Bullying of Quaden (9) never stop: accused of being an 18-year-old scammer
His story went around the world this week after his mother posted a video on social media showing how the Australian Quaden Bayles (9) wished in tears that he was dead, aggravated by harassment from his peers.
A wave of compassion ensued, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised to give the dwarfed boy an unforgettable day as a gift in Disneyland, but the misery doesn’t stop there. The persistent rumor is now circulating on social media that Quaden and his mother Yarraka are con artists, and the boy is actually a lot of old than his parent claims. Something that won’t help.
“Give me a rope, I want to commit suicide,” you hear the little boy from Brisbane say in the moving video that his mother posted on Facebook on Wednesday. “I want to put myself in the heart. I want someone to kill me. I want to die now.” Just before that, a fellow student had tapped him on the head for the umpteenth time and made jokes about his height, said Mama Yarraka.
Flood of supports
A flood of endorsements followed from peers who wanted to become friends and from parents who wanted their children to play with him. But also from a battery of famous people. Actors Hugh Jackman (Wolverine, The Greatest Showman) and Jon Bernthal (The Walking Dead) and actress Alyssa Milano (Charmed, Mistresses), among others, already gave him a boost.
Comedian Brad Williams – who also has dwarfism himself – even started crowdfunding to send the boy and his mama to Disneyland as a consolation. For this, they already raised thousands of dollars (the money that’s too much goes to charities that fight to bully).
Unfortunately, that didn’t put an end to the bullying of Quaden. A persistent rumor is now circulating on social media that the boy is lying about his age and is actually 18 years old. And that he and his mother are cheating on everyone.
According to Australian media, the rumor can be traced back to a dubious Facebook post. “just so you know,” it says with some pictures of the boy that have to prove a point. “He scammed everybody. He’s 18… he has plenty of money, and yeah, everyone fell for it.”
Only, nothing turns out to be right. For example, the so-called photo of the party for Quaden’s 18th birthday is actually a photo of a birthday party of a friend of his (Garlen). That can be seen in other pictures of the event, which are also on the Instagram page of Quaden.
And also a picture of Quaden on which, according to some social media users, he supposedly drank champagne, turns out to be false. It is a photo that was taken from his mother’s Instagram page and trimmed so that you can’t see that the boy is drinking apple lemonade.
You can also follow the entire life of Quaden on the Instagram page of mama Yarraka because she shared photos and videos of all the critical moments of their lives. From his birth in 2010 to now. You see him grow up with time.
There were also television recordings of Quaden when he was a little younger. His mother, for example, once asked attention for the gaze that her son often receives. Images from an interview with the Australian talk show Studio 10 from 2015 clearly show the age of the boy. He is four years old there. If the false rumor about his age were correct, he would already have been 13 in the images, which is clearly not the case.
Meanwhile, Quaden’s mother formally denied the allegations. She even got the support of rapper Cardi B, who told her 59 million followers how the harassment made her “sad”.
