https://www.thecut.com/article/inside-diy-rape-kit-startup-leda-health.html

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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 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 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, 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 “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 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 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.