This can be silly or serious and could've happened any time in your life, but either way, it's probably a little embarrassing!
This post may include affiliate links.
Nasty rumor about me that led to a nasty rumor about someone else I knew. Back in the mid-90s, the internet was still young and there were a lot of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) around where people would create forums for discussion on whatever topics they liked and people would dial into the computer directly via phone call to post on the forum.
I was one of those who had a private BBS called The Hidden Pub. A teen (who I will call Ed), who ran another BBS, would occasionally stop by and chat and we got along well, gave each other advice and were regulars at each others BBSs. I had also met him a couple times.
One day, a new guy popped in and started chatting with me. Seemed friendly enough and he asked if I knew Ed. I said that I did. The he says he heard rumors that the Ed had a secret file area with porn on it. I said that I didn't think so or if he did, he certainly shouldn't ..especially considering he was a minor.
About a week later, Ed's BBS inexplicably disappeared. About a month after that, I got invited to a BBS party where a bunch of us SysOps (old term for Admins) and BBS users would get together face-to-face. To my surprise, Ed was there. I asked him what happened to his BBS and he acted like I just shot his dog. After some coaxing to talk to me, we finally figured out the guy that I had a chat with was going around saying that I had confirmed that Ed had porn on his site. It became such a problem, he had no alternative but to shut it down and thought I stabbed him in the back. No wonder he didn't want to talk to me.
Moral of the story is, even before social media, we had trolls whose sole purpose was to make people miserable and destroy reputations.
A girl in my high school lost her virginity to her boyfriend, because her parents found out she claimed that she was raped. For some reason, she told the police that I was there watching and encouraging her boyfriend to it.
Even after the police released me because 50 witness had seen me at a party miles away all night, and found evidence on her phone that she planned to lose her virginity, and charged her with falsifying a police report. She continued to tell people at school that I helped her get raped. I had fights daily, someone even tried to set my house on fire. It finally stopped when a girl in my class punched my accuser in the face during a school assembly and demanded she tell the truth. Unfortunately mud sticks and the school ended up asking me to leave after getting complaints form other parents.
This is the only rumor about me it was that I was Homeschooled even though I went to school.
