‘Bachelor’ Contestant Sydney Hightower Said She Was Bullied In School, Former Classmates Say Otherwise
Many Bachelor fans likely felt for contestant Sydney Hightower during Monday’s three-hour episode, when she told Peter Weber a heartbreaking story about how she was bullied in high school. She claimed to not have been accepted by her peers and that she regularly ate her lunch in a bathroom stall. Nevertheless, one of Hightower’s former classmates took to Twitter to post yearbook photos and accuse her of lying, according to Cosmopolitan.
The yearbook photos seem to suggest that Hightower was well-respected in high school and was very popular. In one photo she stands with a crown on her head, holding a bouquet of flowers. The caption reads, “Upperclassman Top Beauty.” Other photos showed her winning beauty pageants and other awards.
Another former classmate joined in on the conversation, saying it was Hightower who bullied others in high school.
“Funny that she says she was bullied because in middle school Sydney wrote some of the nastiest stuff in my yearbook and signed her name like she was proud and ended up getting suspended,” a man named Evan Etheridge tweeted.
The backlash against Hightower got so intense that she ultimately had no choice but to defend herself. She stands by the fact that she was bullied and noted that while she may have won beauty pageants, she wasn’t accepted by her peers. She went on to say that she was also a victim of racism — not only by her former classmates but her teachers as well, whom she accused of calling her derogatory names.
“Any one from my high school want to pull out the videos of girls stuffing my locker with Oreo cookies, vandalizing my home, shoving me in the hall ways? Teachers literally referring to me as a halfbreed? Calling my mother the worst names I’ve ever heard in my life? I doubt that,” Hightower said in a tweet responding to the drama.
After making the response, she deleted her Twitter account.
As The Inquisitr previously reported, Hightower hasn’t exactly kept to herself this season. She stirred up drama early on with fellow contestant and former Miss Texas USA Alayah Benavidez. The pair shared a particularly intense pillow fight that brought about tension. Hightower later went to Weber and told him that one of the women in the house was different when the cameras were on than when they were off, eventually dropping Benavidez’s name. Benavidez did not receive a rose and was later sent home.
