Cardi B Defends Quaden Bayles After Online Bullies Claim 9-Year-Old Is 18

Cardi B has joined the list of stars now defending Quaden Bayles from false reports about his age. The 9-year-old boy went viral last week with a heart-wrenching video about bullying and mental health. After an initially positive response, social media flipped on Quaden as some claimed he was an 18-year-old man pretending to a be a child. Cardi B was horrified.

“I really don’t think he’s lying about his age,” Cardi B said of Quaden in an Instagram Live broadcast.

Quaden’s mother, Yarraka Bayles posted a video of him crying in the car, discussing how he was bullied by other kids because of his dwarfism. However, social media posts soon began claiming that Quaden was actually 18 years old, and that he and Yarraka had somehow “scammed” the public into sending them money for his fake childhood pain.

This claim was decisively disproven, particularly in one comprehensive report by Snopes. It was based on Yarraka’s Instagram posts where Quaden could be seen wearing nice clothes, posing with money and standing in settings and poses that some thought were too “adult” for a 9-year-old. Many, including Cardi B, took issue with this logic.

“Just because there’s videos of him flossing money and acting all gangster, and acting all cool and everything, it doesn’t mean that kids do not pick on him,” she told her followers. “Y’all be acting like you’ve got money everyday and y’all broke.”

Cardi B said that she was “so sad” about the video and the ensuing controversy, adding that Quadne looked like a “little cheeky boy.”

Yarraka shared Cardi B’s video on Facebook before she made all of her social media platforms private. She thanked the rapper for her support, and shared another post from a long-time supporter who pointed out that pretending to be a child in the hopes that strangers would give you money was an incredibly improbable “scam.”

“Never did she ask for money… That being said, another Fellow Little Person did reach out to them, which is a famous comedian. He wanted to turn Quaden’s frown upside down and created the GoFundMe account to take the Australian boy to Disneyland,” she wrote. “Now that was his doing. That came from his heart… Never did they say they were broke. Never did they ask for this.”

Comedian Brad Williams did set up a GoFundMe page for Quaden after his video went viral, hoping to get him a trip to Disneyland. The page has earned just under $465,000 in donations at the time of this writing, but Yarraka and Quaden did not solicit donations in any way.

Yarraka is a long-time activist, creating and running the dwarfism advocacy group called Stand Tall 4 Dwarfism. She and Quaden have made several appearances on the news over the years, sometimes as early as when Quaden was a toddler. She shares his struggles only in the hopes of showing others that they are not alone.