering accusations and whataboutisms directed the rapist’s way.
“She has a whole future ahead of her, don’t ruin that,” one commenter said, harkening back to the arguments used in Brock Turner’s trial. The comments are all discomfiting gold, leaning on age-old arguments to flip the script on the rapist.
“Did he say no? Did he say it strongly, or was it just a token no, and he really meant yes?”, “I heard from all the girl’s friends that she would never do that, I think he’s just making things up.”, “Does he have any proof?”, “I’m pretty sure the body has ways of shutting that whole thing down when they’re hanged against their will.”
The blistering response showcases the long-since lost patience the general public has in regard to sexual assault. There’s not a person to be found in the comments who isn’t reveling in Madison’s video or the scathing responses delivered by dozens of other fed-up TikTokers.
The case Madison is referencing appears to originate in Sweden, and she has just a few details wrong. The girl in question was, in this case, actually 15 at the time of her rapist’s death, and it wasn’t actually her who killed him — it was her brothers. The 15-year-old’s three older brothers joined with her boyfriend — who was also 15 at the time — and together lured the rapist, a taxi driver, into the woods with the promise of sexual favors from the same girl he’d abused. They then overpowered him and hung him, apparently attempting to make his death look like a suicide.
Mobile phone conversations proved their involvement in the murder and all three brothers went on to face charges, with the eldest being given a life sentence. It’s a tricky case, and it’s easy to draw a comparison to the 2022 Iowa sex trafficking case, which is a harsh example of the failures of our justice system.
In that case, a 14-year-old girl who’d been sex trafficked attacked and killed one of her rapists, and faced harsh sentencing as a result. Even though she was a victim, she was handed a five-year prison sentence alongside a monetary fine — this girl was ordered to pay $150,000 to the family of the man who raped her. If that’s justice, we truly are doomed.
With instances like that haunting the justice system, it’s little surprise that Madison found so much support on TikTok. We live in a harsh, bitter world, and it’s making for harsh, bitter people. Those people are fed up with the failures of justice systems across the globe, so can you really blame them when they take matters into their own hands?