How Eight Years of Bullying Built Brazil's Most-Followed Creator — Felca. What He Revealed When He Came Back

Brazilian creator Felipe Bressanim Pereira — known online as Felca — broke a 14-month YouTube silence in the early hours of Tuesday with a video running just over one hour in which he disclosed a formal diagnosis of Social Anxiety Disorder and walked viewers through eight consecutive years of sustained physical and psychological abuse that began when he was 12 years old. He set the release for the stroke of midnight on October 20, World Anti-Bullying Day.

A Countdown That Kept Everyone Guessing

The return started as a riddle. Days before the video appeared, Felca posted on Instagram: "eu me escondi por tempo demais — 20/10 00:00," a line that translates roughly as "I have been hiding for too long" and attached to a hard midnight deadline. Poder360 reported that many of those followers had expected a political statement about the presidential runoff — Brazil's second round between Flávio Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is scheduled for October 25, just five days away — and were instead met with something far more personal. His last social media post before the countdown had been in March 2026, when he announced the debut of his mental-health segment on TV Globo's Fantástico, a program that ran through late April before he went fully silent.

Eight Years Behind Classroom Walls

Felca tells the story in plain terms: from age 12 to 18, a total of eight years, he endured regular physical assaults and social exclusion inside school buildings in Londrina, the Paraná city where he grew up. Among the episodes he recounts is being attacked by classmates in a school bathroom, an incident he describes in enough detail to explain why returning to any room crowded with people became, for him, a physiological reaction rather than a choice.

Speaking directly to the camera, Felca described his mental state during those years: "From 14 to 18, I survived. I kept myself alive and that was everything. When I thought about school, the fear was so overwhelming, so seductive, to just find a way to end it all — end the suffering once and for all. That is the story of someone who was bullied. Just one more."

The weight of that disclosure lands harder against the backdrop of what the data shows. According to the IBGE's Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde do Escolar (PeNSE 2024), released in March 2026, nearly 40 percent of Brazilian students between the ages of 13 and 17 report having been bullied — a figure directly associated with elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal behavior among adolescents.

"After It, Nothing Happens": The Cost of Impunity

Reflecting on his own trajectory, Felca draws a line between his personal history and a structural failure when he says: "The greatest sin of bullying is that after it, nothing happens." The observation is not abstract. It connects the culture of institutional inaction to an entire decade he spent managing, in private, damage that began in a public school hallway.

From Dropout to 25 Million Followers

When he finished high school, the accumulated toll made any return to formal education unthinkable. "When I finished school, I told my parents: I'll make videos, fine, but I cannot face another classroom," he said in the video. That pivot from victim to creator eventually built him a platform of 6 million YouTube subscribers and roughly 25 million followers across all platforms — an audience he deployed last year to expose the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents on social media.

The Body Keeps Score: Alcohol, Anxiety, and a Fractured Rib

One of the most striking disclosures in the video concerns what Felca did to get through public life while managing an undiagnosed disorder. Poder360 confirmed that he admitted relying on alcohol for years to show up to recordings, interviews, and public events — a coping method that escalated until, during one production in Londrina, he drank throughout the day, passed out after arriving home, and broke two ribs in the fall. Mixvale also reported that in March 2026, before appearing on TV Cultura's Roda Viva, his social anxiety kept him awake for two full days before the taping. He reports that even today, social situations can drive his heart rate past 130 beats per minute. The disclosure closes the gap between the sharp, self-deprecating comedian audiences see and the cost of every public appearance.

A Video That Already Changed the Law

This is not the first time Felca has translated his reach into accountability. His August 2025 "Adultização" video accumulated more than 52 million views and triggered more than 60 legislative proposals in the Brazilian Congress. Among the concrete results was the ECA Digital, a law that came into force in March 2026 requiring platforms to verify users' ages, link accounts for minors under 16 to parental controls, and prohibit targeted behavioral advertising directed at children. The video also resulted in the arrest and conviction of two influencers named by Felca in that production. During its first week online, it earned him more than 10 million new followers across all platforms.

What Comes Next: #simfel and the Schools

Felca closed the video with two public commitments. The first is the #simfel challenge: 90 days of accepting social invitations and stepping into situations he would normally avoid — this time without alcohol, treating the project as equal parts personal recovery and public accountability. The second is a plan to visit Brazilian public and private schools to deliver free talks on the long-term psychological damage that bullying leaves behind.

Brazil's primary anti-bullying legislation, Lei nº 13.185/2015, mandates preventive programs in schools, but advocates have long argued that implementation and funding remain uneven across the country. For students who streamed Felca's video before sunrise on a Tuesday — with a presidential runoff just days away and a national conversation already tense — his account of what happened from age 12 to 18 does not read like history. It reads like the hallway they will walk through again tomorrow.

Brazil Reacts: A Nation Split Down the Middle

Within hours of going live, the video had pushed Felca's name to the top of X's trending list in Brazil. O Tempo reported that the creator's name dominated the platform, though the reaction was anything but uniform. One camp moved by the vulnerability in the video praised his willingness to address mental illness and sustained childhood trauma openly and on the record. The other arrived at the stream expecting a political missile — a direct statement about the October 25 presidential runoff — and expressed its frustration through irony, memes, and pointed commentary.

SBT News documented the split in real time, noting that while a significant portion of his audience highlighted the importance of discussing mental health and bullying in schools, another segment reacted with open disappointment that he had not used the moment to take a political position. The divide mirrored the polarized climate gripping the country ahead of the election, with partisans on both sides finding in Felca's choice something to applaud or resent depending on what they had come expecting to hear.

Political Crossfire Five Days From an Election

ND Mais confirmed that federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG), one of the most followed politicians in Brazil on social media, moved quickly after the video aired to post on X, describing the left-wing frustration at Felca's subject choice as evidence of the partisanship he regularly argues against. Writing in a tone designed to mock rather than mourn, he framed the moment as further proof that the political opposition was more interested in weaponizing influencers than in the substance of what they actually have to say.

From the other direction, prominent left-leaning influencer Felipe Neto — who has been publicly critical of Felca's perceived political positioning — published an expletive-laced message on X just 14 minutes after the video premiered, expressing raw anger without engaging with the video's actual content. His post landed in a conversation already saturated with political projection, and it drew immediate criticism from users who pointed out the contrast between the weight of what Felca had just disclosed and the tone of the reaction it received from some corners of the political sphere.

The collision between what the video actually was and what different audiences wanted it to be reflects something specific about where Felca sits in Brazilian public life. He built his platform as a satirist, not a political commentator. His "Adultização" intervention united lawmakers from both parties. His new video explicitly avoids political framing. Yet in an election week when every public figure with a significant platform is viewed through the lens of electoral allegiance, the timing made neutrality itself into a provocation.

The Bullies Who Came Forward to Say Sorry

SBT News reported that one of the more unexpected disclosures inside the video was also one of the most quietly affecting: some of the people who had physically assaulted and humiliated Felca during those eight school years had, in the time since his platform grew, reached out to ask for his forgiveness. He said on camera that he accepted those apologies. The disclosure offered no redemptive arc for what happened inside those school hallways, but it closed a loop that eight years of institutional silence had left open — and it prompted many viewers who had shared similar experiences to describe their own reactions in the comments section through the morning hours.

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