The rise and fall of “UPEI Baddies”

By Sam Arseneau and John Ployer

                                                    UPEI Baddies (@unipeibaddies)

Baddie: [noun] A confident and attractive woman. She looks great in a dress or in sweatpants.

Over the Christmas break, a new UPEI-focused Instagram account quickly grew in popularity.

Created sometime before Christmas, the account “UPEI Baddies” (@unipeibaddies) was created to showcase attractive girls that attend UPEI. Mingled in with the UPEI students were photos of women from other maritime universities presented as ‘special guests’.

UPEI Baddies gained a following due to the direct messages sent from the account to female UPEI students. The messages would ask the girls if they wanted to be featured on the page. After only a few posts, the page began advertising money in return for being able to post pictures of the girls.

UPEI Baddies also sent out messages to some of the previously featured girls to offer payment in return for recommending their friends to contact the page.

Given that UPEI is such a small campus, followers and those contacted were curious to know who was running the page. To many, the UPEI Baddies seemed creepy and distasteful.

One UPEI student, Bri Beale, received a message from the page asking her if she would like to be featured. When asked about the identity of the page’s owner, Beale was only told that it was “a third year.”

“It made me really uncomfortable to be asked to be on a page that just posts pictures of girls, for what seems to try to get clout from other people,” Beale told the Cadre.

In another direct message exchange, the anonymous individual running the account described himself as a ‘young sugar daddy.’

A “sugar daddy” is defined as a man who offers women (usually younger) financial benefits in exchange for sex or other forms of intimacy.

The Cadre spoke to one UPEI student who was featured on the page that wishes to remain anonymous.

“When I was first asked to be featured I took it as a weird form of flattery, but after my pictures were posted the account began offering money to girls willing to be featured or to girls to refer their friends to the page,” our source said.

“That’s when I knew it was much weirder than I had previously thought. It started to become creepy and unsettling.”

When the Cadre tried to dig deeper into the account’s history, we learned that UPEI Baddies was no longer on Instagram. The account’s deletion, either by the owner or by Instagram, happened within the first few days of January.

A personal account later messaged our anonymous source claiming he was the man behind UPEI Baddies. He stated he shut the account down but he was still offering money as he is a “young sugar daddy.” The Cadre could not identify the personal page behind the direct messages.

With the account shut down, that should have been the end of UPEI Baddies.

But it wasn’t.

Days later UPEI Baddies was back on Instagram, with all its previous posts still featured. While it is unclear if he is still contacting potential “baddies” through direct messages, he still appears to be open to submissions.

As of January 10, the identity of the “young sugar daddy” and his connection (if any) to UPEI remains unconfirmed.

The saga of UPEI Baddies has been a rollercoaster to follow and the Cadre will continue to watch it’s journey. Any additional information the public can find on this page would be appreciated.