When news recently broke that a former Cornell University student had accused seven men of drugging and gang-raping her at a fraternity party in 2024, and was suing the university for allegedly failing to protect her, comedy writer and internet gadfly Toby Morton jumped into action. He purchased domains for all the men named in the complaint and launched a website to share the story of the woman known as Jane Doe, her lawsuit, and Cornell’s response. “With the story of what happened, the screenshots of the guys saying, ‘free pussy upstairs,’ you know, I immediately went to GoDaddy,” he tells Rolling Stone, referring to a reported detail from the lawsuit. He also acquired domains connected to university officials; the names will all redirect to the main website, TheCornell7.org.
Morton, who once wrote for South Park, has been snapping up domain names to spoof politicians and other public figures with parody websites since 2020. The furore around his fake campaign website for U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (tagline: “Let’s Keep It White”) made him internet famous in 2022; he’s since amassed over a million social media followers on Instagram and Threads.
As public outrage rippled across the nation, prosecutors reopened an investigation into the gang rape allegations in response to Doe’s lawsuit; at the time of the alleged incident, no charges were filed. On Sept. 21, five days after Doe filed her complaint with the New York Supreme Court, the university’s student paper The Cornell Daily Sun published an editorial, “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” naming all seven accused and blasting the university for its response. The piece outlines how, according to the lawsuit, after the alleged assault, the accused perpetrators were temporarily suspended and then offered the chance to ‘mitigate their conduct’ by submitting essays to the school. “Tackling sexual assault as an academic matter… offers no respite to the victims who have undergone physical and mental abuse,” the editors wrote. “This is not a dark chapter in Cornell’s history, it’s a morbid pattern.” Cornell did not respond to a request for comment, but denied that essay-writing was the “sole consequence” offered by the university to defendants in a Sept. 21 statement. The university has since agreed to outside review of its response to the alleged rape, according to a post from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.
After Morton’s followers alerted him to the story, he launched TheCornell7.org, posting a statement on the website that “accountability should not disappear when the headlines do.” The site — which he says has gotten more than 5 million hits so far — features photos of the seven Chi Phi fraternity members and the details of each man’s role in the alleged drugging and assault as outlined in Doe’s complaint. Morton says former Cornell students have given him names of others in the fraternity group Snapchat, which allegedly was used to invite more men into the room with Doe. He’s in the process of trying to verify them with the help of his lawyer. He plans to post more information, including quotes from the District Attorney who declined to press charges, as it becomes available. So far he has not been in touch with Doe’s team. “The goal is not to be first,” he wrote on the site. “The goal is to build a record that can withstand scrutiny. This will take time. It will be careful. It will be documented. And there will be accountability.”
Morton announced the website on Instagram, where he goes by the handle @wordclown. His post, addressed to the accused men, tells them he owns domains in their names, and that he’s also going after “those employed at Cornell who gave you a break,” buying up URLs of their names, too. The disturbing details of Jane Doe’s alleged drugging and assault convinced him of the need to keep the story in the public eye. He shares pushback on social media, including comments like: “How do you know if [Jane Doe] is telling the whole truth since you’re just a satirist?”
“I’m verifying documents, photographs, timelines, and records,” Morton replied. “You’re typing ‘But what if lady lie?’ into a website contact form… May you someday encounter evidence with the same enthusiasm you currently reserve for doubting women.” In response to messages telling him he’s a satirist, not a journalist, Morton wrote, “This is true. But this makes me more dangerous. I have no limits. No boundaries. Nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”
It’s not the first time Morton has caused controversy. He’s made a name for himself stoking outrage with satirical websites that beat people who fail to secure their domain names to the punch. AttorneyGeneralPaxton.com lampoons Texas AG Ken Paxton as a “Criminal – Adulterer – Racist,” with pages dedicated to criminal investigations into the lawmaker, his extramarital affairs, and the significant racial disparities in his prosecutions of Texas voters. StandWithBooker.com mocks New Jersey Senator Cory Booker for being “tone deaf” by promoting his 2026 memoir with a book tour in March and April, when Congress was in session. He parodied televangelist Joel Osteen with OsteenChurch.com: “God is light; In Him there is no darkness… but in Joel there is dimmed lighting, premium seating, and a three-drink minimum.”
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Morton started building parody sites to call attention to politicians in a way that would outlast the social media algorithm. “There were a million jokes and angry posts disappearing into everyone’s feeds,” he says. “A website felt more permanent.” He has tapped into fury at MAGA with sites like DraftBarronTrump.com and TheTrumpObituary.com. After launching the latter site last July (tagline: “A Living Obituary and a Future Memorial”), he found himself explaining satire to law enforcement officers who showed up at his door. “They said, ‘There’s concern about your website about the president of the United States,’” Morton recalls. “I guess they sent local authorities because it wasn’t like the big FBI coming from Washington or anything.” The cops left after Morton assured them that he wasn’t predicting Trump’s death, but he was left shaken by the incident. “It was kind of scary because I knew I was protected, and I didn’t do anything wrong, but there was that little feeling in my gut where I was like, shit, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Morton has created sites to drag White House staffer Stephen Miller (“As Racist as Racists Can Be”) and Hilton hotels for accommodating ICE officers (“aligning comfort with authority”). Predicting that Donald Trump would attempt to affix his name to the Kennedy Center, he snapped up TrumpKennedyCenter.org in August 2025, which he says got millions of views (the site is currently experiencing hosting issues). He crowdsources funding for the sites, occasionally digging into his own pocket to pay for his spoof campaigns, often with accompanying billboard installations. In 2023, he targeted Moms for Liberty with a mobile electronic billboard outside the right-wing organisation’s Florida conference. “It had the website name and a Hitler moustache, and it just kept driving by as people were waiting to get in.” A QR code on the billboard took people to the site, where Morton was monitoring traffic. “There were tons of people looking at it,” he chuckles.
As his work started getting more attention, Morton’s focus expanded. “It became less specifically about politicians and more about power and accountability, institutions, and people who take advantage of others,” he says. Eventually, that led him toward stories that affected him more personally, “particularly with survivors who felt ignored.” His first public callout of an alleged sexual offender was in 2025, when a 22-year-old former Brigham Young University baseball starter named Candon Dahle pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a young girl over a period of five years. The judge suspended his sentence and placed him on probation. After Morton announced his purchase of Dahle’s domain name on Instagram, he received an anonymous offer of $10,000 from someone trying to buy the domain name to prevent him from building the website (he did not accept the money). He hopes to have it up soon.
Last summer, after Oklahoma teen Jesse Mack Butler pleaded no contest to raping and strangling two teen girls and walked free without serving jail time, Morton purchased JesseMackButler.org. “Everyone Is In Danger While He’s Free,” a banner says on the site, with a summary of the 11 criminal counts lodged against Mack, and a “What Happened?” page that outlines the assaults according to the families of the two girls. That campaign upset some Morton supporters; one messaged him, “I’ve requested my $200 to be returned from Venmo. You’re straying from politics and going after families of rapists who have gone through the court system. Please stick to politics.” Morton posted it along with his reply: “I’ve requested Venmo return your $200 so you can put it toward a helmet. You appear to be navigating nuance without one. Please stick to simpler activities.”
Morton, 55, grew up in Colorado as the youngest of nine kids. He has no experience as a journalist; since a stint as a staff writer and voice actor on South Park in the early 2000s, he’s mostly made a living rewriting scripts for production companies. He’s currently developing a comedy series based on his online persona, “a single dad who goes after powerful people in the dark.” He points to his five-year-old son as a huge reason he’s driven to hold sex offenders accountable. “Someday, I want to be able to show him what his dad did when he saw something he believed was wrong,” he says. “I’m raising a little boy who is watching the kind of man his dad chooses to be. I want to give him an example worth watching.” Another motivating factor is the sheer number of messages he receives from sexual-assault survivors: “I’ve gotten hundreds of emails and DMs from women trusting me with their stories. It’s been incredibly overwhelming, and it’s also a catalyst to really get this [information] out there.”
He’s never been sued for defamation, but he’s pissed plenty of people off. After he launched EliseStefanik2022.com, a spokesperson for the congresswoman complained to the New York Post that his work is “a desperate attempt to gain acceptance from the radical left blue checkmark brigade.” Meanwhile, his social media followers cheer him on. “Fucking finally a man gets it,” one commenter said on a post about the Cornell site. Asked if he is worried about unleashing a mob, he answers simply: “The mob is already unleashed, despite what I do.”
What started as comic relief has morphed into real activism, which Morton says is gratifying. He doesn’t see the Cornell site as a dramatic departure from his political sites. “To me, it’s the same basic idea,” he says, “which is using satire and the internet to put sustained attention on people and institutions that I believe deserve scrutiny.”
Morton says he’s determined to continue exposing wrongdoing as he sees fit; he’s currently working on a site for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good. “I was making fun of politicians, and as things got more serious in the country, I just kept going; the saviours keeping my sense of humour are the trolls.”
From Rolling Stone US
