36 Absolutely Wild School Scandals That Took Down The Most Popular Kid In School

Recently, Reddit user Tomfooleryman asked, “What made the popular kid lose popularity?”* and the stories ranged from wildly juicy to disgustingly messed-up. Here are the school incidents and scandals that dethroned the popular kid overnight.

*We also used responses from this Reddit thread.

NOTE: There are mentions of violence, child sex abuse, and death ahead.

“The popular kid lost his popularity in a pretty epic way. During a party, someone found a group chat where he was talking crap about everyone. They projected the screenshots on a big TV, and everyone saw his true colors. He tried to explain, but no one believed him. From then on, people valued those who were sincere and genuine. It was a brutal reminder that popularity built on lies doesn’t last.”

—u/bunnysunlight

“This super popular girl tricked one of the shy nerdy kids into thinking she liked him, got a dick pic, and sent it to a big group chat. She got in trouble but cried her way out of it; a month later, though, she transferred schools. Once we figured out she had transferred, we told the people at that school what she did.”

“Funnily enough, the kid she victimized got a lot of support over this. He came out of his shell and became pretty popular, so at least there’s some good that came out of this.”

—u/Insectshelf3

“We didn’t see him much after he knocked up his girlfriend and had to drop out of seventh grade. I’m not joking. They were both seventh-grade preteens. They kept the baby, and their families made him drop out and get a job to support it. This was in the US in the ’90s, and it’s fucking sad.”

—u/Semi_Lovato

“We were in middle school — seventh grade, I think. The kid wasn’t exactly your traditional ‘popular kid,’ but he had lots of friends. He was a good kid, and everyone knew him and got along with him. Let’s call him Greg. … One day during our lunch period, my friend group’s lunch table was invaded by Greg’s friend group. We told them to fuck off since there wasn’t enough space. … When we asked them why they wouldn’t sit at their own table, one of them pointed at Greg (who was sitting at an empty lunch table all by himself) and said, ‘Look at Greg dude, he shit himself in class. He smells so fucking bad, bro.’ The poor kid just sat there staring at a wall the entire lunch period. I’ll never forget that face either. He was just completely void of all emotion. It was so fucking sad to look at. I’ve never seen anyone look so hollow.”

“Turns out Greg had a stomach virus or something and was sick, but since he didn’t have a fever, his mother sent him to school anyway. The guy was in algebra and shit himself so bad and so loud it was impossible not to notice. He was leaking diarrhea down his leg and ran to the bathroom leaking shit. The girl I heard about it from said that the smell didn’t go away either. The worst part of it all, though, was that it happened early in the morning, and his mother came to deliver him a change of pants but didn’t pick him up or anything. The poor bastard had to sit through the rest of the school day.

I look back on that and still think about how wild it was that within a day, he lost every one of his friends, and his entire social life was ruined for the next five years. Even in high school, he was known as ‘that kid who shit himself in the seventh grade.'”

—u/ThomasEatsAss

“Well, after he planted a pipe bomb in some kid’s locker for looking at the girl he liked wrong, everything just went downhill from there.”

“The weird thing is we had school for the rest of the day — like normal school periods and classes. The boy got hurt very badly, his arms and face. The guy who did it was arrested. It was in 1988, but still, yeah.”

—u/momto2beans

“He had a set of keys given to him by the school (wtf, I know) because he was one of the really popular kids, then used those keys to break into the school and steal $30k in Australian dollars of woodworking/metalworking tools.”

—u/shaneo88

“There was a kid who wasn’t really known until his senior year. He decided to lie and say that he won a bunch of money on a scratch ticket. He even photoshopped a ticket and posted it on MySpace. The guy was popular overnight. He showed up to school with a new truck with spinners on it (remember those?). Then, his friend outed him for lying, and people instantly hated him. He went from being invisible to popular to hated by everybody.”

—u/ayatollahofdietcola_

“Well, he killed three people, so yeah. … He was only in jail long enough for his mommy and daddy to post bail. He served zero time.”

“I’m from a small southern town. His family has lived there for generations; they’re rich as fuck, and he and his brothers have always been assholes.

He got wasted and high on suboxone at a party we were at over winter recess (we were in high school, mind you). He up and decided to take his new jeep with four other people and go down dirt roads on the riverside.

He ramped off a ditch — the first girl got ejected and died instantly. The other girl and the guy in the backseat got pinned and crushed under the car. He and his friend also got thrown from the car but made it out with a broken arm and concussions. Originally, he was only charged with one death, but the two people in the backseat did end up dying from complications due to the crash.

Guess what we got…one small article about a crash involving teenagers and a dumb empty chair with a picture and balloons at our graduation. No one ever mentioned the drugs or the fact he got another DUI charge that was dropped when we were juniors and that he was sent away to rehab in CA.

Now he lives in Toronto and found God, so yayyyy, I guess we’re all supposed to forgive him now.”

—u/LemonnGANG

“He nearly caused the suicide of a girl in his year. He was popular but a massive asshole and would pick on a girl (she was lovely and was only bullied for her weight). He started an online hate campaign against her in the final year of school, and she tried to kill herself because of it. She mentioned his name in a note she left, and he was named and shamed in front of the whole school and ended up going to a youth offenders facility for it. She didn’t die and now has a lovely shop in a coastal city with her husband.”

—u/Whatsthatthingie

10.

“The popular kid was a grade below me. One night, he (16, if I remember correctly) was driving his friend (another popular kid but one who was nice to me) late at night. The driver only had a permit and shouldn’t have been driving. He crashed the car badly. The friend died in the car while the guy was taking pictures of himself, sad that he wrecked the car. According to those who saw the pictures, he didn’t try to help. This was also a few weeks before junior prom and was very sudden. He was no longer a popular kid after that.”

—u/MonsterMontvalo

11.

“My grandfather was dying, I was halfway across the world studying abroad, and a classmate told me to ‘get over it.’ He died ten minutes later, and another classmate started telling everyone that this girl basically spoke his death into existence. Everyone dropped her as a friend (our program was small), and then she faked an illness to leave the program early.”

—u/VastScared3922

12.

“This was … fifth grade. There was a girl named Patricia in my class. She was friends with the popular girls, which made her popular. During recess, the popular girls would walk around the playground and the field like they owned the place. … They gossiped about boys, other girls, teachers, and whatever bullshit 10/11-year-old girls gossip about. … Patricia wasn’t in class one day. I was confused because Patricia never missed a day. On top of being a popular girl, she was also an A student and had a couple of attendance awards. When it was time for recess, I overheard my teacher asking three of the popular girls, ‘Okay, where did you say she hid the knife?'”

“I followed the teacher and the girls outside to one of the portables (outdoor classrooms). One of the girls told the teacher that the knives were there. There was a hole in the corner of the wood foundation, and you could easily see inside.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked one of the girls while the teacher was searching the hole.

‘Patricia brought a butcher’s knife and wants to stab Karrigan,’ she told me.

The teacher got up from searching and told us to run along.

I don’t remember what happened after that. As far as I remember, the knife either didn’t exist or was never found. I do remember that when Patricia came back, she was shunned by the popular girls and pretty much the entire grade. I tried to make friends with her, but she told me to fuck off. I never saw her again after fifth grade.”

—u/Raging_Utahn

13.

“On the last day of school, if I remember correctly, one of the well-liked class clown types played a fake seizure prank in a certain teacher’s class. He didn’t realize she’d had a student literally die in her arms the previous year, and she had a panic attack, thinking it was happening again. The people who knew about her history quickly spread the word, and everyone shit on him for it. He denies it happened to this day, but I was in the room when it happened. I remember being afraid for him, then growing annoyed and silently angry when he started laughing while she began to cry.”

—u/TellTaleTank

14.

“There was one kid in my class who was the son of our math teacher. He was wildly popular because he was able to help everyone out with their homework for that class; it turns out he was actually snooping through his dad’s notes to get the answers. The teacher naturally got super suspicious after a while, so he deliberately made a fake answer sheet. Of course, the kid grabbed it and noted it all down. It was full of wrong answers so blatant that anyone who even slightly paid attention in class would know they were way off base. The kid handed out the answers anyway and, in an instant, made about half the class bomb, and his popularity dropped like a rock as they all accused him of deliberately making them fail. They moved him to another class, and they never had an incident of cheating again.”

—u/BYB64

15.

“He threw a bottle of piss at a teacher for $60 our first year. She cried and left the school. His last name started with a P, so everyone called him Peeman or Pissboy, and even the teachers called our graduating class the ‘Pee Bottle Class.’ I hope it was worth the $60 he didn’t need.”

—u/answie

16.

“A high school jock … got drunk at the graduation party and groped a girl. His girlfriend got understandably pissed and told him to take her home. The drunk dickhead wrapped his car around a light pole, and his girlfriend got killed. After that, he spent about nine years in prison for DUI and manslaughter. (I think he got a reduction for good behavior, but I’m not sure.) He got out expecting everyone to be his friend again and everything to be like it was. Nobody wanted anything to do with him. Everyone hated his guts. Last I heard, he moved across the country to work in the mines. Turns out assaulting a girl and then killing another kinda makes you a piece of shit human being.”

—u/PixelatedNate

17.

“This football player was at a party — also in attendance was a kid nicknamed ‘Beans’ who everyone knew and loved. The football player tried to get Beans to try some party drug or other. Beans, being a good kid, declined. The football player did not like this answer and spiked Beans’ drink. Beans had a bad reaction to this drug. He died. The entire town banded together to raise money for the family, and 15 years later, someone put up a memorial billboard (probably on his birthday or the anniversary of his death). I honestly don’t know who did it; I wasn’t part of that social circle. I do know he was absolutely ostracized and had to transfer schools.”

—u/None

18.

“This popular girl in junior high got exposed and in a bunch of trouble when she accused a couple of guys of stalking her. One guy lived a block away from her, so she told everyone at school that he was a creep and was looking in her window at night. Unfortunately for her, the guy she accused of peeping on her was out of town during the time she said everything happened. He had mountains of proof, and she had absolutely nothing to back up what she was saying. She and her family got into big trouble for a false police report, and since her dad was still active duty military, they got booted out of base housing, and she got moved to another middle school.”

—u/pmw1981

19.

“The biggest dude on my school’s football team … was generally a nice guy and didn’t have that whole jock airhead vibe. He was nice enough to me whenever we crossed paths. Well, one day, he didn’t show up to school. Weeks go by, and his girlfriend (now his ex) lets out that he got caught molesting his five-year-old niece — he was 17. He was tried as an adult, and I don’t know what he got charged with or if he was sent anywhere, but he was never seen again. His Facebook was deleted, his parents moved, and his whole existence was just scrubbed away.”

—u/Leon4107

20.

“She got cellphones banned at my high school. We used to be able to use them between classes and at lunch. There was a group chat all the popular kids were in, and they said they didn’t think she’d win homecoming queen cause she was too mean to everyone. She reported them for bullying, and they banned cellphones even though the messages were sent after school hours. Guess who did not win homecoming queen after doing that?”

—u/Misoisacat

21.

“There was this big fight between him and this other kid who was a pretty big asshole. Everyone knew it was coming, and there was a decent-sized crowd. Everyone was rooting for him. He ended up really beating the guy pretty badly, which I think shocked most of the kids. Fights at school usually got broken up pretty quickly, but this was after school off-site, so there was no authority figure there to stop it. Then he smashed the kid’s car windows with a tire iron before whipping it out and urinating on the kid, who was still unconscious. This was before camera phones, but someone brought a digital camcorder, and the video wound up on a couple of websites. Everyone in school wound up seeing it, and no one really looked at that kid the same way again.”

—u/AmatuerCultist

22.

“In seventh grade going into eighth, a really popular girl was running for class president. A really dorky, awkward, but completely harmless and generally very happy girl decided to run against her, but everyone just thought she was being weird and had no chance of winning. The popular girl ran a smear campaign in middle school. She spread a bunch of bullshit about this happy little wallflower that absolutely nobody disliked. Not only did the dorky girl win the election, but the popular girl was shunned because she showed what an awful person she was.”

—u/rhymes_with_snoop

23.

“This one girl posted something racist on Snapchat and ended up getting suspended for it. This was followed by her parents attempting to sue the district for slander. The case was thrown out almost instantly. The whole situation was honestly really petty.”

—u/cornshartz

24.

“He was a star athlete in multiple sports and was very attractive. One year, his date to the prom started dancing with another guy at an afterparty. He proceeded to hit the kid over the head with his empty beer bottle. The kid needed stitches, and it did not look good. No charges were pressed, but he did not recover from that.”

—u/xanman222

25.

“She started a fight with another popular girl over something petty. The other popular girl, unbeknownst to us all, practiced martial arts and delivered with one hand the most beautiful, graceful punch that I have ever had the pleasure of seeing while pulling out a chunk of hair with the other. The other girl was suspended and skyrocketed higher than ever while the popular girl who started the fight became little more than a laughing stock with a temporary bald spot.”

—u/TeasingTornado

26.

“When everyone found out that he was jerking off to our female science teacher. In the class. Along with his friends. This was eighth grade.”

—u/Busty12Sunshine

27.

“He got high on mushrooms and broke into an old woman’s house and beat the crap out of her. He was in jail the rest of high school. … Apparently, he thought it was his house and was just locked out, so he broke a window to get in, saw the woman, and freaked out.”

—u/nosecone33

28.

“He was king of the roost from sixth grade into high school. Then he was caught standing on a bathroom sink at a public swimming pool, looking through a ventilation hole into the women’s bathroom where one of our female classmates was changing…while pleasuring himself. … He had to move 1200 miles to Wyoming to escape his new reputation.”

—u/AdSalt9219

29.

“I was part of the popular group, but not the most popular in the group. … The most popular girl in the group quickly ended up being the most disliked girl in our grade. Before she skidded into irrelevance, she was always just a little bit ahead of the trend. Her hair was a little straighter, her clothes were a little newer, and her HTML on MySpace was a little harder to replicate. Her mom let her get gel nails. She was also slightly meaner than us (being mean wasn’t a precursor to being popular at my school). She was a little more willing to bend the friendship and loyalty of the group — like starting rumors about other girls in the group.”

“Anyhow, one day, she randomly decided to start dating/pursuing everyone’s boyfriends/crushes! This was in eighth grade, so boyfriends and crushes were basically the most important thing at that time.

It was out of nowhere. We don’t know if she was bored or watched a movie that influenced her, but overnight, she was out to set our clique on fire.

Well, we all decided to stonewall her. She couldn’t sit with us at lunch (we invited some other girl to come sit with us in her spot). We didn’t invite her to parties or each other’s sporting events. We let other girls know she was trying to mess up relationships, and we all removed her from our MySpace pages (lol). If you interacted with her, you’d be kicked from the group, too.

Well, the next year, she moved to the neighboring school district because no one would be friends with her.

Looking back, we were really harsh about this. We probably could have given her a warning to knock it off before just flipping on her. Maybe she would have calmed down, and the rest of her high school career wouldn’t have been so rocky. In hindsight, we were the bullies when we purposefully excluded her.

Teenage girls, man. Happy I made it out. I would not want to relive it despite having fun.”

—u/0011010100110011

30.

“The popular guy was caught hiding in the girl’s locker rooms when we were about 11/12. Apparently, he was caught filming them getting changed. No one spoke to him after that and he was ‘asked to leave’ and moved schools. Also, I’m pretty sure the police got involved, but I don’t think they did anything.”

—u/bluemoonu

31.

“In my experience, the ‘popular’ kids weren’t actually popular. They were just conventionally attractive and mean. Everyone thought they were dicks. The thing that really broke the illusion, though, was at prom. One of the meanest kids went to smoke a joint in the bathroom but triggered his IBS and shit himself. Managed to leave out the fire exit before anyone saw him, but left his soiled suit trousers and gucci belt in the toilet. Word very quickly got around, and of course, our entire school year was there.”

“I saw him a few years later queuing for a club as we had some loose mutual friends; he said something kinda cunty to me, so I asked, ‘Didn’t you shit your pants at prom?’ he got really aggressive, which got him pulled out the queue by a bouncer. Best part was his mates just went in without him, I don’t even think they liked him.”

—u/Prestigious_Dog_1942

32.

“When I was in primary school, the popular kid thought it would be funny to flush the class pet (a hamster called Nibbles) down the toilet. All the kids thought the hamster would have died, so he quickly became known as the kid who killed the hamster. He ended up changing schools for another reason. By the way, the hamster survived. I don’t know how pipes work, but I heard the caretaker eventually found him. The school still gave Nibbles away after that.”

—u/None

33.

“She was an aspiring singer-songwriter, and she had a YouTube channel. It was discovered that she was lip-syncing in a lot of her singing videos. She actually was a good singer, and after high school, she had a bit of success, so I don’t know why she bothered lip-syncing.”

—u/shicole3

34.

“He pulled a prank so bad that the girl had an epileptic attack and was sent to the hospital; she hit her head really bad when she fell. … The girl participated in a class discussion where teachers asked about our biggest fears; she said hers was grasshoppers. Then at recess, this really popular shitty kid found a really big grasshopper in the schoolyard and put it in her pencil case. In the middle of the next period, when the girl picked her case, she screamed and tried to run. But she stumbled and fell headfirst to the floor.”

“The dumb asshole was laughing all the time. He didn’t get any punishment; they couldn’t prove anything. … Anyway, the fucker was socially excluded after that.”

—u/CapitanFlama

35.

“He robbed a 7-Eleven with daddy’s nickel-plated 357 while wearing his varsity jacket (first name on front, last name on back) at the start of his junior year. I’m guessing he was VERY popular in prison, too.”

—u/None

36.

And finally…”She revealed her grandfather (still alive) was a highly ranked member of the local KKK chapter.”

—u/Bmelt

Now it’s your turn — what incident in your school made someone’s popularity tank (or rise) overnight? Let us know in the comments below or via this anonymous form.

Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.