If this is a true story...
...they must've used a lot of artistic licence. I just don't think a girl that nice would've got so stabby so quickly.
shareYes, it is based on a true story. The girls real name was Kirsten Costa, and she was killed in 1984.
AVADA KEDAVRA!!!
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I agree. I got bullied in school too, pretty badly, but I would have never done anything like Bernadette did. I think teenagers live for the moment, and don't think that after they graduate, they'll never have to see these kids again. I think the same thing happened with the Columbine shooting.
AVADA KEDAVRA!!!
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I wonder if there was something else going on too, like maybe Bernadette was physically attracted to Kirsten, and made a pass at her, and Kirsten was going to "out" her at school? Whatever happened in the car that night freaked Kirsten out enough that she ran to a strangers house, and asked to use their phone, saying "my friend got weird on me." No one knows now except Bernadette, and I'm thinking she would never tell the truth, even now. It's a shame, I'm the same age as Kirsten would be, if she had lived. Same with Missy Avila (another famous case) and Jennifer Levin, who was killed by "Preppie Murderer" Robert Chambers.
AVADA KEDAVRA!!!
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There was a Rolling Stone article published in 1985 (a year after the murder and during the trial) that was really a fine piece of journalism. It's featured in the anthology "The Best of Rolling Stone." It was a very sad story. Bernadette Protti wanted to be like the rich, privileged girls but couldn't quite cut it. It's unclear what happened, but the theory is that she opened up her heart to Kirsten Costas, the popular girl she wanted to be friends with, and was horrified to think that Costas would probably go to school the next day and tell everybody about it, sealing her humiliation. She freaked out, lost it and Costas ended up dead.
Costas WAS a really "mean" girl. One of her friends, Stacey Bennett, "kept remembering the cute things Kirsten did":
"One thing that was just so much like her" went back to the winter of their sophomore year when Stacey invited Kirsten to spend Ski Week with her family at Lake Tahoe. "We had four girls in our cabin", Stacey recalled. "And there was this one that we all didn't like. My Mom had invited her because she invited me to this thing of her before." The lonely girl brought a diary. "She would look at us and write something and it was totally bugging us", Stacey remembered. "So finally she goes to take a shower and puts the book down on the table. Kirsten looks at me and starts laughing, and I started laughing and we opened it and started reading. Every time she'd take a shower we'd read it, then put it back in the same place, and she never knew. We would like, repeat what she had written about us and it was SO funny."
"She was only mean to people she didn't care about," said Kirsten's friend Liesl Palmer.
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I think it said at the start of the movie that it was based on that Rolling Stone article about it.
real human being and a real hero
That article is by the man that wrote this movie and it's a notoriously biased account. There is other coverage that is much better. Kristen was NOT a bully. She was well-liked and Bernadette was jealous of her. At worst, Kristen was occasionally caddy to Bernadette. That's not ok but it's no cause for murder. Also, it should be noted that the murder was likely premeditated.
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