Bullied Bus Monitor Campaign Nets $700K For Woman Who Verbally Abused in Shocking YouTube Video
The bullied bus monitor video became a huge internet outrage sensation last month after a clip of Karen Klein, an elderly woman from Upstate New York, spread around the web due to the horrible verbal bullying it showed her peacefully enduring at the hands of a gaggle of teen boys on a school bus.
The bullied bus monitor clip was titled “Making the Bus Monitor Cry,” and the original video has garnered more than 8.3 million views on YouTube.
While the bullied bus monitor video initially was a very sad thing for the internet to behold, some very good things came of it for the bullied bus monitor herself — the internet opened up their digital wallets and took up a vacation collection for the quietly abused old lady. By late last month, the “vacation of a lifetime” kitty had grown to $650,000, an outpouring of kindness that Klein and many others found moving and surprising.
Klein had been making very little in her clearly thankless job, and the internet was proud of itself for giving the older woman — who had endured tragedy in the years leading up to her viral fame — a little bit of money to retire on after her bad luck was publicized. And now that donations have closed up, another $50,000 has been added to the fund, closing it out at a respectable $700,000+.
According to ABC, organizer Max Sidorov of Toronto said that he was blown away by the fundraising’s success, being as he only intended to raise $5,000 for the bullied bus monitor’s vacation fund:
“I think that people just love rallying around a great cause, especially helping someone in need or who has been abused or can’t stand up for themselves,” Sidorov said by phone from Toronto on Friday. “It just shows there are so many great people in the world. It warms my heart to see that.”
The bullied bus monitor herself was not available to comment to press Friday, but one can only assume that the otherwise disappointing incident wound up being a boon for her — and that she no longer has to sit quietly while bratty teen boys give her the business.
