Obsidian/00.03 News/‘Call Me a Scammer to My Face’.md

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Date: 2023-02-24
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Link: https://www.thecut.com/article/inside-diy-rape-kit-startup-leda-health.html
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Parent:: [[@News|News]]
Read:: [[2023-02-24]]

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```button
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^button-CallMeaScammertoMyFaceNSave

 

# ‘Call Me a Scammer to My Face’

## Madison Campbell is determined to get DIY rape kits into survivors’ hands, no matter who tells her it’s a bad idea.

![](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/d12/f34/3b006ab51606d86e0096af9b7b8f91964f-leda-health-madison-campbell.rvertical.w570.jpg)

Photo: Gillian Laub

The headlines were bad. Vicious, even. “DIY Rape Kits Are a Terrible Idea, Says Basically Everyone,” Vice sniped. “The Misguided ‘MeToo Kit’ Asks Us to Accept the Inevitability of Sexual Assault,” wrote the executive director of a Boston rape crisis center. “The At-Home Rape Kit Start-up Is a Useless Mess,” this magazine scoffed. Nearly two years to the date after the Me Too movement erupted, 23-year-old Madison Campbell announced her plans to sell a product borrowing its name: MeToo Kits, an at-home alternative to the rape kits used in American hospitals nationwide.

The idea seemed so simple — after an assault, survivors could swab themselves for DNA in the comfort of their own home instead of being examined by a professional. Campbell was shocked by the blowback. She’d had dozens of meetings with lawyers, nurses, and investors prior to going public, she says, and insists the public furor was her first encounter with real criticism. Namely, that the kit would never be admitted in court; allowing survivors to collect it at home introduced too much risk of contamination. Her product couldn’t help survivors, critics said; if anything, it would exploit them. As a result, cease-and-desist letters and warnings from attorneys general came pouring in: Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Hawaii. “This company is shamelessly trying to take financial advantage of the ‘Me Too’ movement by luring victims into thinking that an at-home-do-it-yourself sexual assault kit will stand up in court,” one attorney general said in a statement. Still, it never occurred to Campbell to shut down. Her start-up was suddenly famous. Maybe if she went to Harvard’s campus and handed out the kits, she mused, she could make headlines for being arrested. “The amount of press we’re getting — people pay tons of money for it,” she said at the time. “And we got it for free.”

Three years later, Campbell has rebranded MeToo Kits as Leda Health and added new features, like Plan B, STI testing, and a 24/7 support line. After closing a $7 million fundraising round last year, the company brought on high-salary hires from Axios and the New York Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Campbell’s landed on best-of business lists, including the *Forbes* “30 Under 30,” and generated some much-needed friendly press after saying she wanted to give away 10,000 kits to those on “the frontlines of COVID” (though she never did) and shipped another thousand to a nonprofit organization in war-torn Ukraine (though it was unclear how it might use them).

What hasn’t changed, however, is the clientele: Leda currently has no paying customers. The kits have never been used in a court case. Leda’s last remaining partnership, a sorority chapter at the University of Washington, came to an abrupt halt after the state’s attorney general sent the company another cease-and-desist late last year (and lawmakers in the state are now trying to [ban](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legislature-considers-ban-on-at-home-sexual-assault-evidence-kits/) at-home kits entirely). The reality inside the company is equally tenuous. It is down to about ten employees, while ex-staffers — most of them young queer people of color — say Campbell created a chaotic, often hostile environment where boundaries were nonexistent.

Yet Campbell is aggressively optimistic for the CEO of a company with an unsellable, untested product. “Maybe it’s spiritual bullshit or whatever,” she says, waving her hands around her head, but “I’m a big believer that everything kind of happens for a reason.” Speaking from her boyfriend’s apartment in San Francisco, she gets philosophical when thinking about the adversity she’s faced. “Nothing is actually innately positive, and nothing is actually innately negative,” she says. “It kind of just sits, like, in the center.” After all, hasn’t she made it this far?

Campbell has a way of disarming people. At a slight five-foot-four, she has delicate features and the hint of a lisp that make her seem even younger than her 27 years. Her voice jumps an octave when she tells a secret or talks about attention she’s received. “The rape kit was just, like, this crazy late-night idea that somehow started a national outcry from attorneys general,” she says. And while she speaks with the rehearsed confidence of a TED Talk–er who has all her bullet points memorized, she’s also prone to wandering off-script. When we talk in early November, she’s not feeling well, wearing a bathrobe and a pale-pink headband that twists into bunny ears at the top. “I use it so I don’t get throw-up in my hair,” she says with a laugh.

Any media-savvy founder knows they need a great origin story, and when Campbell tells hers, it starts in a small suburb of Pittsburgh, where she was raised primarily by her mom in a Catholic, conservative family. Her dad wasn’t a huge presence in her life growing up, but she now considers him a friend. She learned the pleasures of questioning authority early on, arguing with her middle-school principal over the school’s dress code, which she found unnecessarily restrictive.

Campbell soon found musical theater. She enrolled in a performing-arts high school — “Like taking the theater kid to like the next geekiest level” — but her music teacher said that Campbell’s lisp, which gives her *S*’s a fuzzy, childlike quality, could be an issue in auditions. “My mom was like, ‘We’re not doing anything about that,’” she says. “‘We like Madison how she is.’” So she pivoted to dance, since “then I don’t have to open my mouth,” she says with a wry smile.

Those aspirations were cut short when she was diagnosed with thoracic-outlet syndrome, a painful nerve disorder that made performing impossible. She obsessively read medical research about her diagnosis and decided to major in public health and epidemiology at Hampshire College. Later, inspired by Elon Musk’s plans to populate Mars, she set out to study how diseases might spread on the planet, a field she dubbed “astroepidemiology.”

Like many undergrads, she tried on different identities. “Through my life, I have flip-flopped on a lot of the things that I believe in,” she says. Shortly after Campbell arrived on the lefty campus, she briefly shed her conservatism to become a “militant atheist.” A fall semester studying abroad, in Edinburgh, further shaped her worldview. Seeing the U.K.’s universal health-care system up close convinced her that Americans’ privatized health care, which had more choices, was superior. When she returned to the U.S., she was a libertarian.

Back at Hampshire, Campbell founded a Young Americans for Liberty chapter. In a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H37iVVVwJmQ) she made for the organization to show “one way to do activism on your campus,” she saunters through Barnes & Noble wearing a wavy red wig, slipping copies of the Constitution between pages of *The Communist Manifesto* and books by Bernie Sanders and Lena Dunham. (Sudden, dramatic hair changes, she says, “are a big part of who I am.”) She interned for the Charles Koch Institute and Senator Rand Paul’s PAC, though she remained committed to her goal of getting a Ph.D. in epidemiology and working at NASA. During her last semester, Campbell lost faith in the viability of that career path. Trump had cut NASA’s budget, and she was in an abusive relationship. She dropped out of school.

For a few months, “I was in a funk,” she says. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.” Campbell knew she wanted to create something singular and memorable but wasn’t really sure how to. “I like people that dream really big and have crazy ideas,” she said on a [podcast](http://www.thesocialchameleon.show/madison-campbell/), even if the execution “doesn’t always work.” She drew inspiration from Robert Greene’s *The 48 Laws of Power*, a Machiavellian self-help guide (Law 17: “Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability.”) After a short-lived attempt to run a start-up that connected software engineers in Nigeria with U.S. contracts, she pivoted to something more personal.

As Campbell tells it, the concept for Leda was sparked by McDonald’s French fries one night in 2019. When a former boyfriend found fry crumbs in her bed, he half-jokingly accused her of sharing the snack with another man. Campbell Googled whether it was possible to scientifically disprove infidelity and discovered at-home DNA test kits designed to do just that by following the same process used in hospital sexual-assault exams. The technology was there, so why not give at-home tests to survivors who were hesitant to visit a hospital? Campbell says she herself was raped in college by a friend who showed up at her dorm late one night and chose not to go to the hospital. She texted her proposition to Liesel Vaidya, her technical-project manager at the software-engineer start-up Iyanu. “It’s a great idea,” Vaidya responded. “If it works.”

Vaidya was one of Campbell’s first hires at Iyanu. As a Nepalese immigrant and recent college grad, she needed a job to stay in New York. She saw Campbell as a “true visionary” whose ideas are “out of the box.” “It might not make sense all the time,” the Leda co-founder and CTO says. “People like me, and the rest of the team, sort of round those things out.”

Campbell is persistent in a way [she admits](https://enterprenuer.org/founders/meet-madison-campbell-co-founder-of-leda-health/) “borders on delusion,” a quality she credits to her experience in high-school theater auditions. “Just because that one person doesn’t think you’re right for the part, you can’t let that get you down.” Within months of the French-fry epiphany, Campbell was cold-calling experts and investors to gauge whether her idea was viable. Though no kits existed yet, Campbell says she e-mailed her pitch to college presidents across the country, telling them about the company’s lofty goal of “fixing the sexual assault problem on campuses across the USA.” She expected a wave of interest. Instead, she received letters from 16 attorneys general — including six cease-and-desists — and six subpoenas. New Hampshire even tried [to ban](https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/01/23/bill-banning-sale-do-it/) the kits outright. Campbell, who had been accustomed to the warmth of entrepreneurial applause, was dunked in ice-cold bureaucracy.

Critics wanted her to slow down and better understand the problem. When sexual-assault advocate Leah Griffin spoke with Campbell about her idea in 2019, she recalls telling the CEO, “What you’re doing is wrong. What you’re doing will harm survivors.” (Campbell says Griffin did not voice her concerns at the time.) Nobody who works in the sexual-assault field thinks the current system is perfect. There is a [national shortage](https://www.rainn.org/news/congress-moves-address-critical-shortage-sexual-assault-nurse-examiners-rainn-partners) of sexual-assault nurse examiners (SANEs), and the backlog of rape kits in many states means results often take a while — or may never arrive. But advocates pointed out that the MeToo Kit wasn’t a practical solution to any of these issues. For one, it would charge survivors for a product that hospitals are required to provide at no cost. An at-home DNA test would also lack essential parts of an exam, like checking for injuries, testing for STIs, and connecting survivors to mental-health resources.

A few civil lawyers were in favor of at-home kits, at least in theory. “We need to support sexual-assault survivors in every way that we can,” says Sigrid McCawley, who represented victims suing Jeffrey Epstein. “If the choice is do nothing or do the at-home kit — my vote is for the kit.” But many experts didn’t think the evidence would be admitted in court, given the chain-of-custody issues that could be raised by a judge or the defense (who touched it? Where was it stored? Was it tampered with?). Nor would independent labs have access to CODIS, a database that helps identify repeat offenders.

Campbell characterized the onslaught of media attention following the cease-and-desists as threatening; she says a reporter “broke into” the NYU Future Labs, the co-working space where the MeToo Kits staff worked, looking for dirt on the company. Campbell says her lawyer advised her and Vaidya to stop taking the subway and that she lost 15 pounds off her 110-pound frame from the stress.

Which isn’t to say she didn’t talk to any reporter who would listen. She told them the kits [would be](https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/09/09/metoo-kit-rape-sexual-assault-diy-test-michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel/2232251001/) “tamperproof,” digitally timestamped, and could serve as a “[psychological deterrent](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20850965/me-too-kit-metoo-rape-sexual-assault)” to assault on college campuses. When these claims [were](https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/09/09/metoo-kit-rape-sexual-assault-diy-test-michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel/2232251001/) [critiqued](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/diy-me-too-rape-kit-founder-backlash-madison-campbell), she sometimes said it was unfair for anyone to criticize her product, which did not yet exist. “We haven’t even made the kit, so we can’t make any claims,” [she told](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/diy-me-too-rape-kit-founder-backlash-madison-campbell) BuzzFeed in the fall of 2019. “Every claim that we make is something that we think might be able to happen.”

The same chutzpah that made sexual-assault experts wary was catnip in start-up-land. At a Bay Area pitch-accelerator event, Campbell was introduced as a maverick: “Never in the history of Alchemist have we had as much controversy in any start-up,” the host said proudly. Her business idea, he said, “is not for the fainthearted, but this is for people who like revolutions.” Campbell strode onstage to the *Pirates of the Caribbean* soundtrack and raucous applause. “Sexual assault” was a “multibillion-dollar industry,” Campbell told the audience, and MeToo Kits would be its leader.

On the surface, her pitch had all the necessary elements: a personal story, a large problem, and a disruptive solution. While advocates were focused on the fine print, investors looked at the big picture. They wanted founders who dreamed up billion-dollar unicorns. Even if this particular idea failed, as those of most start-ups do, funding someone as tenacious and eccentric as Campbell was bound to pay off at some point.

Tom Allchurch, who once worked as a VP at Amazon, agreed to join MeToo Kit as an adviser amid all the controversy. He started working to combat sexual assault after his daughter was raped in high school, and he thought Campbell’s idea to disrupt the flawed legal system was “far more ambitious, far crazier, and far less likely to work” than anything Bezos had ever come up with. Allchurch was ultimately persuaded that it could be revolutionary. While some saw Campbell’s mission as reckless, Allchurch said the same had been said of Elon Musk’s ventures — a man who is “going to do more than any other human being on the planet to change climate.”

By early 2020, money was coming in. Bradley Tusk, a high-profile consultant who worked as Michael Bloomberg’s campaign manager and then as an Uber lobbyist, invested, and Ruca, the design agency whose clients include Amazon and *Vogue,* spearheaded a rebrand. Compared to Campbell’s Silicon Valley mentors, these new funders and advisers wanted the company to become a little more buttoned-up.

Ruca’s main task was to change the name of a start-up that many found insensitive. They landed on Leda Health, after the mythic Greek queen Leda, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan and gave birth to Helen of Troy. Campbell wanted a female figure as the company’s emblem — similar to Starbucks’ mermaid logo — and liked that the name “exemplified something that, quite literally, has been around forever.” The branding change also may have ended up disguising the company’s legal troubles; one of Leda’s second-round investors told the Cut she wasn’t aware the start-up had another name, or that it had received cease-and-desists, but she stands by the company.

Other investors were similarly uninterested in the finer details of Leda’s mission, like how the kit worked, what was in it, how it would be distributed, and whether any court would allow it. “I’d much rather back a project like this that fails than someone doing the next global photo-sharing app or something,” said Bong Koh, a Pennsylvania-based venture capitalist. “I look for mission-driven, scrappy, passionate entrepreneurs who don’t give up.” He first discovered Campbell on Twitter and, since the start-up was still in its early stages, didn’t feel the need to see the at-home rape kit before giving her “a very small amount” of funding. Nor did another angel investor who had no background in sexual-assault advocacy and wrote a $10,000 check. In fact, the investor saw his own ignorance as an advantage: he didn’t have the “conventional knowledge” that “would have prevented me from believing that it can work.” Sometimes it annoyed Campbell that potential investors didn’t seem interested in the inner workings of the actual business. After talking to a dozen venture capitalists in one week, she [tweeted](https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1462943070203224072): “Every single one asked me my relationship status. Nobody asked what our revenue is.”

In the spring and summer of that year, Leda Health began recruiting college students to fill out its staff, which worked remotely, apart from occasional New York–based meetups to talk strategy. New recruits worked for little (or for free) because they cared about Leda’s mission, especially as self-identified survivors.

Jae Ortiz was a 19-year-old NYU student when they applied, infuriated with the college’s handling of sexual assault, particularly concerning students of color. They were hired as an unpaid lobbying analyst, tasked with sharing their personal experiences with sexual assault in order to persuade government officials to allow Leda’s legally dubious services. Early position titles at the company meant relatively little, though, and shifted often. Ortiz soon moved from lobbying, to content creation, to director of the new holistic-services department. After spending six months working for free, they began receiving a small monthly stipend of around $1,000. Another former employee was a 19-year-old premed student when they were hired as an unpaid HR intern, though there was no one in charge of HR at the time.

Former employees considered a disorganized workplace a small price to pay for a part in Campbell’s vision. The premed student compared her to former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann: “She’s such a charismatic person and will make anyone who she talks to believe she’s going to change the world.” Her appeal was obvious on Twitter, where she gained followers with a mix of snarky start-up jokes and perfectly lit selfies. She [joked](https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1300474251460239361) about her partner’s “asscrack” showing during an investor call and posted a bikini-clad beach [photo](https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1493321724309360641) captioned “my conservatorship has ended.” At one point, she and Vaidya had “founder portraits” — taken at JCPenney with ’80s laser beams highlighting their oversize sweaters — that went viral (Reddit [co-founder](https://www.businessinsider.com/want-to-get-attention-of-vcs-try-80s-inspired-photoshoot-2021-3) Alexis Ohanian called them “spectacular”). “Everyone please as a piece of advice spend more time just shitposting on twitter I promise it’ll pay off,” she posted. Her DMs filled up with potential investors and suitors**.**

Campbell treated her employees like friends. She felt isolated during the pandemic, and they were the kind of people she would hang out with at a bar anyway. They dyed her hair, worked together from a four-bedroom house she rented in Palm Springs to ride out the pandemic, and recorded TikToks, awkwardly dancing to a Britney Spears song or doing [impersonations](https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1344331190975782913) of Erlich Bachman, a character on HBO’s *Silicon Valley.* “It’s really tough because, yes, there’s a dynamic of me as a boss,” she says. “But for the longest time, I didn’t really view myself as that at all.”

Her lack of boundaries, though at first endearing, soon became a problem at work. Ex-employees say she bought them food, fancy hotel rooms, and clothing, including lingerie. (“We’ve done nice things for company employees,” Campbell says.) They also say Campbell was overly forthcoming about her sex life and inappropriately curious about theirs. When Ortiz sent flowers to Campbell when she was out sick, the CEO speculated to another staffer that her employee had a crush on her. (“​​I would never be inappropriate with a colleague regarding their sex life or personal matters,” says Campbell, adding that the situation with Ortiz “could have been handled differently.”)

When addressing these criticisms, Campbell becomes somber and dutifully contrite. With a heating pad wrapped around her shoulders, she acts as vulnerable as she was, moments earlier, indestructible. “I’ve had to really change and try to learn from people that have built these companies before,” she says. “I think it’s gonna take many years because I did start this so young.”

By the end of 2021, Leda’s early evidence kit was finally camera-ready. It looked more like a Glossier product than a medical exam: a trio of slim teal-and-coral boxes full of swabs, intake forms, and a prepaid FedEx package. Leda’s companion app guided users through the DNA collection — which survivors can record on video, if they choose — and asked 21 questions involving consent, use of force, and a description of the incident. In a move to appease critics, the kits included a resource card that says “If you are able, it is always best that you go to a hospital for a comprehensive exam.”

Leda focused its efforts on soliciting partnerships with sorority chapters at colleges and universities. Kits were, for a brief period, available to students through a partnership with DoorDash, whose co-founder, Stanley Tang, was a Leda investor; the deal, which Campbell says sidestepped “official channels,” was later canceled.

Leda has had just two partnerships at the university level: Its first, with an Alpha Phi sorority chapter at USC, ended after protest from the on-campus sex-and-relationship resource center. More recently, in the fall of 2022, the company struck a deal with the University of Washington’s Kappa Delta sorority, whose members wanted help navigating drunken frat parties that often ended in hookups of questionable consent. Sorority members say they agreed to pay a fee of about $15 each per quarter for unlimited access to all of Leda’s services, including Plan B and rape kits stored in a lockbox in the sorority house. Compared to on-campus health services, the students said Leda’s offerings felt familial and warm. One sophomore described “sobbing” at the end of the company’s orientation. “I think it was just these women saying, ‘We’re here for you. Heal in the way you need to heal.’ It was one of the first times I felt heard.’”

It’s unclear whether there’s any survivor demand for the kits. In theory, completed kits are tested at Leda’s partner lab in Florida, though Campbell says only one kit has ever been tested. In its effort to ramp up support for its proposed university partnerships, Leda hired a 24/7 care team, most of them nurses with a forensic background, to provide virtual support and after-care to the company’s would-be customers. But no calls came in. “I don’t believe anyone has had any specific survivor contact at this point,” Deepa Ganesan, Leda’s clinical-operations manager, told the Cut in October. She said the six-member care team is paid an hourly rate to staff a line that never rings.

One of Leda’s Early Evidence Kits. Photo: Marcus McDonald

With the kits earning almost nothing for the company, healing circles and accountability circles geared toward self-identified perpetrators became, for a moment in time, Leda’s most promising moneymaker. Fewer than 100 customers ever participated in either of them, earning the company approximately $1,900. But Ortiz, who was tasked with building these programs, says the circles cost many more thousands of dollars in payments to facilitators.

Despite a $2.2 million fundraising round in 2021, and an additional $7 million Campbell says the company raised a year later, the company appeared to be cash poor. Campbell outsourced some of the company’s early bookkeeping to her mom, a certified CPA whom she called Leda’s “unofficial accountant,” and brainstormed different moneymaking options. As tech-world interest in cryptocurrency surged, she began pitching its app [as an ethereum product](https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/04/radical-ethereum-entrepreneurs-are-redefining-what-rape-kit-means/), claiming blockchain technology could be used to timestamp evidence collected in the kit. The company also spitballed about seeking investment from Harvey Weinstein, the convicted sex offender and former film producer. “What if we wrote to him and was like / If our kit existed, and you truly ~didn’t~ sexually assault anyone / this would prove your innocence / so fund us,” Campbell wrote Ortiz on Slack. “Tea,” Ortiz replied. (Leda never contacted Weinstein, and Campbell says she was joking: “Obviously we don’t move forward with every radical thought that comes up in a Slack-based brainstorming session.”)

In a summer 2022 Zoom call, Campbell told Ortiz about Leda’s dire financial reality: “We’re going to run dry. We almost ran dry earlier this year. There was a point in time where we had less than a hundred dollars in our corporate bank account. And myself and Liesel started taking out credit cards to make sure everybody got paid.”

Increasingly desperate to right their ship, Campbell and Vaidya hired Ilana Turko, a former prosecutor and senior counsel of the New York Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, as their VP of strategy. Turko had years of experience working on sexual violence within the system. She spearheaded trauma-informed programs in her work on the Domestic Violence Task Force and earmarked funds for specialized housing for crime-victim survivors and their families. Turko felt fellow advocates were closed off to innovation and says she was ready to try a new approach. Her first task at Leda was to clean house. “There was definitely a need for there to be a bit more structure and more of a 30,000-foot view to make sure we’re on the right track,” Turko says.

A week after Turko was hired, the company received tragic news. Exene Rodriguez, then a contractor working as the digital marketing lead, had died by suicide. The next week Campbell led a Zoom call to “hold space” for her grieving staff. She and Vaidya then sent their employees on a weeklong mental-health break.

When they returned, 12 contractors, including the premed student and Kat Pham, a social-media manager and Rodriguez’s friend of ten years, were terminated. One full-time employee was also laid off. Ortiz quit a few days later. For the sexual-assault survivors whom Campbell recruited, their experience at Leda was singularly disheartening. “She could help people, you know what I mean?” Pham says. “But it was never the survivors she could help quietly. It will never exceed her need for glory. She wants the credit.”

But now the company had some breathing room. The layoffs bought Leda an extra year of runway, giving it three years to operate off its remaining funds, Turko explained in a company all-hands. This is “good for us,” she said, “and should, I hope, instill a level of confidence in our ability to continue our work.” Campbell says Leda’s priority now is to hire staffers who can influence policy and run an efficient business, like Turko, now chief strategy officer, and Abby Clawson, the senior vice-president of finance they poached from Axios. “I’m getting people who I believe are some of the best of the best in this industry, who still say we’re doing the right thing.” The company recently hired a staffer with Title IX experience to help bolster the company’s credibility on campuses, and Turko is creating a guidebook to help lawyers get the at-home evidence admitted in court. The hope is that universities, prosecutors, and judges will have warmed to Leda’s approach before the money runs dry. Already, Campbell’s teasing another partnership the company is set to launch in March with “a large private university” whose name she can’t disclose.

In mid-November, Campbell sat in a New York conference room, visibly frustrated. She was in town for a few weeks from San Francisco, where she now lives, so the typically remote Leda team had convened in a Soho loft — an office space her ex-boyfriend rents but never uses — with white brick walls, a [modular](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/style/furniture-squishy-home-design.html) cream sofa, and monstera plants. Pizza boxes lay open on the kitchen’s marble island. A coder sat in the back corner, glued to his computer.

Campbell, Turko, and one of their advisers were sitting around a long wooden table, deciding how they should respond to a cease-and-desist from Washington’s attorney general. The University of Washington’s student government had filed a complaint, and now Leda had to end its only partnership with the UW sorority. The cease-and-desist touched on familiar territory about admissibility and cost but also raised some new criticisms, like the fact that Leda’s SANE locator “blatantly misrepresents the availability” of these exams. (For example, the company’s search tool listed nine locations in Washington State, when in fact there were [at least](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/sexual-health/after-sexual-assault-where-can-you-get-medical-forensic-exam-n1240035) 60 in 2020.)

Turko thought they should immediately cut off the sorority’s access to all services, since the AG could sue them or try to shut down the business if they didn’t comply. Campbell felt more rebellious. It seemed clear to her that the AG’s main issue was with the kits, so why not just pull them from the sorority and continue to provide Plan B and other services? Campbell wore a black shirt with a Thrasher flame logo, and as they waited to hear back from their lawyers, ran a pen through her hair. So in a post-*Roe* v. *Wade* world, she asks, “after we just went through the midterm elections, you’re saying that we’re fucking taking emergency contraceptive out? In the state of Washington? That’s some Alabama shit.” In the end, they decided to pull the rape kits until the AG’s office provided more guidance.

Despite losing her only client, Campbell says she wasn’t worried about breaking the news to investors. She had a call lined up later that day with Acme, and predicted the venture-capital firm would write off the situation as standard start-up churn. Mostly, Campbell’s just bemused that advocates and AGs still consider her a shit-stirrer. “I would love for them to call me a scammer to my face. Do they think I’m like a six-foot-two behemoth plotting in this office being like ‘How can we make the most money that we possibly can?’” she asks, switching to a low, gravelly voice. Besides, if it turns out survivors themselves don’t want the kits, Campbell says the company will find a way to pivot again, maybe expand into selling harm-reduction products, like Narcan or fentanyl-test strips. “I’m really interested in building a company that is there for you in the worst moments possible,” she explains.

Further into the future — “after Leda,” whenever that might be — Campbell has her eye on Pennsylvania state government. “I want to run for politics one day,” she says. “That’s my dream.” Because Democrats have been most critical of her business, she figures none of them would vote for her. A self-described social progressive and fiscal conservative, Campbell instead plans to run on returning “some sanity to the Republican Party.”

In the meantime, she says, the goal is just to “center ourselves” and “emotionally heal” from this latest setback with UW. For her, this meant spending most of December in Europe with a friend. “This is your sign to dye your hair red and go to greece,” she [posted](https://twitter.com/martyrdison/status/1603769547294646275/photo/1) to Twitter, her new locks lit up by the sun as she perched on a rocky beach. “The company fails if all of us are too bummed to wake up in the morning,” Campbell says. “You gotta keep trucking.”

‘Call Me a Scammer to My Face’

 
 

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