Boy behind 'Star Wars Kid' internet memes breaks silence to tell how taunts made him contemplate suicide

Ghyslain Raza filmed himself awkwardly fooling around with a pretend Star Wars light sabre in

Students at his school posted the video online a year later

Video ended up generating over a billion hits and Raza became a target of cyber bullies

He lost friends and fell into depression

Ten years later, he's speaking out





If you can think back to the days before YouTube was even invented and the dawn of high speed internet, you may recall an amusing video that got sent around called 'Star Wars Kid'.

Ghyslain Raza recorded himself imitating a Jedi from the “Star Wars” films.

The then 14-year-old’s awkward display captivated the internet’s attention causing the clip to become one of YouTube’s earliest viral hits.

While the video was a runaway success, the teenage became a target for both online and offline bullies.



Ten years on since the video did the rounds, Ghyslain Raza, the 14-year-old boy in the clip is speaking out about how it changed his life.

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Ghyslain Raza, 14: He used his high school¿s TV studio in November 2002 to film a two-minute clip in which he clumsily impersonated a light saber-wielding Jedi Knight with the help of a golf ball retriever

Life-changing: While the video was a runaway success, the teenager soon became a target for both online and offline bullies

Although the video came out in 2003, it was in the days before cellphones took decent quality video.



Raza never intended for the clip to spread in quite the way it did. He put a VHS tape into his school's video camera, grabbed a golf ball retriever, and pressed record.

Classmates found the tape and uploaded it online. And so a new celebrity was born: Star Wars Kid.

It brought a type of fame and celebrity that Raza did not want.

'What I saw was mean. It was violent,' the Trois-Rivières native, now 25, tells L’actualité 'People were telling me to commit suicide.'

Speaking up: Now a law-school graduate, Raza decided to speak out about his experience following a spate of high-profile cyber bullying which have led to suicide.

Wishes: Raza says he hopes speaking out about his experiences will help the victims of cyberbullying and unfortunate memes

The bullying got so bad that Raza was forced to quit school and ended up checking into a psychiatric ward with severe depression.

'No matter how hard I tried to ignore people telling me to commit suicide, I couldn’t help but feel worthless, like my life wasn’t worth living,' he said.

Front page: Ghyslain Raza, 24, one of the first people to gain notoriety from a viral video, is the subject of a cover story for Canadas two major news magazines this week. He has talking about what it is like to be cyber-bullied





He tells L'Actualite how the whole thing started: 'I made the video in November 2002, when I was a member of the school's television club. I'd been working on a Star Wars parody with other students for a gala. One evening, while I was alone in the studio, I practiced the choreography...Most 14-year-old boys would do something similar in that situation, maybe more graceful, but I was goofing around. I left the tape on a shelf in the studio. I didn't think about hiding it. Who would take the trouble to watch it?'

He says that everything rapidly degenerated. In the common room, students climbed onto tabletops to insult him and people made fun of hie weight and appearance. He was given the label 'Star Wars Kid'. 'They didn't mean it as a compliment,' he says, 'It soon became impossible for me to attend classes.'

He tried to do something about the bullying. His dad called the school but the principal and teachers didn't understand and the police said there was nothing they could do.

Raza sat his exams in a psychiatric unit of a hospital.

In the end, he and his dad decided to sue the school for not taking care of him and the media too in the hope that they would stop showing the video.

Raza maintains, the money he received did not even cover expenses.

Although he was invited onto talk shows, he did not believe it was for the right reasons. Raza felt he was being portrayed as a laughing stock, a circus act rather than for doing something truly worthwhile. He described the experience to the Canadian magazine as humiliating.

Despite all of his misgivings about the past, Raza says he wouldn't change a thing. 'Today I'm happy with who I am...I'm the product of good and bad experiences. Obviously, if you were to tell me that it would happen again, I wouldn't greet the news with overwhelming joy and happiness. But I wouldn't look for ways to avoid it.'

He eventually came out the other side of his depression and went to University to study law.

Now he's decided to speak out about the past to help other young people who are cyber-bullied.