Airing one’s dirty laundry on social media, while often entertaining for onlookers, can quickly get incredibly messy and incredibly unpleasant, particularly when strangers get overly invested, start taking sides and begin harassing one or both parties involved in a dispute, as if people’s real lives are merely another form of entertainment on par with the Real Housewives cinematic universe.


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One recent example is a case where a man’s ex-girlfriend publicly accused him of giving her HIV, posting the accusation to social media and resulting in a flood of people sending him abusive messages. The woman posted a screenshot supposedly showing messages from her ex, a student at Saint Augustine’s University in North Carolina, admitting to having HIV for seven months and giving it to her because he “just couldn’t pass up” on her, adding that he “wanted [her] so bad man.”


In a video posted to social media after the accusations went viral, a recorded phone call with the woman who made the accusations can be heard in which the cameraman urges the woman to clear up the false nature of the allegations. He tells her, “If we know it’s false, everybody knows it’s false, somebody needs to go on these pages and let them know that it’s false, instead of letting this shit drag on and letting his name get tarnished like this, it ain’t right.”



The man who was accused posted an Instagram Story in which he threatened self-harm, blaming the people harassing him for ruining his life, only to follow it up with a story that reads, “Sike, fk yall feelings.” He then proceeded to upload screenshots of the numerous abusive messages he’s received since going viral, with some people telling him they hope he gets cancer and dies and others hoping his penis falls off. Stranger still are the messages in which people call him cute and say they’d still let him infect them.



While there’s now been ample evidence that the woman was lying, someone (it’s not clear who) once said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Weaponizing anti-HIV stigma against someone you feel wronged you harms not just their reputation (and yours, once people discover you’re lying) but further contributes to the idea that having HIV makes someone dirty, promiscuous, unclean and unsafe to be around. Which only makes all of this more all the more awful.