Somewhere in the world, a man is sat behind a computer screen telling a group of strangers his most shameful secret.

The story is long, but the details are thin. At some point when he was 15, he writes, he got wrongly accused of bullying a girl in his class.

“We were in maths, and I accidentally knocked her bag off the desk so I went to pick it up because her things fell out,” he explains. “She must have thought I did it on purpose and she screamed like someone stabbed her.”

Apparently the girl had been a victim of bullying before. After the incident with the bag, though, the man’s classmates treated them both differently. They were kinder to her, and cold towards him.

“The only people who believed me were my friends,” he continues. “I was pissed and frustrated.”

That night, he added her as a friend on Facebook. When she accepted, he began to send her abusive messages.

“She would often reply with ‘stop please’ but I didn’t care at that moment,” he writes. “I tried to help her and she made me look bad. I did this for about three hours straight.” Eventually, the girl unfriended and then blocked him.

The next day she wasn’t in class. The following week, he found out in the papers that she’d died by suicide.