What happened to Lexi Bonner?

It can be difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to things online. Information travels faster than fact-checking, which can be time consuming and costly. This seems to be what’s happening in the case of Lexi Bonner, a 14-year-old British girl who allegedly beat the snot out of an autistic 8-year-old boy. So what exactly happened? Let’s get to the bottom of it.

The story of Bonner is not one that’s really made its way through traditional news outlets, but it is incredibly popular online. Basically, a video was posted on Snapchat on April 13th of two young people grabbing a young boy as he screams “no!” He’s shoved on the grass and then kicked. Someone calls him “gay boy.” It was posted on X the next day.

It’s a disturbing video that’s only 19 seconds long, and it garnered “1.5 million views and 13,000 likes in a day,” per the social media site knowyourmeme. As of this writing, it has almost 3 million views. Warning: the video is violent and disturbing.

As the video made the rounds, misinformation and rumor spread along with it. According to different sources, either the boy was near death in the hospital with broken bones, as in this TikTok video with 2.4 million views, or he was completely fine and playing in his backyard, as this other TikTok video claims. The latter video has almost 4 million views.

One of the main (and obvious) differences between an internet myth and reliable story with facts is that it is fact-checked and comes from a reliable source. On TikTok, anyone can can pretty much say anything. The story gets a little worse from here.

A day after the original was posted on Snapchat, a TikTok user posted more footage adding more context. In the “new” footage, the boy playfully touches Bonner’s hand. It’s pretty clear that he’s playing around. He then runs, and Bonner gives chase. This was posted to X by user @DylanS99, who wrote: “Here you see the boy (8) play hitting Lexi bonner (14) to which she then chased him and carried out a horrific attack.”

That video has almost 5 million views as of this writing. Perhaps the most disturbing video of all shows the young boy on the ground with Bonner standing over him, and the boy crying. “Why can’t we just be friends,” the little boy says. “Get up and we can,” the teenager says. He then screams that she’s going to hit him. “I’m not,” she says, and reaches for him, and he screams again. She picks him up and throws him to the ground. He screams more, and she laughs.

“It’s not funny,” he screams. She mocks him and starts repeatedly kicking him again. These videos are clearly from the incident, but there are seemingly hundreds of other videos and posts with wild, unverified claims. Some claim Bonner is being jumped, and others claim to show the boy in the hospital.

As for what’s actually happened to Lexi, everyone claims to know, but it’s pretty clear no one really does. Is she in jail? Some think so. Has she been stabbed? Apparently, according to this post on Instagram. That post claims that Bonner was found after a group of girls stabbed her multiple times, and that she’s in the hospital. That is, like the hundreds of other rumors about Bonner, unverified. People are also claiming the boy has autism. Whether or not that’s true, or how that affects the narrative, remains to be seen.

One post from a few months ago on Reddit claims that:

1. lexi bonnor has not been jumped although there is a video going around it is not her in the video
2. the boy has not got any injuries, he has a few cuts and bruises 
3. the people saying the boy is dead is not true and as you can imagine his mum is very upset about the info that her son is dead and has broken bones because it is simply not true
4. lexi bonnor is not dead! 

This information is apparently sourced through the boy’s mother on Facebook. X user @DylanS99 posted an apparent update on a gofundme.

The gofundme page has stopped accepting donations but says it raised £4,559. The organizer said:

“After watching the video, I felt compelled to do something. It took a couple of days and the power of social media, but I finally got in touch with his mother. My initial plan was to give him a personal gift to cheer him up, but as I reached out, I discovered there were many others touched by his plight and eager to help.”

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the multitude of caring comments speaking for the the boy on the gofundme page. The truth is hard to find, but it will probably come out on its own fairly soon. We’ll update this story when it does.