When it comes to criticism, most folks can swallow a harsh comment with a grain of salt. But there are those who take a negative review and turn it into a full‑blown, crazy reaction. Below are 10 crazy reactions that prove some people will go to extreme lengths when their reputation is challenged.

10 Richard Brittain

Richard Brittain was thrilled with early praise for his novel The World Rose, boasting that critics likened him to Dickens, Shakespeare, and Rowling. He dismissed the handful of detractors as “idiots” and “teenagers.”

Enter Paige Rolland, who found the book unbearably dull and penned a scathing review that tore apart everything from the cover to Brittain’s very name. Brittain, infuriated, tracked her via Facebook, then drove over 640 kilometres (400 mi) to the grocery store where she worked.

Inside the cereal aisle, he seized a wine bottle and smashed it over her head as she bent down. Rolland briefly lost consciousness, later waking with stitches in her scalp. Security footage captured Brittain’s assault, leading to his arrest. With a history of violence, a judge sentenced him to 30 months behind bars.

9 Marisol Simoes

Elayna Katz ordered jambalaya at Mambo Nuevo Latino and specifically asked for no olives. The dish arrived with olives, prompting Katz to send it back. The restaurant complied, but the check still listed charges for both meals.

Frustrated, Katz left a business card with a note requesting a call. When no response came, she posted a negative review criticizing the slow, rude service and the olive mishap.

Owner Marisol Simoes, enraged, harvested Katz’s personal details from the card and fabricated an email account using Katz’s name. She spammed Katz’s employers with bizarre messages about group sex and other lewd content, and even impersonated her on a dating site. After two years of harassment, Simoes was convicted of libel, sentenced to 90 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, mandatory counseling, and an anger‑management course.

8 Joon Song

Michelle Levine visited gynecologist Joon Song for an annual exam that should have been covered by insurance. Instead, she received a $427 bill for an ultrasound, a new‑patient visit, and several procedures she swore never occurred.

After the office ignored her complaints, Levine vented on multiple review sites, labeling Song’s practice as “very poor and crooked.” Two weeks later, Song’s lawyers served her with a lawsuit demanding $1 million in damages plus legal fees, alleging she fabricated pelvic pain.

During the litigation, Levine claimed Song’s team leaked her entire medical record—including mental‑health notes, insurance details, driver’s license, birthdate, and home address—onto the internet, intensifying her distress.

7 Diane Goodman

Sean C. visited Ocean Avenue Books in San Francisco and found the store a chaotic mess of piled‑up books. He posted a Yelp review urging the owners to close temporarily for a deep clean.

Owner Diane Goodman retaliated with a barrage of threatening messages, calling Sean a “p‑y boy,” promising to contact his employers, and hurling insults. When Yelp shut down her account, she created a new one and continued the harassment.

Goodman eventually tracked Sean’s home address, showed up at his doorstep, and tried to force entry. Sean fought back, pushing her down a set of steps. Police arrived; Goodman was cited for battery and placed in a mental‑health intervention.

6 Kathleen Hale

Publisher Kathleen Hale sent copies of her novel No One Else Can Have You to book bloggers. Reviewer Blythe Harris slammed the book, calling it one of the worst she’d read that year and condemning its treatment of statutory rape, PTSD, and domestic violence.

Hale became obsessed, obsessively monitoring Harris’s Instagram and Twitter, and even paid for a background check, discovering Harris had used a pseudonym. Determined to confront her, Hale located Harris’s address, rented a car, and drove to her home, merely peeking into the car and house before leaving without a knock.

Hale then called Harris’s workplace under the guise of a fact‑checker, demanding answers about her true identity. Harris blocked Hale on all platforms, ending the harassment.

5 Zhang

Xiao Li ordered clothing online and grew angry when her order remained unshipped. Seller Zhang, fearing a lowered rating, sent death threats via text.

After finally shipping the items, Xiao waited at the pickup spot. While scrolling on her phone, Zhang ambushed her, kicking and slapping her repeatedly until she collapsed. He fled the scene.

At the hospital, Xiao learned Zhang had traveled over 800 km (500 mi) from Suzhou just to “teach her a lesson,” warning she could be attacked again. Police arrested Zhang, and his seller profile was removed from the platform.

4 Andrew Szakaly

Katrina Arthur booked a weekend at the Abbey Inn, advertised as a private retreat in southern Indiana woods. Upon arrival, the room reeked of sewer, the AC failed, water pressure was weak, and the sheets were filthy with hair and dirt.

After a futile search for staff, the Arthurs cleaned the room themselves, slept poorly, and checked out the next morning, leaving their key in a drop box. The inn later emailed Arthur, requesting a review. She posted a scathing, honest assessment.

A month later, Andrew Szakaly—representing the inn—claimed her review caused “irreparable injury,” threatening a libel suit unless she removed it. Arthur complied, only to discover a $350 charge for “negative review damages” on her bank statement. The Indiana Attorney General sued Szakaly, resulting in the policy’s termination and a new manager planning to purchase the inn.

3 Owner Of A Barbecue Shop

Yu ordered barbecue chicken and beef for her friends, then posted a harsh review criticizing the price, packaging, freshness, and overall taste. That night, a caller asked if she’d written the review; after confirming, the line went dead.

Later, seven or eight men armed with clubs stormed Yu’s mah‑jong parlor, interrogating and threatening her. Her husband rushed in to defend her and was brutally beaten, sustaining serious brain injuries and being rushed to the ICU. Yu suffered broken bones.

Police traced the assault back to the barbecue shop’s owner, who admitted to hiring the thugs to silence the review, claiming the competitive delivery market justified his drastic actions.

2 Norman Auvil

Diana Walley visited Daybreak Diner for a birthday meal, only to be told she needed a companion because of a prior fall. Upset, her daughter Monica posted a Facebook review accusing the staff of “unnecessarily rude” behavior toward a disabled patron.

Michael Johnson, the diner’s son, along with roommates Jesse Martin and Norman Auvil, plotted revenge while drinking. Martin identified Monica’s address from her post. The trio drove to the Walley home, intending vandalism.

Auvil drew a gun, firing three shots into the house, one piercing a window and narrowly missing Kenneth Walley’s head. Surveillance captured the vehicle, leading to their arrest.

1 Yang

Taiwanese blogger Liu ate dried beef noodles at a restaurant and found the food overly salty, the venue infested with cockroaches, and the owner a bully who caused traffic chaos by allowing haphazard parking.

Customers read Liu’s blog and questioned its accuracy. Owner Yang, angered, sued Liu for libel. The court sided with Yang, deeming Liu’s claim of excessive salt unsubstantiated, though it affirmed the cockroach observation as factual, despite health officials finding the conditions less severe.

Liu received a 30‑day jail sentence, two years probation, and a NT$200,000 fine to compensate the restaurant for lost business.

Why These 10 Crazy Reactions Matter

These stories illustrate how a simple negative review can ignite a cascade of extreme, sometimes violent, responses. From courtroom battles to physical assaults, the fallout shows that criticism can provoke the worst in some people. Remember, when you leave a review, you’re not just sharing an opinion—you might be setting off a chain reaction you never imagined.

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.