Some stories are so delicious they’re good even if you’re hearing it for the second or third time.
A story about Winona Ryder’s experience with homophobic bullies as a preteen has re-re-surfaced, and the internet is loving it.
A story originally detailed in a 2012 biography of actress and Stranger Things star Winona Ryder went viral in 2017 when it was shared to Twitter.
The biography, authored by Nigel Goodall, details Ryder’s experience with homophobic bullies and how she got a fabulous moment of revenge years later.
“I was wearing an old Salvation Army shop boy’s suit,” Ryder recalled. “As I went to the bathroom I heard people saying, ‘Hey, f***** [the homophobic slur].’ They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the s*** out of me. I had to have stitches.”
Disturbingly, and perhaps a sign of the times, it was Ryder who got punished for the horrific act. “The school kicked me out, not the bullies”, she said.
“Years later, I went to a coffee shop and I ran into one of the girls who’d kicked me, and she said, ‘Winona, Winona, can I have your autograph?’”, the actress recalled.
“And I said, ‘Do you remember me? Remember in seventh grade you beat up that kid?’ And she said, ‘Kind of.’ And I said, ‘That was me. Go f*** yourself.’”
In 2010, in an interview with GQ Magazine, Ryder said that actor Mel Gibson was homophobic and anti-Semitic when she had met him years earlier.
“I remember, like, fifteen years ago, I was at one of those big Hollywood parties. And he was really drunk. I was with my friend, who’s gay. He made a really horrible gay joke. And somehow it came up that I was Jewish” she said.
“He said something about ‘oven dodgers,’ but I didn’t get it. I’d never heard that before. It was just this weird, weird moment. I was like, ‘He’s anti-Semitic and he’s homophobic.’ No one believed me!”
The slur “oven dodger” is a horrific reference to the gas chambers used to kill Jewish people during the Holocaust.
winona ryder did that. pic.twitter.com/UfjBefAVNR
— best of winona ryder (@BESTOFWlNONA) June 16, 2022
Beautiful reminder that it’s OKAY to choose to never forgive your bully, even if it was 15 years ago. https://t.co/Mb11PibQAa
— Sweeney Boo @TCAF #239 (@Sweeney_Boo) June 18, 2022