Am I the jerk for turning my whole school against my ex girlfriend?

This story is old. We graduated HS in 2003. I haven’t thought about this girl in years but someone just mentioned her the other day. Looking back as an adult, I think I might have really overreacted and I kind of feel bad about it now.

All names have been changed so It’s cool to post this story wherever. 

Just so you understand me back then: I am a very nice heartfelt person now but when I was young (middle school age) I was told more than once that I was a “SMART BULLY”. I never hurt anyone physically but I learned very early on how to push all the right buttons to get what I wanted. 

My first love was Alice. I fell for her in the 8th grade hard and by HS, I was doing all those annoying teen things, all the way to the sad poems even. 

We all went to a rather large private school. There were 132 kids in our graduating class. 

I know I will get some judgement on this comment but I feel it’s worth sharing. Alice was never attractive. That was actually a common topic of confusion in our class. Maybe she had some kind of queen bee pheromones going one, but I know at least 4 guys who “fell in love” with her through HS but all agreed it was confusing because none of us found her physically attractive or even really liked anything about her personality. She also somehow kept collecting new BFF girls who also never liked her. It was really weird. 

By the end of Freshman year, I think Alice had dumped me I think 3 times by then, and I was incredibly devastated each time and would tell everyone, including her, that I was prepared to be alone forever loving her and hoping she would truly be with the man who made her happy. It was a different boy every time. Once she decided to “run away from home” She told her parents all about it and how it was all their fault. Her mom secretly gave me $200 for “gas money” and I drove Alice 2 hours away to stay with the a guy I knew she was cheating on me with. I’m telling you it was all so crazy!!!

I dated other girls but it was never anything real… Until Lee. Lee was in our same friend group and we started dating Sophomore year. We dated on and off the rest of HS and have now been very happily married for 18 years. 

Alice knew before I did that my feelings for Lee were going to erase my feelings for her. She forced her way into Lee’s life and claimed her spot as her new BFF. I don’t have time to explain all the insane things that went on over the next 3 years but it was so incredibly weird. Alice somehow started coming on our dates with us, just the 3 of us. After a crazy event senior year that included alcohol poisoning and I let Alice talk me into putting Lee in severe danger, I decided it was time to banish her for good! 

Lee and I both told Alice that she needed to remove herself from our lives and she did not handle it well…. There were multiple huge public scenes with her screaming and hitting me and somehow, even the teachers let this happen. We were on a college touring trip when one of these events happened in the middle of the night on the bus. When we got to our next stop, I was the last one off the bus and was met by all the girls on my bus (I think it was all of them) lined up waiting to give me a hug as I walked down the line. That was the first time I realized that the whole class had been watching our soap opera for all these years.  

Now we will get into the part where I might really not come off well and I feel guilty now. 

By the time we returned from the trip, Lee and I had made it very clear that we would not be speaking a single world to Alice ever again. She did not handle this well. I decided to go full on passive aggressive with it. I made myself an Anti-Alice pin to wear. Her name with the big red circle slash thing through it. Lee did not want a pin, but I made her a double sided sign. One side said “I like you. Let’s be friends!” The other side just said “GO AWAY!!!” 

My pin must have looked very cool because someone asked me to make them one so I did. Then someone else asked for one, so I made it, and it started a trend. Alice obviously saw the pins and ran up to someone somewhere and ripped it off them. That schoolmate came to me for another one. This started becoming a big game to the school. If Alice ripped your pin off, you needed to go to Jason (me) with something round and a safety pin and a sharpie so I could make you a new one. Yes people could make their own but that apparently was against the rules of the game. This went on for several weeks and it got so big that people from all 4 classes of HS were coming to me all day to make pins. So many people who probably didn’t even know me or Lee or Alice but were in on the game. I was told people were keeping tallies as bragging rights. The more times Alice ripped your pins off you, the cooler you were. Some people started carrying bags around with all their broken pins to show off. She would run down the hall screaming and ripping pins off people while they all just laughed at her.

I don’t know how long it went before the principal finally came to me to put a stop to it. This was 2003 and it was a private school so things were definitely more flexible than they should have been. I agreed to have a single last conversation with Alice. We met in the back outdoor chapel of the school in the field through the woods away from all faculty (at least I assume so). Lee and Alice and me. Somehow the word spread of this (maybe I told people and don’t remember). We ended up with a rather large audience. We had a convo where she screamed at us and said we were ruining her life and I said it would all go away if she would just agree to LEAVE US ALONE!!!  As she walked back the path to school, we could hear everyone loudly booing her and calling her a loser and crazy and all kinds of mean things.

The last couple months of school had to be  really rough on her. She was now the complete social pariah of the entire school. I was told that she was bringing a giant bottle of vodka and lemonade to drink in class all day. By the time we graduated, I don’t know if anyone at all was even talking to her. After we walked back down the graduation aisle, Alice’s mom approached me and I was expecting a loud scolding but she actually apologized for letting her daughter put us through all that. 

I would hear stories here and there later from friends. Once I was told she went to a party and wasn’t getting any attention so she pretended to be drowning drunk in the pool and everyone just ignored her until she stood up and left. 

Now I haven’t even thought about her name in probably over a decade. I think she is living in Colorado and has kids and is divorced but I could be completely wrong. What made me think about this is that someone just told me that she is now bragging online about being autistic….. Yeah let that sink in for a minute…… 

Like I said at the beginning (I think). Looking back on this as an adult, I feel pretty lousy about how I acted our senior year of HS. Yeah she was crazy and yeah I was right to tell her to go away, but I didn’t have to turn it into a giant show for the whole world to see and possibly screw up the rest of her life and feelings towards others. I turned 600 people against her just because I was enjoying being the hero of the story.