Is Madison Campbell a ‘Fraud’—or a Feminist Hero?

If you don’t like it, make your own. That’s the ethos that has driven decades of American founders in Silicon Valley—and that led a 28-year-old named Madison Campbell to develop an at-home rape kit.

But unlike the young men in cities like Seattle and Palo Alto, California, who built empires from their garages, Campbell is a five-foot-four blonde from Pittsburgh who spends her free time in beauty pageants.

To some, she’s a feminist icon who stands to revolutionize our broken criminal justice system. To the attorneys general of New York and Pennsylvania, she is a latter-day Elizabeth Holmes albeit on a smaller scale: a fraud who, in Campbell’s case, exploits the confusion and desperation of rape victims. (She even dated “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli for five months after he was released from prison for fraud.)

They say that Campbell’s crime is “misleading” victims of sexual assault into thinking they could one day get justice using her innovation: at-home rape kits sold under the name Leda Health. The attorneys general say the evidence collected by her kits will never be admissible in court, and therefore, according to New York Attorney General Letitia James, is “illegal, fraudulent, and deceptive.”

But Campbell says that just because this hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. 

“​​We built our system to basically be as advanced as humanly possible,” says Campbell, who said she studied epidemiology in college before dropping out her senior year to escape an “extremely awful” ex-boyfriend. “Our advice is to go to the hospital to get a full rape kit, but if you’re not comfortable with that, we believe that if you follow our instructions, it’s your next best shot.”

In a May cease and desist order, James demanded that Leda Health, which Campbell started in 2019, pay half a million dollars for “misleading” victims into thinking that its services are “a substitute for professional medical care.” Pennsylvania’s top lawyer, Michelle Henry, also hit Campbell with a similar demand that month—shut down or else. 

But Campbell refused to close her doors—and fired back with her own lawsuit, a single one against both states, arguing that evidence from her kits “would likely be admissible if handled according to the instructions included with them.” 

Leda Health is limited in its ability to help victims identify their attackers. It even admits on its website that “as a private company,” it cannot enter any of its data into CODIS, the federal database used to apprehend repeat sexual offenders. 

But Campbell says: What other option is there? The government, she says, does a poor job of getting justice for rape victims—only an estimated two percent of sexual assault perpetrators are convicted of felonies nationwide. And to obtain justice, victims usually have to undergo an in-person exam, in which a medical professional swabs, photographs, and prods their genitals. Even if a survivor goes through that “traumatizing” experience, Campbell says, there’s still a chance the evidence could be thrown out by a judge.

“We cannot guarantee the admissibility of our kits because you cannot guarantee the admissibility of any kit,” she told me. “All we want is to be held to the same standard of any other piece of evidence.”

Campbell, who was crowned Miss Pittsburgh last year and was raised in a Catholic family, has fashioned herself as a #MeToo activist on the right, having served as an alternate delegate for Pennsylvania at the Republican National Convention. She and her lawyer are both convinced that her fight to get her product to market is a free speech issue. 

Campbell has been beleaguered by subpoenas, cease and desist orders, and state investigations into her product. (Courtesy of Madison Campbell)

“I have a First Amendment right for myself and my company to say that the criminal justice system as it currently works does not work for everyone,” Campbell tells me over Zoom. 

Her lawyer Alex Little, who represented pop star Kesha in her sexual assault lawsuit against her former producer Dr. Luke, tells me that all the components of a Leda Health kit are “entirely legal,” like tamper-proof tape, a ballpoint pen, and cotton swabs. 

“You can go to CVS, and you can get either of those things immediately,” he tells me. “None of those things are illegal.”

He adds: “So, Pennsylvania isn’t upset that we’re selling swabs and plastic bags. What they’re upset with is what we’re telling victims they can do with those items. And that is your speech restriction.” 

Since launching Leda Health more than five years ago, Campbell has been beleaguered by subpoenas, cease and desist orders, and state investigations into her product. In addition to her suit against New York and Pennsylvania, she is suing Washington State for passing legislation that bans her product. And, in June, the state of Pennsylvania hit her back with a countersuit. When asked for comment from The Free Press, Pennsylvania’s attorney general declined; New York’s office did not respond to our request.

“This sucks,” she says. “But I am not going to let the same system that is already failing so many survivors tell me that there’s nothing I can fucking do to make it better.” 

The beginnings of Leda Health, unlike, say, the origin story of an Amazon or Facebook, is quite personal.

In 2016, Campbell was studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, coming out of a classroom, when she dropped all of her books on the ground. Then almost “like out of a movie,” another student began picking up her things. 

“He said, ‘I think I’ve seen you around—I think you’re living in the same dormitory as I am,’ ” she remembers the student saying, whom she describes as a tall man from Switzerland. “We should hang out sometime,” he added. 

They started a platonic friendship, often studying together. Then one night, he showed up to her dorm room drunk—“like you could smell the beer,” she says. The next thing Campbell can picture is him undressing. 

“One of the last memories I have is him standing over me in a white wife beater,” she tells me of the man she says raped her.

In the aftermath, she called the local hospital to ask if there was a nurse who could perform an inspection, but then she thought about the prospect of being touched. How she’d be laying under fluorescent lights with her feet saddled in cold, plastic stirrups. 

“I was like, ‘No way. I don’t want to be a science experiment for someone on the worst night of my life.’ ” 

She did her best to “compartmentalize” the incident, immediately dyeing her signature blonde curls jet black—“I wanted to be unrecognizable to my assailant”—and focusing on finals. Then, two years later, she was riding the New York City subway, thinking about the rise of at-home genetic testing kits like 23andMe, when it hit her: “Why are we doing this for everything else, but we can’t do this for sexual assault?” That weekend, she says she read everything she could on direct-to-consumer genetic testing, even obtaining a rape kit online, which she later deconstructed on her kitchen counter. 

“I got obsessed with the fact people thought this thing was so intense, but in reality, it was just a bunch of pens and paper and bags,” she tells me. “It really is not anything new or novel.”

In 2019, Campbell launched her business under the name MeToo Kits. About six months later, she rebranded to Leda Health, named after the Greek goddess raped by Zeus, to reflect her ambitions of becoming a larger sexual wellness company offering everything from Plan B emergency contraception to testing for sexually transmitted infections. She says those options are available to partners that request them, such as an unnamed sorority at Clemson University that she says went through “nearly 400 units” of emergency contraception one semester. She tells me that Leda Health, which has so far pulled in $9.4 million in funding, currently has about a dozen clients, five of which are nonprofits. Its biggest customer, she says, is the college sorority Delta Gamma, which pays for its 150 chapters nationwide to have access to Leda Health’s services.

A Leda Health kit is no bigger than a brick. It’s a compact unit of colorful boxes, each numbered one through three and stuffed with sterile cotton swabs. 

“We think you are brave, and we believe you,” reads the first page of the fifty-page instruction booklet. 

The Leda Health evidence collection kit. The words We believe you are inscribed on the inside of the box. (@ledahealth/Instagram)

Users are encouraged to download the Leda Health app so that they can connect over video to a SANE-certified nurse as they collect their evidence. The company employs eight of these professional sexual-assault examiners, all of whom are prepared to later testify in court. A leaflet in the Leda Health kit tells victims “it is always best that you go to a hospital.” But Campbell tells me “the majority” of rape victims don’t want to do that—nearly 70 percent of sexual assaults are never even reported to the police.

“We’re not saying that we have a gold standard here,” she says with a shrug. “We’re just saying that not all survivors want to go to the police or hospital. And I know that because I didn’t want to.”

Even women who do go to the authorities can struggle to obtain a conviction against their attacker. Take Bunny, a 57-year-old sales associate in  northwest Nevada, who told me she was sexually assaulted in April by a stranger. But when she appeared at her local police department to file a report, she was told there was nothing they could do, because she didn’t know the name of her attacker.

“They were worse than useless,” she told me about the officers. “And because I didn't have the address of the house where it happened, or the name of the person who assaulted me, they were just like, ‘blah blah blah.’ ”

“I’m done with this,” she remembers thinking. “Here are the actual police, whose job it is to protect and serve, and they’re doing neither. I just wanted to go home.”

She tells me she didn’t want to go to a hospital to have “some random dude poking me with a swab.”

Instead, she says she called a friend, who happened to speak with another friend—a man who coincidentally used to lobby for Leda Health. That friend then reached out to Campbell directly, who arranged for Black Wall Street—one of the five nonprofits nationwide carrying the product—to send a kit directly to Bunny via courier. (Campbell calls this all a “happy coincidence.”) 

When I asked Bunny how it felt to open the package, she told me about the words she saw inked on the inside of the box: We believe you.

“Dude,” Bunny croaks over the phone. “I literally cried.”

Bunny says Campbell and her company are “the only ones who are doing anything besides my literal friends.” She tells me the Leda Health employees were “sympathetic and understanding” as they walked her through her options.

“They’ve listened to me rant,” says Bunny. “They’ve helped me heal as well as collect evidence.”

She tells me she hopes that Leda Health might be able to run tests on a condom that she found inside of herself the morning after the attack. She says she knows the kit might not help catch her attacker, because the evidence can’t be put into CODIS, but that “Leda is the only one who really gives a shit.” 

“I don’t care if it’s supported in a court of law or whatever,” she says. “It is justice. Someone cared.” 

Olivia Reingold is a writer for The Free Press. Read her piece “Professor by Day. Porn Star by Night. Can He Be Both?” and follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold.

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