Panty Raiders
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Panty Raiders – Leba Haber Rubinoff and Katie Marsh – are two women who created a website purporting to sell "Forget-me-not Panties" in 2005. The website was created as an entry into the New York-based Contagious Media Showdown's contest to see which purpose-built website could spark the most viral interest over a three-week period. Haber Rubinoff and Marsh saw the contest and website as a venue to raise awareness and discussion about gender. They were not expected to win, but their work was picked up by Fark, the College Humor blog and other sites, leading to more than 600,000 sites during the contest period and one million hits in the six months between May and November 2005.
Surprising both the creators and the contest organizers, many visitors to the website believed the product to be real and attempted to order the panties or learn how to become a distributor. The creators believe the website's success, which was a significant return on a $18 investment, came from the humor and the fact that it was picked up by key bloggers who helped to spread the word. This resulted in the duo winning the $2,500 grand prize.
Other websites created by the duo include: Plastic Assets, which advertised a new credit card that offered free breast implants to young applicants; Christians Against Hip Hop, which tried to save white girls from the "dangers" of hip hop; and Adopt Black Girls, a fake adoption agency for young girls, which raised awareness about the effects of racist policy after Hurricane Katrina.
“Panty Raiders” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Panty, Raiders and Open-knowledge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Panty Raiders” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Panty, Raiders and Open-knowledge provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7131940. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Panty Raiders”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Panty Raiders primary sources, Panty Raiders archive and Panty research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Panty Raiders”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Panty Raiders” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.