Don't mess with Winona Ryder.
The 46-year-old actress' career couldn't be hotter with the rising popularity of Stranger Things, but in a recently resurfaced story from her biography, Ryder describes a time when life wasn't as glamorous. In fact, the Golden Globe winner says she was bullied so bad in middle school that she once had to get stitches.
As Ryder explains, she wore a boy-ish haircut and dressed in boy's clothes in her pre-teen years, which caused traumatic harassment for her on the third day of seventh grade at Kenilworth Junior High in Petaluma, California.
“I was wearing an old Salvation Army shop boy’s suit,” the actress said in Nigel Goodall’s book Winona Ryder: The Biography. “As I went to the bathroom I heard people saying, ‘’Hey, f***ot [a homophobic slur].’ They slammed my head into a locker. I fell to the ground and they started to kick the s**t out of me. I had to have stitches.
According to Ryder, however, it was her and not the perpetrators who were punished for the event. "The school kicked me out, not the bullies," she recalled.
Not long after, however, Ryder's career began to soar. The Beetlejuice star remembers running into one of her tormentors in a coffee shop years later.
"She said, 'Winona, Winona, can I have your autograph?'" she remembered. "And I said, 'Do you remember me? Remember in seventh grade you beat up that kid?'"
"She said, 'Kind of.' And I said, 'That was me. Go f**k yourself,'" she revealed.
