The r/MensRights Brigade of Occidental's Reporting Form

In December 2013, users on Reddit's r/MensRights subreddit, alongside parallel discussion on 4chan, coordinated to flood Occidental College's anonymous online sexual-assault reporting form with fake reports. The form had been set up in 2012 so students could report assaults; submissions were reviewed by administrators and used primarily to track patterns of serial offenders.

The brigade was triggered by a post that misrepresented how the form worked, falsely claiming that simply filling it out would result in someone being charged with rape without any need to prove the allegation or reveal an identity. The stated intent was to 'prove' the system was open to abuse — by abusing it.

The college received roughly 400 false assault reports in about 36 hours. Administrators concluded that an off-campus group was responsible because the language in the submissions closely matched what was circulating on Reddit and 4chan. The flood of fabricated reports clogged and threatened the integrity of a genuine victim-support and tracking tool at a school already under federal scrutiny over its handling of sexual assault.

No site-level enforcement action against r/MensRights was reported at the time, and the subreddit was not banned; Reddit's formal anti-harassment and anti-brigading rules and its quarantine system would not be established until 2015. The episode is now commonly cited as a textbook example of organized subreddit-to-external-target brigading.