High school bullies make for great "where are they now" stories. In some cases, bullies right their wrongs and turn out to be decent people. However, more often than not, karma catches up to them and they end up reaping what they sowed.
Read on to find out what happened to these bullies because no revenge is sweeter than knowing they guy who used to pick on you peaked in high school while you're out here thriving in your adult life. Content has been edited for clarity.
You’ll All Be Flipping Burgers Someday
“I had three bullies all through elementary, middle and high school. Just before graduation, the three of them cornered me in the hall at our high school. After a few minutes of F-Word this and F-Word that, they started for me. They didn’t know I spent the weekends helping out on my aunt’s dairy farm by stacking hay bales. I picked up the closest guy, the worst bully, and threw him against the wall. The other two backed off and picked up the one I threw. I told them that I was getting out of the small upstate New York town and they’d be stuck there flipping burgers and pumping gas for each other.
Fast forward a decade: I went out to a bar local to my parents’ house. I bumped into the least aggressive of the three and instantly bought him a drink. He told me that the three of them had done as I predicted and all had minimum wage lives.
Fast forward to 2017, through online research I found out all three are dead with the worst one dead at 54, eleven years ago. No idea how they went. In the meantime, I built a law practice that I retired early from. I feel great about showing them that I would and could take them on by prospering as an adult.”
“I Really Want To Care”
“He bullied me all of middle school starting in 5th grade until my sophomore year of high school. Starting the summer before junior year and on, I took boxing classes every day. We had several fights, but starting junior year, I would beat him pretty badly and tell him to stop the bull, but he had the same attitude and started trying to jump me with random weapons (bat, pipe, rock whatever etc).
One day, early senior year, he just stopped. I remember the last time I saw him…he came up to me like usual like he wanted to fight, but he just stood there. Then he drifted off. I never saw him again.
A few weeks after that, his parents took him to the store, but left their wallet at home. They went home and couldn’t find it. He had fallen asleep in the car on the way home, so they left him in the car to find the wallet. They went mad, crazily turning over stuff looking in the house for it. They couldn’t find it. Upset and annoyed, they came back outside and the car had caught on fire and was in full blaze. He never had a chance.
I wanted to care. I’m not a bad person but…I just didn’t. I still don’t. Maybe one day I will.”
“He Deserved Every Ounce Of Pain”
“My very first bully started in 3rd or 4th grade. In 6th grade, he was rollerblading without a helmet. He ran into a parked car at full speed with his head down on a freaking dare. He had life altering brain injuries (lost part of his skull, and probably 50-100 IQ points, depending on where he started – hard for a kid to judge such things). He can barely talk, is totally dependent on his parents and other care takers. I did see him walking around from time to time, but it’s been a while.
When he first came back to school, I tried to be nice to him. I went up to him and told him I hope he feels better soon, and I was sorry he was hurt. The only thing he managed to say back to me was an insult. I told him to go bug off and never talked to him again. I had to watch people baby him and be nice to him and help him. I was criticized for not fawning over him and his needs, even years later when I didn’t go out of my way to say hi to him on the street. I didn’t give a crap, he deserved every ounce of pain, and the loss of a real life. I do feel bad for his family though – they don’t deserve a life long sentence as a care taker for an idiot.
He was vicious before the accident, controlled groups of people who decided my slight amount of being overweight was a daily source of entertainment. He would recruit new people that I trusted into luring me into situations that he could abuse me in… forget him. I always saw it as his fault anyway. Who takes a dare of ‘Go run your freaking head into that car at full speed with no helmet’ just to see what happens?
There was also this girl who wasn’t a bully, but who saw me as an enemy for some reason (I liked a guy she hung out with). She physically attacked me in 9th grade… I saw her recently as I left a restaurant with my family. She didn’t know it was me, or maybe she just didn’t notice me. She was talking to a friend about how some guy ditched her while they were on vacation together, meanwhile, there I was, walking with my faithful husband, 5-year-old, and baby in my tummy.
I felt a little bad for her (not that everyone wants what I have, but clearly she wanted a better relationship). We had different priorities, and I never really was mad at her. Even after she attacked me, I wasn’t hurt. I was suspended like her because school rules always punished everyone involved, but I didn’t get into real trouble because the teacher that broke it up told everyone I didn’t do anything but hold her down, and she approached me.”
The Three Bullies
“I had three bullies (J, Z, and C for anonymity) because I was an anime-club-running, a-cappella-singing, stage-crew-assisting, D&D-playing, video-game-obsessed, uber-nerd back then. I still am, but I was then too, and I didn’t have nearly the charisma I do now.
J was the Jock Bully. He liked to hit me with lacrosse sticks. He bragged that he was going to own an airplane some day while I’d grow up to be a nothing because my family wasn’t from old money. He died in a private airplane crash along with basically his entire family, except his estranged brother.
Z was the bully who did all kinds of substances. He was a jerk with a crappy childhood. He tried to force me to do blow, more than once. He tried to assault my best (female) friend at the time. He came out as bi, went to a gay-only party, and died of an overdose in the bathroom, which is how his parents found out he was using and was bi.
C was an ideological rival more than a bully. He was conventionally attractive, dumb as a brick, but from a wealthy line of surgeons. His future was all but decided for him. He liked to pick on me for having useless skills like being a bookworm and an artist and he prided himself on his athletic skills, perfect health, and romantic prowess above all else. He shoved these in my face and called me a loser. He is currently a fat, unemployed addict undergrad dropout whose father abandoned their family out of shame. Then he had a very public affair from whence a child was born, who he gave the same name as C in order to ‘try again.’
So, yeah, I’m doing okay.”
“I Want Her To Have Learned A Lesson”
“By the looks of it, my bully is doing great. Just graduated college, has a decent job and is engaged. She looks fantastic in all her Facebook pictures, didn’t get fat or anything like that. Her life is better than mine.
I wonder sometimes if she even realizes what she did. I don’t exactly hold it against her – we were kids and kids are cruel. I got bullied by basically everyone I went to school with, but she was the ringleader and the meanest. She caused crippling anxiety and self esteem issues that I’m still affected by over a decade later. She seriously messed up my life…and now she’s doing great.
It’s not that I want her life to be bad, I just want her to occasionally lay awake at night thinking ‘Crap, I did a horrible thing.’ If she has kids or nieces/nephews, I want that guilt to motivate her to teach them not to pull the crap she did. If she sees someone sitting alone at a party, I want her to be reminded of me, feel kinda guilty, and go talk to them.
I don’t know. I just want something good to come out of it. I don’t want her to suffer, but I want her to understand what she did and not just have this perfect life and see herself as a wonderful person who’s never done anything bad. I want her to have learned a lesson from it.”
Donny And Bunny
“We moved and I ended up attending a new high school my junior year and senior year. I went from one rural Podunk high school to another that had more of the same bull crap from my previous school: cliques of jocks, freaks, and nerds. But there was this couple, let’s call them ‘Donny and Bunny.’ Donny was a brute of a guy. He was the anchor of the football team and I suspect maybe he got held back once or twice early on because he was the biggest guy in the school with a whopping student body of 200. He was pretty much your typical meathead: strong as an ox, not too bright, and coddled by the football coach, who just happened to be the vice principle. Go figure.
Then there was his cheerleader girlfriend ‘Bunny.’ She was the kind of girl that would find some poor unsuspecting guy and bounce up to him being overly friendly and semi-flirty just to get Donny’s blood up, which of course lead to the unavoidable shoving, growling, posturing and occasional pummeling. He blasted me a few times thanks to Bunny telling him I was ‘leering’ at her. I hated her and I still do nearly thirty years later. So there’s your image: a hulking violent halfwit brute and his little perky version of Curley’s Wife from Of Mice and Men.
To make a long story shorter, the summer between junior and senior year, Donny was out driving after some heavy drinking on some rural country roads and got in a really bad wreck leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. Bunny stayed by him, just long enough for it to lose the shine of ‘isn’t she great for staying with him’ and then dumped him like hot trash.”
What Goes Around Comes Around
“I wasn’t really bullied much in high school, but in elementary and junior high I was. One guy in junior high was a jerk and would try to fight me for talking to girls he liked and your usual stuff, like insulting me for being a fat kid and stuff. I finally talked to him about why he was being a like this and he said it was because he had an image to keep up. We eventually became friends until I moved for high school. I still talk to him occasionally.
Now this other guy, let’s call him Devon. He would beat the crap out of me in elementary and some of junior high for no reason other than it was fun. He knocked out my friend’s front teeth with a golf club for looking at him wrong. He and his friend also mugged a kid and went to juvie for it. His friend came back a totally different person, but Devon didn’t change a bit.
I finally kinda got him back one day when I was in 9th grade. Now Devon was about two years older than me and had been held back many years. He was bullying this little kid in 6th grade all the time, so I stood up for this kid and got my butt kicked.
However, there is a good part: I lived in a crappy part of town where the bullied kid’s older brother was in a gang. One day my friend and I were coming back from school and like eight big dudes came up to talk with me and my friend (which we thought was kinda messed up since we were kinda fat, scared kids). These guys thanked me for defending his brother and asked for a description of Devon and what way he takes to get home from school. I whole-heartedly divulged all I knew.
Two weeks later, my friend and I were walking home from school when we saw a bunch of people at the far end of the field. Guess who walks up behind us? It’s Devon. He says some crap and keeps walking. After taking a casual stroll to the end of the field, my friend and I found 10 guys beating the ever loving crap out of Devon. He was bleeding a bunch and crying like a little girl and asking for help. We just thanked the kids brother and kept on walking, Devon never bothered me or my friends again after that.
As for today, I see him in news articles all the time getting arrested for different crap. Glad to see he got what he deserved.”
“I Feel Bad For Her”
“My middle school bully was cruel and terrible to me. I was a bigger girl so she would constantly make fun of my weight. She tried giving me snack cakes in front of people and laughing. She would put her hand on my stomach so her friends could take pictures and pretend I was pregnant. Literally a group of girls would stand there with their phones, surprised that I started crying. She made fun of me during gym and would look at me disgusted when I got changed for gym. Just a really rude and terrible girl.
Later on, I learned that she had a crap home life with a workaholic dad and addict mother. Her sister had to pretty much raise her during tough times. She got herself into trouble, developed an eating disorder and started hurting herself (which is something she used to make fun of people for).
Now, she’s super skinny and constantly works out, to the point that she looks sick. One of those people who tans past the point of normal tanning. I feel bad for her, honestly. She was projecting her issues onto me and others. I just have to feel bad for her instead of looking back on those memories with an angry outlook.”
Keep Your Friends Close And Your Enemies Closer
“My worst bullies were actually my best friends.
In early high school my best friend at the time hacked my MySpace, deleted the account, made a new one, and wrote a bio which completely ripped on all of my other friends, ultimately turning everyone against me. I forgave her, but we weren’t close after that obviously. Now she’s obese. I can’t help but feel bad for her.
My other best friend/bully was a classic social climber. When we moved to university together, she started hanging out with a new girl and never invited me. It was her birthday and she was having pre-drinks at her house to celebrate. I heard her say to her new friend, ‘Yeah bring whoever you want! The more the merrier.’ So I invited a girl from one of my uni classes who told me she was having a hard time meeting anyone at uni. I told my best friend I invited her, and in front of everyone at the pre-drinks, she screamed at me for making the birthday about me and taking away the attention from her. People started yelling at me like, ‘What have you done?!’ I had literally been in the apartment for two seconds when this went down.
I went home and cried. I lived with three boys and they knocked on my door and asked what happened. I told them and they were like, ‘Oh thank God you’re not friends with her anymore. She’s really, really strange.’ They invited me to go out with them, and as I was dancing on the dance floor, my best friend came up to me to dance, acted like everything was fine, because I had three attractive dudes around me and she wanted their attention.
Now, I’ve moved overseas and she spends her time taking photos/snapchats with my current best friend. I can’t escape her.”
“It’s Not Healthy To Harbor Hatred For That Long”
“I coach an adult league softball team.
One of the players said they had a guy to fill in for a tournament, so, needing bodies, I agreed.
My heart sank when he came strutting up. My player introduced me to him, and the guy said ‘Yeah he and I go way back. I made his life miserable in high school. I don’t think I’ll be welcome to play, but thanks for the opportunity.’
He turned and started walking away, and I called him back over. I told him that if he’s half as good as he was when we were teenagers, he’s welcome to play.
He immediately agreed, and after the first game, (which we won by the mercy rule) he had a long chat with me. We’re good friends now, and he has a permanent spot on my team. He’s also part owner of an auto parts store I buy from.
I decided to forgive him because why not? We’re both adults, he saw his mistakes, and owned up to them like a man. Plus, I would be doing my kids a disservice by not forgiving him. Just because he was a piece of crap then, does not make him a piece of crap now. People change over time. High school was so long ago, and it’s not healthy to harbor hatred for that long.
And yes, he is still as good as he was on high school.”
A Summer At Grandma’s Made A Huge Different
“I had a major bully on the bus in 7th grade. She would steal my things, hit me, and follow me home taunting me with mean comments or throwing mud at me. My parents and the school did nothing about it. This was before there were cameras on school buses.
The summer between 7th and 8th grade, she disappeared from the neighborhood. I figured her family had moved away and I felt relieved.
On the first day of 8th grade, there was a knock on our back door. It was my bully. She asked if she could speak with me. She apologized for the way she had treated me the previous year. A real sincere apology. She asked if we could walk to the bus together. I agreed and we walked to the bus together every morning that year. Sometimes we would hang out on the weekends too. She became a friend to me.
Eventually, I found out her mom had sent her to live with her old school Catholic grandma out in the country that summer. Grandma set her on the straight and narrow somehow and got her going to church which also helped her. The summer after 8th grade she moved away to permanently live with her grandma. We wrote to each other for awhile. She got really into long distance bike riding and got a boyfriend. I was happy for her, but we drifted apart during high school. I hope she’s still happy!”
A True Psychopath
“I went to school with Sharon Carr, a true psychopath. She murdered someone at 12. It was so brutal the police thought it was a man. She picked on my friends and I, me not as much as them because admittedly I didn’t stand up to her and she recognized I was weak and not worth the fight. She’s now trying to get married in Broadmoor…
James, a lovely chap who picked me up in the middle of the playground and said if I went to my parents again over something he instigated that nearly resulted in me being strangled on the bus and the driver did nothing to help, said that he would find me and kill me. To the teachers, James was an angel, blond hair, blue eyes who never did anything wrong. He was loved by his friends and girls alike, but he was a complete and utter jerk.
He wrapped his car around a tree while speeding in the rain. I hope he’s rotting for the torture he put me through. He is dead, it’s the only time I’ve ever said good riddance to bad rubbish.
There was a kid who made fun of me for having a squeaky voice. It’s not my fault; it’s genetics. I met him while chatting with someone I know, he started embarrassing me and I told him to go bug off or I’d find his home and bang his mother. He never bothered me after that.
There was this woman at school, blond hair, big chest, pretty. She’s now a complete fat slag who wanted discount for being my friend. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard in my life. She was a witch then and she is a witch now.
On the bright side, I’ve had people who did bully me, don’t remember their names, who have since apologized, so it’s not all bad.”
The One Person Who Isn’t Supposed To Bully You
“My high school bully was also my art teacher. She was a pretentious witch who broke the spirit of anyone who didn’t draw high realism, which was the only thing she considered to be art.
I’m a cartoonist and she didn’t like that. I got low grades on everything and constantly told me I’d never have a career as a cartoonist and that I should give up.
This was common for her and I know at least four people who didn’t pursue the art career they wanted because of this woman.
Later on, my significant other and I were getting drinks one day…and ran into her at the cash register.
I guess after I graduated she got fired because of parent complaints. Now she’s a cashier at the LCBO (Ontario convenience store) because she can’t get a job in her field, which was why she was teaching. She’s a crappy artist and she’s bitter.
Now, I’m pursuing a career in animation. My significant other is already a professional animator and this woman told me there was no money in cartoons. Forget her.”