In another example of how you should always think before you post, an Instagrammer with nearly 160,000 followers is being blamed for unwittingly bullying a little girl.
The 12-year-old alleged victim attends University Heights Middle School in Riverside, California. According to her mother, the girl has been mercilessly bullied over the past three weeks. It started when the girl’s cell phone was stolen by another student. When the girl reported the theft to her teacher, the other kids began calling her a “rat” and a “snitch.”
The insults didn’t stop there.
“[They would say] I smell bad,” she told ABC 7 Eyewitness News. “They would spray perfume on me while I’m getting dressed [for PE].” The girl said she was also called a “ho,” a “slut” and “white trash.”
Things got worse when one of the bullies convinced an Instagrammer named Yoamandax (pictured above) to bully the girl online. In a live video, Yoamandax named the victim and said, “Let me just tell you that you f—ing smell like fish.” The popular Instagrammer then rattled off a bunch of expletives.
“It hurt,” said the 12-year-old’s mother, Marie Prather, in a conversation with ABC 7. “Just watching her cry, and not wanting to go to school because she’s mortified, and she’s humiliated.”
Seeing a girl bullied on Instagram isn’t a new event, but why would a popular Instagrammer do this? It turns out, Yoamandax was too quick to post her insulting diatribe. She claims she thought the bully was actually the 12-year-old victim.
“I thought I was defending someone from being bullied, and it turns out I’m the bully,” said Yoamandax. “I’m really upset about it, it hurts my heart.”
Yoamandax has since apologized for her actions. She addressed the little girl online, saying, “I want you to know that you deserve so much better. … I don’t even know you as a person and I said those horrible things and that makes me a horrible person. I just wanted to tell you to keep being strong and that things like this pass.”
In a statement sent to ABC 7, the Riverside Unified School District said they have “a comprehensive Bullying Prevention Policy” and that “anyone experiencing uncomfortable behavior from another is encouraged to fill out a Bullying Report Form.”
However, the school district also implied that perhaps the bullying went both ways. In their statement, they said “social media communications are often mutual in nature.”
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ABC 7 Eyewitness News
Yoamandax’s Instagram account