Comedian Brad Williams raises £100,000 to send bullied child with dwarfism to Disneyland
Comedian Brad Williams has raised $194,986 Australian dollars (£100,000) to send a bullied child to Disneyland with his mother.
Williams, who has his own Netflix show, started a crowdfunder after seeing a video of nine-year-old Quaden Bayles crying about being bullied at school.
Bayles, like Williams, has achondroplasia (a type of dwarfism), and was filmed by his mother, Yarraka, saying that he wanted to be given a knife to kill himself because of how he was treated at school.
Since the video was posted on Facebook, Bayles story has gone viral and led to pledges of support from numerous celebrities, as well as the GoFundMe page set up by Williams.
Williams said: “I’m setting up this GoFundMe to let Quaden know that bullying will not be tolerated, and that he is a wonderful human being who deserves joy. I want to fly Quaden and his mother to America, get them a nice hotel, and bring them to Disneyland.”
The page has received over 8,000 donations totalling nearly £200k Australian dollars.
Williams also confirmed that Fiji Airways had agreed to donate plane tickets for Bayles and his mother to fly to Los Angeles for free.
He says: “This isn’t just for Quaden, this is for anyone who has been bullied in their lives and told they weren’t good enough. Let’s show Quaden and others that there is good in the world and they are worthy of it.”
If there is money left over after the Bayles’ holiday Williams says he will be donated to anti-bullying charities on the behalf of the family.
Earlier this week Bayles’ mother shared a video of her son in floods of tears after picking him up from school on Facebook in a bid to raise awareness of the consequences of bullying.
In the video, which has subsequently been viewed more than 17m times, his mother says “this is what bullying does” before explaining that she has to “constantly keep my eye on him because of the suicide attempts”.
So now we have a severely suicidal child who is sick of the bullying that is every single day that he attends school or is in public,” she said. “It’s every single f***ing day and we’re sick of it.”
A number of celebrities have shared their thoughts on the footage after it was shared on social media, including Hugh Jackman who said Bayles was “stronger than you know”, and Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
In the original footage, Bayles, who raises awareness about his condition in his home country of Australia, can be seen getting visibly upset after being picked on at school about his height.
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