"He accidentally stabbed and blinded (in one eye) the nicest kid in the school by throwing a stick at him."
Recently, we wrote about how people went from the most popular kid in school to social pariah overnight, and members of the BuzzFeed Community submitted their own stories. Here are 37 more popular kids whose reputations tanked in the blink of an eye.
We also included some answers from the original Reddit thread.
1. "One of the football players convinced probably the least popular girl in school to cut all her hair off with the promise of going to junior prom with her if she did so. She had long, long curly brown hair practically down to her waist. She did it. (She was pretty developmentally and socially delayed, which just makes it even worse.) He did not go with her. She included it as a reason in her suicide note. (She killed herself.) One of the other reasons was that her dad had been molesting her for years. (Her dad killed himself before the trial.) Her cousin had a copy of her note and passed it around school. The guy had to be homeschooled for the last month of junior year and all of senior year."
"The girl's cousin still routinely contacts whatever job he has at the time and sends them the suicide note to get him fired."
2. "She faked being pregnant. It somehow got blown up and became a huge deal, especially as it's a lie that's pretty hard to fake effectively. Everyone at school just ended up ignoring her completely afterward. She was a good friend of mine, and this made it clear she was a chronic liar. I'll never know the entirety of the lies she told me. I don't think it was intentional, and I did feel bad for her, but it was the end of our friendship."
3. "He accidentally stabbed and blinded (in one eye) the nicest kid in the school by throwing a stick at him. The kid who was blinded grew up to be super successful and is now married, with a baby on the way."
4. "There was this one girl I knew for a long time who I thought deserved her popularity. She was kind, giving, funny, and smart. ... The school had a Subway delivery system where parents could put money into an account and use it to pay for their kid's lunch to be delivered to the cafeteria. At some point, parents started complaining about money going missing from the account, and it turned out that the girl was stealing her friends' account info and using THEIR PARENTS' money to pay for HER lunches behind their backs. She was caught in the act one day on a supposed bathroom break."
"The school was very small, so the news spread within two days. She lost the trust and respect of her friends, classmates, teachers, and the school. She was suspended, and the whole Subway system had to be remodeled because of it. The final blow was when a classmate found her social media that had tons of posts about her smoking weed and practically worshipping it. She was only in eighth grade. She never came back."
5. "He got drunk with a friend one night, and they sent an abusive email to everyone's favorite teacher, causing her to have burnout and go on sick leave for the rest of the year. They were expelled yet were still included in the yearbook just to remind everyone of what they had done."
6. "At my high school, there was one really popular kid. One day during lunch (I'm assuming he was on something, but I don't know), he went to a preschool across the street from our school, pulled his pants down, and had explosive diarrhea in the sandbox while kids were playing in it. He was clearly expecting everyone to be like, 'Wow, what a great prank,' but everyone was so grossed out that he was a pariah for the rest of his high school career."
7. "She cheated her way to valedictorian and screwed the girl who ended up salutatorian out of a hefty scholarship that would have paid for a four-year degree. The cheater's parents had half a million set aside for each of their kids' college funds. The other girl's family survived off $18k a year. The cheater knew this scholarship was the only way the other girl could go to college without taking on massive debt. Hell, a scholarship is how the girl was in a private school in the first place. The cheater later admitted on Facebook that she did this because the other girl was 'the wrong kind of Christian.' This was a church school where most of the students belonged to the denomination that ran the school, and the other girl belonged to a different denomination."
8. "He went to juvie. I've always hated him because he's the type to moan in a silent study hall or just disrupt a class in general, but he was popular and athletic. Sophomore year, someone called in a bomb threat, and the school went on lockdown while they searched for it. I was on a trip with my mom, so this is all second-hand info. Apparently, while they were searching for the bomb, he started making jokes with his buddies about how it was him and whatnot. But his teacher overheard, took it all literally, and called in the principal and police."
"They all took it very seriously and searched all of his stuff. Since we live in a small town in the Midwest, hunting is very common. ... They searched his car, and I believe they found, at the very least, a knife, if not more. So I think they decided to make an example of him and his behavior and sent him to juvie."
9. "She made bracelets with curse words and then stuck them into other kids' backpacks. She then went to the teachers and got the kids suspended. Someone else told on her, and then she got suspended. Now, pretty much everyone in my grade hates her."
10. "When I was in junior high, I got along with pretty much everyone, and they got along with me. UNTIL Valentine's Day in 9th grade. My mom owned an Edible Arrangements-type store. A few days before Valentine's Day, a couple friends and I were at my house discussing how we thought a boy (let's call him Ben) was sooooooooo cute. So, my mother took it upon herself to create this elaborate Edible Arrangement for him on my behalf and had it delivered to our 7th-period class from 'a secret admirer.' Everyone began trying to guess who it could be from. The next night, those same friends were over, and my mom spilled the beans. My friends immediately told everyone. By the next morning, I was known as the stalker forever."
11. "It was our senior year, and a couple of days before graduation, a group of popular kids pulled a senior prank like the alumni before us. Except their prank included defacing school property, including spray painting the gym. When the cops came to investigate, they found weed in one of the cars. The most popular guy (and biggest jerk), whose mother was a school board president, struck a deal to rat out his friends as being the ones who pulled the prank and had the weed in order to not get charged. At graduation, all of his group except for him were banned from going. I was onstage to give a speech and sat beside his mom. She leaned over to me while they were calling each graduate up and asked me if I thought the class would boo him. I shrugged (but could only hope). Sure enough — they called his name, and the 300 graduates all booed him. It was glorious."
—Anonymous
12. "She shit. Like, a lot. It was a house party, and she got drunk and shit herself. She cleaned it up poorly, went into another room, and did it again. Basically, everyone kept telling her to get away because she smelled horrible. She sobbed all over the house, and everyone was grossed out. It's a story I wouldn't believe if I wasn't there. She was super hot, a head cheerleader, and genuinely a really nice girl. She disappeared entirely after that."
13. "This overgrown dumbass on my high school's varsity baseball team thought he ran the school. Teachers loved him, girls loved him, his boys loved him. Or so it seemed from a not-so-popular person's point of view anyway. In his senior year, he peed in one of his teammates' water jugs as a joke, and that kid got really sick, so the rest of the team ratted him out. The whole popular thing didn't really help him in the end. Years later, I found out that while in college, he was still going back to high school parties and tried to rape some 15-year-old girl outside the party. I bet now he's REALLY popular in prison."
14. "There was this popular girl at my school, who everyone thought was cool...but then we found this weird shrine in her lunch box. Apparently, it was her crush's stuff, like his hair, a tooth, and eyelashes. After that, she was so unpopular that she moved to a different city with her mom."
15. "Rape. He was at a graduation party that I had the misfortune to attend, and his ex (who was also there) was asleep on the couch. He took her upstairs to 'get her away from all the noise.' Five minutes later, we hear a scream and a 'Get off OF ME!' She comes running downstairs, frantically pulling up her pants and runs out. She told us what had happened after a few days, and the guy heard and tried to break into her house. He's in prison for assault and battery (he gave her a black eye), rape, and breaking and entering. She's in therapy, and we are housemates now in college because she goes out with the girl I'm sharing the house with."
16. "He was caught taking upskirt photos of girls in school and sending them to his friends. His popularity went from Hero to Zero in a split second."
17. "A popular kid in seventh grade continually picked on a kid named Albert. Every day, all day — he picked on him mercilessly. Albert's parents owned a corner store (yes, I'm from the south), so he usually wore off-brand clothes and shoes, while the other kid was a good-looking guy with nice stuff. All the girls wanted to be with him. One day, after gym class in the locker room and another barrage of jokes and belittling, the popular kid challenged Albert to fight. ... He got up close to Albert, in his face, and swung at him. Albert got up from the hit and proceeded to whoop the living hell out of the popular kid."
"It spread fast how Albert beat this kid up, and whenever someone did something dumb, we would say, 'You want to get beat up like Albert beat up James?' The roles soon became reversed, and Albert became popular, but Albert never said anything about him or picked on him; everyone else did, and from that day on, all the girls wanted to be with Albert, and he was popular through high school. It got so bad for the popular kid that he changed schools, but kids I knew at the other school picked on him, too, because of this fight. I learned that day never to pick on anyone; just because they're quiet and shy doesn't mean they might not be able to whoop your ass!"
—Anonymous
18. "There was a small group of really popular kids who went out cruising one night, and a girl was riding in the pickup truck bed. The other vehicle accidentally rear-ended the truck right into her legs, and she almost had to get them amputated. The group was a bunch of pricks and became veeeeery unpopular after almost killing a girl the first week of senior year."
19. "The kid turned out to be a racist. For full context, this kid was a freshman jock who was really popular despite being the stereotypical jerk jock guy. My history teacher decided to do a survey to see how the kids in my class felt about racial propaganda (like blackface and similar things). The only kid who actually found that funny was the jock kid. Instead of getting angry, the teacher just asked him more questions, like 'Why is that funny to you?' etc. The kid kept getting more nervous with each question. ... The people in that class gave him disgusted looks, even his own friends, and eventually, he just stopped having friends and now only hangs out with this one other guy."
20. "At 15, one of the popular guys appeared in a promotional video for the youth wing of an incredibly racist British group. I'm not giving much detail because the video is still out there. My area isn't massively progressive, but he was slaughtered for that; we even had an assembly about it where he apologized."
21. "He started blasting Nazi military music to try to be funny. Everyone just sort of ignored him until he came in one day wearing an S.S. uniform, which got him an ass-kicking from me. Nobody would talk to him after that."
22. "He and his girlfriend were drunk after a party and decided to drive around. They ended up hitting someone and sending them to the hospital. The cops found them crashed into the side of an elementary school. The guy went to jail, and the girl was young enough to be put on probation. The person they hit got his knee pretty much shattered, and he had to set up a GoFundMe to pay for his medical expenses."
23. "At a school fair, he decided to crush up a couple of laxatives in some cotton candy, then gave it to someone two years younger than him. The kid then shat himself in front of the geography teacher. It was funny at the time until the next day. The teachers narrowed it down to certain repeat offenders and gave everyone in their forms detentions until whoever basically drugged the kid owned up to it; he eventually did. At this point, people stopped finding it funny and began to realize he was a bit of a shit."
24. "The nicest guy in school ... was good-looking and in a relationship with one of the school hotties. He went on a vandalizing rampage through the town because his girlfriend broke up with him. On my way from my dorm to school, there were broken car windows everywhere. You could literally see which way he went."
25. "There was a rich, popular kid at my school. I dont mean his parents were rich, he himself had a business while in high school buying expensive clothes from a different country for cheap and selling them for a lot more. He drove a super nice sports car and stuff. It turned out he wasn't paying taxes on the stuff, so he ended up getting some jail time. I've never heard another word about him since."
26. "She made a fake Instagram account called '[Insert high school] Burn Book' during the last half of our first year, where she absolutely tore apart all the popular girls in our grade. She was pretty smart by posting one of herself, but she eventually got caught because she accidentally posted a roast on her real account. Nobody was ever really that upset about the account, but what drove the nail into the coffin is that she denied that she did it and insisted that her Instagram was hacked up until and after graduation."
27. "A kid a few years ahead of me was valedictorian, good at sports, and had gotten a full academic scholarship to a very prestigious school. Then, one day, for some reason, he drank an entire fifth of vodka at school, threw up, passed out on the bathroom floor, and had to be taken to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. He lost his scholarship and ended up not going to that school. It was a pretty big blow to a kid who's main thing was being smart and successful."
28. "He made fun of a kid with Down Syndrome. Despite being a shitty school, the kid with Down Syndrome was treated like royalty by everyone. His last name was 'King,' and everyone called him The King. The popular kid thought it would be funny one day to 'dethrone' him by pulling down his trousers. I have never seen someone get turned on so quickly. He ended up moving schools, and The King stayed just that."
29. "Had a pretty popular guy who worked at a photo lab. A girl we went to high school with had nude photos on a roll, and he made copies and passed them around. Once they were all being investigated for child sexual abuse images, the town turned on him lightning quick. They all had to move, and he was on probation for a huge amount of time (like 10 years) and wasn't allowed to use a computer. He also got sued by the girl and photo lab. It pretty much ruined his life."
30. "I was going to rural high school in Georgia, and there was this one extremely popular guy who we shall call Tom. Well, Tom was popular for playing baseball and football...and playing with women. I played on the baseball team with him, and he was just a meathead jock who, once you got to know him, was very off-putting. He didn't really have any close friends for that reason. Well, one day, senior year, he decided to sleep with a girl and gave her an STD on purpose. I don't remember what it was, but he did it intentionally. We know because he bragged about it."
"The girl tried to turn Tom in for it, but the adults didn't believe her, saying Tom probably didn't know. The funny thing was all the kids at school immediately ostracized him. The entire baseball team (except for Tom) went to the coach to say something. He finally got into trouble, and one day, he just wasn't in school anymore."