Karma can be a bitch, even in Real Life.
- Dirk Willems
was an Anabaptist Protestant imprisoned by Dutch authorities for his beliefs. When he escaped via Bedsheet Ladder and ran across the frozen moat, a prison guard noticed and gave chase. Willems, having lived on prison rations for a while, was light enough that the ice held his weight, but the guard was less fortunate and smashed through the surface. Willems turned back and saved the guard's life by helping him out of the icy water. This led directly to his recapture, and thence to his agonizing death by burning at the stake in spite of the guard's pleas to let him go. The closest thing to a bright spot is that the bailiff might have ordered one of the guards to put him out of his misery, and Willems is remembered to this day as an Inspirational Martyr. - Alan Turing not only laid the groundwork for modern computing, but his work with British intelligence was vital to the decoding of Nazi Germany's communications during World War II. It is estimated that Turing's contributions to Allied intelligence shortened the war by as much as two years. How was he rewarded after World War II ended? He was outed as a homosexual and prosecuted under Britain's dated Gross Indecency laws. With his career ruined and having been forced to undergo chemical castration to avoid prison, Turing eventually died from cyanide poisoning in what was ruled a suicide. The UK government wouldn't officially apologize for his treatment until 2009, and he was granted a royal pardon in 2013.
- The Wampanoag people of Massachusetts famously helped a group of starving English immigrants ("Pilgrims") learn to survive in an unfamiliar land, but half a century after the first Thanksgiving of the 1620's, their kindness was repaid when another group of English settlers subjected them to King Philip's War.
- This may likely have contributed to DJ AM's death. After surviving a horrific fatal plane crash that killed everybody on board except him and rocker Travis Barker, AM decided to help other former drug addicts like himself via a reality show. During filming, just holding the drugs tempted him; Goldstein later died from a drug overdose.
- Raoul Wallenberg. A Swedish diplomat, who saved a countless number of Jews and other persecuted people from extermination camps, was widely known as a philanthropist-and was arrested just before the end of WWII by the Soviets. The Soviet intention was to extort the Swedish government by keeping him as a hostage and exchange him for Soviet spies caught in Sweden. When Sweden refused to comply, he disappeared into the Gulag. Wallenberg's brother was an accomplice of the Nazis, buying the gold they had stolen all over Europe. It's hardly surprising the Soviets thought he was up to no good.
- One example is that of Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, a homeless man in NYC who attacked a mugger that was robbing a woman and succeeded in driving him off and allowing her to flee. He was stabbed for his troubles and bled to death on the sidewalk while about two dozen people walked by.
- During the Gempei War in Japan, Kiyomori Taira spared the three young sons of Yoshitomo Minamoto. The sons - Yoritomo, Yoshitsune, and Noriyori - grew up into the greatest warriors of the era, leading to the complete extermination of the Taira family after the battle of Dan no Ura 1185. Karma eventually caught Yoshitsune Minamoto. He was an able general and warrior who greatly aided to raise his elder brother Yoritomo into Shogun. As a reward Yoritomo had Yoshitsune and his whole family killed. Yoritomo had also his surviving brother Noriyori and his family murdered.
- Chelsea Manning may or may not be an up to eleven example of this trope. In 2010, she revealed corruption and failures within the US government to Wikileaks, technically and judicially committing treason. She did what she felt morally right. As a reward, she got a prison sentence and a dishonourable discharge from the US military. However, in January 2017, as one of his last acts as Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Obama would commute her sentence, and she was released in May 2017.
- Oliver Sipple saved President Gerald Ford. The resulting media frenzy over his heroic act outed him as a gay veteran, leading to estrangement from his conservative family and numerous unsuccessful lawsuits for invasion of privacy against the media, which led to his deterioration and early death.
- A person illegally crossing the Mexican-US border stopped to help a boy and his mother, both victims of a car crash. He got detained and deported.
- During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Richard Jewell noticed a bomb and reported it to the police. He was hailed as a hero at first, but because the police had no leads on the bombing suspect, they began to suspect and eventually charged him as the bombing suspect. He would be vindicated later when the real culprit—a serial bomber named Eric Rudolph - was linked to the bombing but wouldn't be captured until 2003. Richard Jewell ended up suing the media for slandering his name.
- Khaseen Morris was a 16-year-old boy from Long Island, USA, and walked a girl home after class one time. Unfortunately, she did this just to make her ex-boyfriend Tyler Flach jealous. Despite explaining that he had no intention of getting into a relationship with her and agreeing to talk about it, all of Khaseen's peers and Tyler forced him into a fight which led to Khaseen getting stabbed and bleeding to near death while all 50-70 of his peers recorded and posted it on social media. He died in the hospital. The case is still ongoing.
- When Aum Shinrikyo wanted to test their chemical weapons stockpile, in 1994 they sprayed a suburb near the city of Matsumoto. Local man Yushiyuki Kono was one of the first people to call the authorities after his wife fell ill from the gas attack, and she would eventually go into a coma. When the police arrived to conduct an investigation, they saw that Kono had a number of pesticides on his property, and concluded that Kona had somehow synthesized the sarin gas used in the chemical attack. After word got out, the Japanese media labeled him a terrorist, and he got numerous death threats and faced serious legal actions. Once Aum Shinrikyo struck in 1995, the ensuing investigation cleared Kono, but the Japanese media never retracted labeling him a terrorist.
- This list of over 700 Poles who were executed during the Nazi occupation for helping persecuted Jews, some merely for providing food to starving ghetto inmates.
- How about the poor girl who got expelled from her school, thanks to the school's No Tolerance Policy, because she was attending a party with alcohol... so she could pick up her drunk friends and drive them home safely.
- One of Ted Bundy's favorite methods of luring his victims was his Wounded Gazelle Gambit—he'd put his arm in a sling or walk around with crutches and approach lovely young women, asking for help in carrying books or parcels to his car. As one crime writer so sadly put it, "The cost of their altruism was their lives."
- During World War I, a British soldier named Henry Tandey found a 29-year-old wounded German corporal. In an act of battlefield mercy, Tandey decides to spare the German and left him alone. That German Corporal turned out to be Adolf Hitler. That's right; an act of mercy in World War I resulted in World War II. It's worth noting, though, that historians have disputed whether this event actually happened, since a lot of it hinges on the word of Hitler. It's entirely possible that Hitler just wanted to screw with a Victoria-Cross winning soldier, to make one of Britain's heroes look bad.
- Department store J.C. Penney instituted a policy in 2012 called "Fair and Square Pricing". Granted, this was done in the hopes that being upfront with their customers would be good for business rather than a genuine act of goodwill (the company was not doing very well at the time), but still, you'd think that customers would appreciate not being treated like suckers. What they did was discontinue fake "sales" that displayed artificially inflated "regular" prices to make it look like customers were getting a bargain, as well as listing prices ending in whole dollar amounts rather than 99 or 97 cents. The result: people quit shopping there because they weren't being suckered into thinking they were getting a bargain anymore.
- Performing well in a government or military job tends to earn you more work, as your superiors realize you can be trusted to accomplish it. Performing poorly, on the other hand, will get your responsibilities gradually taken away, but it's usually much more difficult to fire people than it would be in the private sector. One easily can wind up in the unfortunate situation where the high performers do all the work (and often burn out on it from the stress) and are surrounded by marginal performers who do nothing but continue to receive a paycheck every month. There's a joke in the private sector that the reward for a good job is more work.
- In May 2015, restaurant critic John Golden was banned from three restaurants not for slamming them with bad reviews, but for giving them rave reviews instead. The restaurants justified themselves on the grounds that they warned Golden not to write any reviews at all.
- During the White Ship disaster, William Adelin, heir to the throne of England, managed to get on a boat and leave when he heard his sister's screams, so he came back to rescue her. The boat was swamped by panicked people and sunk, drowning them and sentencing England to the civil war known as The Anarchy.
- Since The '90s, the Democratic Party has operated on an "open tent" philosophy, where, although being a more left-leaning party, more right-wing politicians (particularly former Republicans) are embraced by the party. However, this thinking has faced serious criticism as by The New '10s, many ex-Republicans or otherwise right-wing Democrats have switched to the Republican Party, which has helped reach the majority in 34 state governments compared to the Democrats' 15 (with one Independent governor in Alaska), as well as both the Presidency and Congress, leaving the Democratic Party at their weakest standing since The Roaring '20s.
- The man that discovered that washing hands prevents diseases, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, was shunned by the medical community for his discovery up until his death. This was before germ theory was widely accepted — that is, germs were known to exist, but contagion was viewed with skepticism — so Semmelweis did not have the necessary proof to back up his claims at the time. The claim was largely rebutted by saying that the idea that doctors being responsible for the death of their patients was preposterous and unacceptable.
- A man found a toddler lost and missing her parents and went to go help her find them. Some people nearby mistook the man for a kidnapper and informed the parents of said child. No sooner than that happened, the father of the child confronted the man and delivered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on him before being pulled away by the police. To rub salt on the wounds, the man ended up getting slandered on social media as he was accused of being a pedophile, forcing him to leave town with his family. As for the father, he refused to apologize.
- Subverted with Xu Shoulan v. Peng Yu. The general gist of the case: Xu injured herself falling while alighting from a bus, so Peng brought her to hospital and contributed some money to her initial treatment, but when the doctor determined that Xu required further medical treatment and she demanded that Peng pay for the cost of that, he refused, resulting in the court case. During the proceedings, Peng admitted that he had accidentally pushed Xu while getting off the bus, causing her injury. With this admission, both parties withdrew their respective cases and reached a settlement. Despite the truth of the incident, concerns have been voiced that the purported background leading to the case exacerbated the Bystander Effect due to the lack of a Good Samaritan law in force at the time; such a law would eventually come into force in 2017.
- In the Wang Yue incident, eighteen people walked past her before Chen Xianmei, a rubbish collector, finally helped her (it's said that she may have dared to help because she had nothing to lose anyway) - and has since been accused of doing so for attention. Then again, the eighteen who walked past Wang Yue also received criticism for not helping her.
- There was one man who had gotten fired for escorting, by hand, a child he found lost to the front desk in the store where he worked. The mother saw him walking down the main aisle with her son and thought he was kidnapping him. Despite his and his manager's many attempts to convince her that he was only trying to help a lost child, she insisted that he was kidnapping him because he didn't look like an employee (asset protection, so plainclothes). She even called the police and said that he and the managers were conspiring to kidnap her child and demanded that the police speak to the actual manager. After an hour or so, the police sent her on her way and apologized on behalf of her. Some days later, corporate sent someone in and explained that she had filed a lawsuit against the man, the store, the manager, and the company for conspiring to kidnap her kid and she said she would drop the lawsuit if he was fired. The reason they sent someone from corporate to fire him was that they had to explain to him exactly what he did wrong in the situation, how he broke company policy, and how because of that she actually had a case that stood a chance at getting a settlement at the very least, which they deemed he was not worth. So they used his breaking policy (reporting the lost child to a member of management, even though technically in his position he didn't have to since it was his job to protect the assets of the store) as their reason to fire him. Because of this, he missed his car payments, his credit, and lost the house he was planning to buy. All because he wanted to help a lost child. The incident has made the man think twice about helping another person again.
- But it wasn't all bad. He sued both her and the company for damages. The company settled for a year's salary and agreed upon an extension on his healthcare benefits which they would keep paying for until he found a new plan that was of equal or greater value for a maximum of 2 years. He found another job 4 months later after he was fired where he was making significantly less than what he was making before. In regards to the woman, he couldn't sue for defamation since the claims were not made public, but he did manage to sue for lost wages and damages. He also slapped a restraining order on her, preventing her from coming within 100 yards of his place of residence or work. Months later, she got into a car accident while drunk and went to jail. Coincidentally, it coincided with a custody hearing with her ex-husband, and he was granted full custody.
- A couple of Home Depot employees worked with police to foil what looked like a real kidnapping in 2017 (police found it was a domestic dispute, but they couldn't have known that) and one of them, Dillon Reagan, was fired. There have been similar incidents where employees were fired for stopping shoplifters or turning in lost wallets.
- This trope is, more often than not, cited as a reason why people won't often help someone asking for help, especially if that person is a child (the abovementioned case with the lost child), appear to be injured (the Ted Bundy example), associated with someone dangerous (the Khaseen Morris example), or homeless, as what happened to this poor woman.
- After Margaret Thatcher called a vote of no confidence in the UK government of James Callaghan, Callaghan was forced to make the difficult decision as to whether or not to ask backbench minister Sir Alfred Broughton, who was on the verge of death, to attend the House of Commons. Callaghan ultimately decided against it — and was promptly kicked out of power after losing the vote of no confidence by the single vote that Broughton, who died a few days later, could have cast.note
- Oskar Schindler is rightly remembered as one of the most prominent members of the Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by the State of Israel on non-Jews who helped to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Using a mixture of politicking and bribery, Schindler saved the lives of over 1,000 Jews working at his factory. In the process, Schindler exhausted his entire fortune, and his business ventures following the war all ended in failure. In a partial aversion of this trope, however, the Jews he saved never forgot what he did for them, and Schindler managed to survive off of their financial support until his death in 1974.
- John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party who worked in Nanjing at the time of the Nanjing Massacre. Often called the Chinese Oskar Schindler, he set up the Nanjing Safety Zone to protect Chinese civilians from the Japanese. Once the War was over, what happened to him? He was unemployable for the rest of his life simply because he happened to be involved with the Nazis, completely unaware of what they had been doing. Until his death in 1950, he survived on food packages sent by grateful Nanjing survivors.
- In 2018, an Australian man found a 19-year-old woman having trouble with her car, spent 2 hours fixing it up, stayed to make sure that there wasn't any more trouble, and then saw her off. Some days later, the woman told police that the man propositioned her for sex in return for his service and later followed her when she refused. She went on by saying he then assaulted her at a different location and began to stalk her. He ended up arrested, jailed for two weeks, lost his job, went through a divorce, and was vilified in the media. If it wasn't for his lawyer pressuring the police into looking through the security footage, his life could have gotten much worse and the woman would've got away scot-free.
- Animals and Nature
- A general rule with wild animals, especially baby animals, is to leave them alone because this trope almost always happens. Remember how there was a nice couple who tried to help a baby buffalo? Sadly, the calf had to be put to sleep because its herd wouldn't take it back.
- This will not, however, happen with kittens. Here is a list of proper actions if you find kittens outdoors.
- This will not, however, happen with kittens. Here is a list of proper actions if you find kittens outdoors
- At first, people thought a species of tree found in Madagascar was completely extinct, until, the last one was discovered. It was nice for a little while but, when more people knew about the tree, they flocked to see and take a souvenir of it. To keep it from being harmed any further, officials put a large fence around it.
- A general rule with wild animals, especially baby animals, is to leave them alone because this trope almost always happens. Remember how there was a nice couple who tried to help a baby buffalo? Sadly, the calf had to be put to sleep
- Iowa native Carson King took a Sharpie to poster board during a baseball game in September 2019, and sketched out a simple plea: “Busch Light Supply Needs Replenished.” The 24-year-old added his Venmo handle and crossed his fingers that someone watching ESPN’s “College Gameday” the next morning would see the sign and send him a “couple dollars” for his favorite beer. In nearly overnight, he gained well over a million dollars and made it into a fundraiser for a children's hospital. This did not escape the eye of the news media, one of which, the Des Moines Register, believed it would be informative to include the fact that Carson made some off-colored tweets when he was a teenager (in reality, he was quoting something he heard on Tosh.0). Fortunately, Carson went public with the tweets and apologized before the Des Moines Register could go forward with the hit piece. This story has a Bittersweet Ending; though Busch Light has separated themselves from the fundraiser, Carson has more support than he ever had before. In karmic irony, the reporter who dug up the eight-year-old tweets was discovered to have far more offensive tweets and was promptly fired.
- The reporter's rationale for including the old tweets as part of the story was, ostensibly, to allow Carson time to get in front of the allegations before someone else dug them up. Take that as you will.
- It also appears to be one of the major themes of what is known as "Cancel Culture". A person can go out and do something good for people and someone with a vindictive agenda could look through their past to find something dirty to discredit them whether or not that person has already changed for the better.
- The reporter's rationale for including the old tweets as part of the story was, ostensibly, to allow Carson time to get in front of the allegations before someone else dug them up. Take that as you will.
- In 1952, clothing salesman Arnold Schuster spotted a man he recognized as wanted bank robber Willie "The Actor" Sutton, then followed him to his hideout and told the police of his whereabouts. The resulting publicity from Sutton's arrest brought him to national attention, which earned him the ire of Mafia boss Albert Anastasia. While Sutton had no affiliation with Anastasia (or organized crime in general, for that matter), Anastasia's pathological hatred of "squealers" was reason enough for him to order that Schuster be hit.
- A particularly horrible example is the murder of Mabel Monohan. She was an old widow who the career criminal Barbara Graham planned to rob due to rumors of her having a bunch of jewels. She and her cohorts went to Monohan's house and pretending to have been in an accident and in need of help, only to immediately try to rob Monohan. When it turned out she didn't really have any jewels, Graham bludgeoned the poor woman to death out of spite. Unsurprisingly, she received the death penalty.
- Ended up being the case for heavyweight boxer Deontay Wilder. Back when Wilder was arguably the best heavyweight in the world, Tyson Fury who was another high ranking boxer, fell under a deep depression and left boxing for a couple of years. During this time, he became obese, addicted to drugs, and was close to committing suicide. After the news came out, Wilder sent Fury a get well message, saying he would like to see him back in the ring someday. Fury took this to heart. He got off the drugs, lost a lot of weight, and got back into boxing. This eventually led to an epic three fight trilogy which Tyson Fury ended up winning, handing the once undefeated Deontay Wilder, who seemed to be on his way to becoming the first undisputed heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis, two losses on his record as the first fight was ruled a draw. And as result, Tyson Fury who was undefeated when he left boxing, returned still undefeated and is now seen as the best heavyweight in the world.
- During The Peloponnesian War, after a critical victory, the Athenians have executed their generals for failing to save people from their own sunk ships. Only one person objected to the trial, actually succeeding in a legal sense before the Athenians executed the guys anyway. The guy's name was Socrates.
- During the 2002 Gujarat Riots, where the accidental deaths of nearly 50 Hindus triggered what many have called a pogrom against the city's Muslim minority, many police officers turned a blind eye to the violence or even participated in it. A handful did not, however, and actively tried to contain the violence and save lives, with many losing their lives as a result. According to Gujarat's now-former State Director-General of Police R.B. Sreekumar, many of these same officers were later punished through disciplinary proceedings and transfers on the orders of then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.
- The murder of Abby Choi, dear almighty fricking lord!. Abby Choi was an extremely wealthy model who married a middle class man (who was secretly drowning in debt) at 18 and had 2 kids with him. She lavished him with money and gifts, which he used to live a luxurious lifestyle. The relationship didn't work out and they divorced shortly after. Even after the couple divorced she still continued to financially support him (the ex husband) and his family, going as far to buy a multimillion dollar condo for them to live in. The ex husband and his family eventually ended up brutally murdering her and turning her remains into soup out of spite when she wanted to sell the multimillion dollar condo she bought for them
