It’s always hard to be on the receiving end of criticism, especially if you’re an artistic type of person. You may pour your heart and soul into your work, only to have someone with possibly no talent trash your masterpiece publicly.

Although most people can take criticism reasonably well, some people completely snap after reading a few harsh words. The following people harassed, stalked, and even assaulted people who dared to leave a negative review.

10 Richard Brittain

Richard Brittain was delighted with early reviews of his novel, The World Rose. He claimed that critics loved his book, comparing him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and Rowling. Only a few “idiots” and “teenagers” gave him bad reviews.

Paige Rolland despised Brittain’s novel. She read several pages and declared that she was bored out of her skull. Rolland wrote a lengthy review of the book in which she criticized every aspect of the novel, including the cover, the price, the plot, Brittain’s writing style, and Brittain himself.

Rolland’s critique infuriated Brittain. He used Facebook to track her down, and then he traveled over 640 kilometers (400 mi) to the grocery store where she worked. Brittain entered the store, grabbed a wine bottle, and hunted Rolland down.

He spotted the young woman stacking shelves in the cereal aisle, and when she bent down, he smashed the wine bottle over her head. Rolland briefly lost consciousness. When she awoke, Brittain was gone. Rolland was taken to the hospital where she received several stitches in her scalp.

Brittain was caught on the store’s security cameras, and he was arrested. He had a history of assault, and the judge sentenced him to 30 months in prison.^[1]

9 Marisol Simoes

Elayna Katz ordered jambalaya at Mambo Nuevo Latino, and she asked the server to leave olives out of the meal. When Katz received her food, she noticed that it was laced with olives. She sent the dish back and asked for another.

The restaurant complied. However, when Katz received her check, she was charged for both dishes. Katz complained and left her business card with a note asking the owner to call her. She received no response. So she posted a negative review of the restaurant, lambasting the slow, rude service and the problem with her order.

Marisol Simoes, the owner of the restaurant, was furious. She took Katz’s personal information from the business card and created an email account in Katz’s name. Simoes used the email address to send messages to Katz’s employers. The emails said things like: “I am open to anything—couples, threesomes, and group sex. Am especially into transsexuals and transgenders (being one myself). I am . . . a tiger in the bedroom.” Simoes used similar phrases when she impersonated Katz on a dating website.

The harassment continued for two years until Simoes was found guilty of libel. She was sentenced to serve 90 days in jail, work 200 hours of community service, receive mandatory counseling, and attend an anger management course.^[2]

8 Joon Song

Michelle Levine visited gynecologist Joon Song for an annual visit which was supposed to be covered by her insurance. However, she soon received a bill for $427. Song had charged her for an ultrasound, a new patient visit, and several procedures that Levine claimed never happened.

Levine tried to complain to the doctor’s office, but nothing happened. She decided to take her anger to several review sites. Levine criticized the doctor’s “very poor and crooked business practice,” and she wrote that the visit caused her emotional distress.^[3]

Two weeks after she posted the reviews, Levine received an email from the doctor’s lawyers. Song was suing her for $1 million in damages plus legal fees. Song claimed that Levine had complained of pelvic pain and that he had tried to treat it. Levine maintained that she had only wanted a physical.

During the ensuing court battle, Levine claimed that Song and his lawyers had posted her entire medical record, including notes about her mental health, her bills, her insurance information, her driver’s license, her birthdate, and her home address.

7 Diane Goodman

Sean C. visited San Francisco’s Ocean Avenue Books, and he thought the store was a total mess with books piled everywhere. When he got home, he wrote a review on Yelp criticizing the clutter. He also recommended that the owners close for a few days to clean and organize the store.

Sean’s review angered Diane Goodman, the owner of the bookstore. She began to send Sean threatening and insulting messages: “Goodbye p—y boy and I will be contacting your employers . . . you are a stupid person . . . you look like an idiot.” Sean reported her to Yelp, who canceled her profile. Goodman made another account, and she continued to harass Sean. He reported her, and her account was canceled again.

Goodman used Sean’s account to find his home, and she showed up at his front door. She tried to force her way into his house, but Sean fought back and pushed her out. They wrestled, and she fell down a couple of steps. Sean slammed the door closed and called the police. Goodman was cited for battery and taken for a mental health intervention.^[4]

6 Kathleen Hale

Kathleen Hale’s publisher sent out copies of her novel, No One Else Can Have You, to book bloggers for their opinions. Reviewer Blythe Harris really did not like the book. She wrote, “This is one of the worst books I’ve read this year.” Then she added, “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”

Harris disliked the way the story depicted statutory rape, PTSD, and domestic violence.

Hale became obsessed with Harris and began stalking Harris’s Instagram and Twitter. Hale spent weeks looking through the reviewer’s profiles and following Harris’s conversations about the book. Hale began to suspect that Harris was using a pseudonym, and she paid for an online background check. She discovered that Harris had provided the site with a fake name, age, and occupation, and Hale became determined to find the real critic.

Hale found Harris’s address, rented a car, and went to the blogger’s home. She peered into the woman’s car and home before she decided to leave without knocking. Hale called Blythe’s workplace several times and pretended to be a fact checker, demanding an explanation about Harris’s real identity. Harris ended the call and blocked Hale on Facebook and Twitter.^[5]

5 Zhang

Xiao Li ordered clothes online, and she complained when her order had not been shipped after several days. The seller, Zhang, was furious at his lowered rating, and he began sending Xiao threatening messages, including death threats.

Zhang finally shipped the clothes, and Xiao waited at the delivery spot to pick them up. While she looked at her phone, Zhang attacked her. He kicked and slapped Xiao repeatedly and knocked her to the ground. After she fell, he ran away.

Xiao was taken to the hospital where she was treated for bruises, cuts, a concussion, and a broken elbow. While she was lying in the hospital bed, she received another message from Zhang saying that he had traveled from Suzhou—more than 800 kilometers (500 mi) away—so that he could “teach her a lesson.” He also warned her that he could attack again.^[6]

Police arrested Zhang, and his seller’s profile was deleted from the shopping website.

4 Andrew Szakaly

Katrina Arthur planned a weekend getaway for her and her husband at the Abbey Inn, which advertised a private stay in the southern Indiana woods. They checked into the hotel and walked into their room. There, they were hit with the stench of sewer. The couple soon discovered that the air conditioning did not work, the water pressure was poor, and the bed’s sheets were loaded with hair and dirt.

The Arthurs went to the front desk to complain, but no one was there. Neither of them could find a single employee anywhere. They tidied up the room themselves, tried to ignore the room’s smell, and attempted to get some sleep. The next morning, they put their room key in a drop box and left.

The hotel emailed Arthur and asked her to leave a review. She complied and left a scathing assessment that she felt was completely honest. A month later, she received a letter from Andrew Szakaly, who claimed that her review was false and had caused “irreparable injury” to the inn. He threatened to sue her for libel unless she took down the review. She deleted it.^[7]

A few days later, she checked her bank statement and discovered that the hotel had charged her an extra $350 in damages. Arthur discovered that the hotel had a policy in place that allowed them to charge customers for negative reviews. Arthur contacted the Indiana attorney general, who sued Szakaly.

Szakaly stopped the $350 punishment policy, and a new manager plans to buy the hotel.

3 Owner Of A Barbecue Shop

Yu ordered barbecue chicken and beef for her and her friends. She did not like the food and complained on the food delivery site the next morning: “[The food is] expensive, not properly packed and not fresh. The portion size was average. I have never had barbecue meat that tasted so bad.”^[8]

Later that evening, she received a call asking if she was the one who had made the review. Yu said she was, and the caller hung up. Later that evening, seven or eight men armed with clubs crashed into her mah-jongg parlor and began questioning, harassing, and threatening her.

Yu’s husband heard the noise and rushed to help his wife. The men brutally beat him before they left. Yu and her husband were taken to the hospital. Yu was treated for broken bones, and her husband was transferred to the ICU with serious brain injuries.

Police called the barbeque restaurant’s owner, who admitted to sending the brutes after the couple. He explained that the late-night food delivery business was extremely competitive and it was worth it for him to get the review taken down.

2 Norman Auvil

Diana Walley went to the Daybreak Diner for a birthday meal. However, the employees told Diana, who was disabled and had once fallen in the restaurant, that she could not be inside the diner without another person with her. Diana left the restaurant in tears.

She told her daughter, Monica, what had happened. Monica called the diner and spoke with several workers about her mother’s visit. Unsatisfied with their response, she left a negative review on Facebook in which she claimed that the restaurant workers were “unnecessarily rude.” Monica also launched a social media campaign against the diner, alleging that they had mistreated her mother because of a disability.

Michael Johnson, the diner owner’s son, was furious at the Walleys. He had hoped to inherit the diner, and the Walley family’s actions were hurting the business. He and his roommates, Jesse Martin and Norman Auvil, were sitting around their home drinking when they decided to get revenge. Martin was able to figure out Monica’s identity from her Facebook post, and he found her address.^[9]

The trio drove to the Walley house with the intent to vandalize the home. Johnson parked outside the house, and Auvil pulled out a gun and fired three shots into the home. One of the bullets pierced a window, and it missed Kenneth Walley’s head by a few inches. (Kenneth was married to Diane Walley.)

The trio’s car was caught on surveillance cameras, and they were soon arrested.

1 Yang

Taiwanese blogger Liu visited a restaurant where she ordered dried beef noodles and a couple of side dishes. She was not impressed with the restaurant or its food, and she wrote an article criticizing both. She claimed that the food was too salty, the place was unsanitary because there were cockroaches, and the owner was a bully who let customers park their cars haphazardly, leading to traffic jams.

Several of Yang’s customers read the blog, and they asked if the article was true. Yang grew angry at Liu, and he sued her for libel. The court ruled in Yang’s favor. They claimed that Liu’s article was libelous because she had only tried one meal and she was not familiar enough with the menu to declare the food salty. They did rule that her criticism about cockroaches was factual, although health officials did not find conditions to be as unsanitary as Liu had described.

Liu was sentenced to 30 days in jail, given two years’ probation, and fined 200,000 New Taiwan dollars to compensate the restaurant’s owner for lost business.^[10]

What’s in a name? It’s generally one of the first things we learn about a new person, place or thing. We need to know how to refer to it. And we’ll probably not bat an eye over 99 names in 100. But every so often something happens to a name that makes it problematic and a name change is the only way to save the day. 

10. The World Taekwondo Foundation Had To Change Their Name Thanks to the Internet

Are you into martial arts at all? If so, you may know World Taekwondo. That’s the official name of the World Taekwondo Federation. But now you might be thinking, if it’s the World Taekwondo Federation, why is it called World Taekwondo? Well, thank the world of today and its penchants for abbreviations, acronyms, and salty language.

Even though the World Taekwondo Federation was established in 1973, they made the switch in 2017 thanks to the fact that their initials, WTF, had come to take on a decidedly different meaning in the world at large. The organization was at a loss to try to overcome the negative associations with those three particular letters and rather than use their fighting skills in a battle they couldn’t win, they just dropped the F.

Suffering the same fate a few years earlier was Wisconsin’s Tourism Federation who realized in 2009, after 30 years in business, that the internet can never be defeated. They became the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. 

9. MRI Used To Be NMRI But The N Stood For Nuclear 

Have you ever had an MRI at a hospital? They perform roughly 30 million of them a year. And that high number is due in some small part to a public relations move back in the day when they changed the machine’s name. 

When the technology first appeared it was called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging and man, people did not like that. The technology was developed through the ’30s and first implemented in the 1940s before becoming widespread in the ’70s at the height of a time when no one wanted to get near anything named nuclear at all. 

Ironically, the name comes from how atomic nuclei interact in the presence of a magnetic field at a certain resonance frequency and wasn’t related to the nuclear everyone was afraid. Still, to keep people at ease, they dropped the nuclear part. 

8. Canola Oil Used to be Rapeseed Oil 

Canada produced 12.6 million metric tons of canola oil in 2021. It’s one of the most popular cooking oils in the world and you can find it pretty much everywhere. When it first arrived on the scene, however, it had a different name.

There is no canola plant. The name comes from an amalgamation of the terms “Canadian oil” and “low acid.” The name used to be rapeseed oil. And you probably don’t need to be told why the name rapeseed oil was viewed as problematic. So in 1989 it was changed to canola. 

Rapeseed gets its name from Latin. Rapum is the Latin word for turnip and rapeseed is in the same family. The horrible connotations were mostly innocent enough, but few people wanted to mount a PR campaign to try to salvage the innocent usage of the word. That said, some people were still behind it for a long time, like the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan where huge crops of rapeseed are grown. If you happened to be driving towards the town you could run across harrowing signs that read “Tisdale: Land of Rape and Honey” until about 2016.

7. Jays Potato Chips used to be called Mrs. Japp’s 

Jays Foods has been around since 1927. The company was started by a man named Leonard Japp and originally they sold pretzels. This expanded to other foods and eventually came to include potato chips. In 1940, Mrs. Japp’s Potato Chips hit the market. One year later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and anti-Japanese sentiment was at an all time high in America. 

Leonard Japp’s unfortunate last name was identical in pronunciation to a popular racial slur against the Japanese. The chips were pulled from shelves across the nation for no other reason than the name and people associating them with the Asian nation.

Rather than try to fight against both prejudice and misunderstanding, Japp opted to rebrand calling the new company Jays because it started with a J and was available to use at the time. 

6. The Cincinnati Reds Changed Their Name to the Redlegs 

During the Cold War, nothing seemed to be more terrifying to a person stateside than being near a communist. The very idea of the Red Menace was enough to run people out of Hollywood and ruin lives. Even today you can readily see people using the word “communism” with the same vitriol as some of our more popular curse words. 

This anti-Soviet hatred became an issue for professional baseball back in the 1950s. The Cincinnati Reds were founded back in 1869 and were actually the first professional baseball team in America. Back then they were the Red Stockings. By 1881 they were just the Reds when they switched from the National League to the American Association and the name stayed for decades. Then came 1953.

McCarthyism was peaking, the Korean War was underway, and Communism was the great boogeyman of the world. The Reds needed to distance themselves from their name and Redlegs was a nickname they’d had for years, so they adopted it formally until 1959. They just used the “C” for a couple of years and, in 1961, the Reds were back.

5. Jaguar Used to be SS Cars

You don’t see a ton of Jaguar cars on the roads these days and the company has never been as big as Ford or Toyota. Jaguar Land Rover makes both luxury cars and SUVs and the Land Rover model seems to be a bit better known. A 2023 Jaguar F-Type starts at around $74,000. That said, the company may not exist at all had it not been for a strategic name change.

When Jaguar started it was actually the Swallow Sidecar company back in the 1920s. They made sidecars, so it made sense. But it was kind of a long name for a car company so people started abbreviating it. Plus, the company itself was known for just using their own initials on the front grille of cars they produced. So they all had SS on them. You can see where this is going.

Throughout the 1930s it became more and more obvious that SS cars were a bad idea thanks to the Nazi Schutzstaffel. The company dropped the initials in 1936 and by 1945 they were officially just Jaguar Cars Limited. 

4. The Canadian Town of Val-des-Sources Used to be Asbestos

There are a handful of towns in the world that are just very unfortunately named. Some are vaguely offensive, some goofy, and some like the town of Val-des-Sources in Quebec were just too closely associated with death and despair.

Val-des-Sources wasn’t always known by that name, it was only changed in 2020. Prior to that, the small French-Canadian town of 7,000 people was known as Asbestos. Nothing like naming your town after one of the few products in the world synonymous with deadly cancer.

The town came by the name Asbestos honestly; it was actually home to the world’s largest asbestos mine. They’d had the deadly moniker since the 19th century. Back then it obviously didn’t have the same negative connotations.

As time passed, the town held onto the name even as asbestos was banished from pretty much everywhere. However, the town was suffering in a business sense thanks to foreign investors not wanting to go into business with such an ominously named place. 

The town held a vote on a new name and Val-des-Sources, meaning Valley of the Springs, won with 51%.

3. Biggby Coffee Used to Be Beaners

Coffee is made from beans so, in principle, it’s not hard to see how a company that sells coffee might stumble upon the name of Beaners in an effort to brand themselves. That was the case with Biggby Coffee when they first appeared on the scene back in 1995.

By the year 2007 the company had grown to 77 locations and was expanding rapidly. Today they have nearly 300 in operation. But as they grew larger and more people took notice of them, the company also began to field criticisms from the public over their name. Though owners Bob Fish and Mary Roszel claimed to have not been familiar with it at all and meant no insult to anyone, the word “beaner” had, at that time, an established history of being a racial slur against Hispanics. 

The company realized the name was not projecting the image they had intended. They felt like if they didn’t change it, even if they meant no harm, they’d be condoning its use so in 2007 they changed all of their existing stores and rebranded as Biggby, keeping the “B” logo from the original store but losing the name entirely. 

2. The Washington Wizards used to be the Bullets 

The Washington Wizards have been playing in the NBA since 1997. The franchise history is longer, however, starting in Chicago as the Packers all the way back in 1961 and then moving to Baltimore in 1963 when they became the Bullets. The team held the Bullets name through a 1973 move to Washington, where they played first as the Capital Bullets and then later as the Washington Bullets, starting in 1974. So what made them change from the Bullets after more than 30 years? Two things.

First, in 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. He was a friend of the Bullets’ then-owner Abe Pollin. Pollin made the name change announcement four days after his friend’s funeral. 

More pertinent to the people of Washington was the fact that, at that time, Washington was known as one of the most violent cities in the entire country. Gun violence was rampant and Pollin acknowledged that the idea of their team being “faster than a speeding bullet” meant something else in that climate. 

Fans were not particularly happy at the time, though that was to be expected. Nevertheless, they were allowed to vote on five potential new names, and Wizards won out.

1. The Royal Family Took on the Name House of Windsor Over Saxe-Coburg-Gotha

It’s a little difficult to keep track of all the names and titles used by people in the Royal Family but the reigning family come from the House of Windsor. They took over from the House of Hanover back in 1901. Except, if you check the history, you’ll see that the House of Hanover was officially succeeded by the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. 

It was in 1917 when King George officially ordered Royals to dispense with German names. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was dropped and Windsor, a name prominent in British society with ties to royalty going back years, was chosen.

Anti-German sentiment had been on the rise and, of course, the First World War cemented people’s feelings. The final straw seemed to be an air raid that took place on June 13, 1917. Germans bombed a school in London’s east end and killed 18 children. The raid was conducted with Gotha bombers. It was just over a month later when Windsor became the official name.