John Cena Was Bullied Too

John Cena recently revealed that he was once a victim of bullying. The former WWE Heavyweight champ says, as a kid, he was picked on because he liked rap and hip-hop duds in a town where it wasn’t popular.

Cena began to lift weights to bulk up and be in a position to protect himself. “By the time I was 15, I was a built kid, and the comments didn’t come so often, and the people making fun of me sort of fell by the wayside,” Cena said, while speaking to the press on Friday about bullying. He is a huge supporter of the Be-A-Star anti-bullying campaign and spoke about how social media has contributed to bullying.

“The introduction of social media pretty much gives everyone a voice, but unfortunately, people choose to use that voice in a negative way,” he noted. Cena also said: “Usually your first instinct is to lash out at these people. … but I believe you always need to turn a negative into a positive.”

His advice: “The best way to get back at them is to put a smile on your face and do whatever you can to succeed.”

It’s never a big surprise to us at Fikkle Fame when a celebrity comes forward to reveal he or she was bullied. If anyone stepped up and admitted to being a bully, now that would be a big surprise.

But what’s interesting about his comments is the part about lifting weights. Once he beefed up, the bullies left him alone because it was obvious that retaliation could be painful. So, not that we don’t already know it, bullies love to pick on people they perceive as defenseless.

We’d also be impressed if a celebrity would come out and say people who tease and harass and pick on anyone as ‘easy prey’ are despicable. The anti-bullying movement could take some giant leaps from a great deal of contempt directed at bullies. Don’t think so? Well, they got everyone to hate smokers, didn’t they?

Cena’s anti-bullying message is more like — not everyone is going to like you, learn to deal with it. And he holds himself up as an example, leaving insults on his Twitter, like his twitter war with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

“There’s a lot of negative stuff on there and some of it is personal,” Cena says. “When you’re a kid that feels that everything is coming down on you, you can look and see that this truly does happen to everybody.”

Just an observation, John, but reading your Twitter feed really wouldn’t offer a lot of comfort to a kid being bullied.