Ruby Rose Says Classmates Called Her a “Baby Killer” After She Tried to Save a Child at 15

by · Thought Catalog
Christopher Polk / Getty Images

Gossip

By Nicole Stawiarski

Updated 3 minutes ago, October 5, 2026

Ruby Rose says she was 15 when she found a 4½-year-old boy hanging from playground equipment, tried to save him, and then had police show up at her school to question her about what happened.

Speaking on the Off the Vine podcast in her first-ever podcast interview, the 40-year-old actress said she was at an art-gallery party in the Australian bush with a friend she’d known her whole life. She went outside to smoke and thought she saw a doll on the play equipment. Up close, she realized it was a real child, with blood coming from his ears, nose, and mouth.

Ruby Rose seated at the 2019 Summer TCA Press Tour at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on August 4, 2019. Photo by Amy Sussman / Getty Images.

Rose said she ran to him and picked him up, and for a moment thought she’d saved him “because there was a big deep breath.” The boy was later left brain-dead, and because no one knew what had happened, police came to her school. Classmates started calling her “baby killer.”

Wearing a draped yellow gown and displaying extensive arm tattoos, Ruby Rose arrives at the Hollywood premiere of ‘The Meg’ at TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX on August 6, 2018. Photo by Christopher Polk / Getty Images.

She was eventually cleared after the boy’s 7-year-old older brother, who had experienced dissociative amnesia, remembered pushing him down the slide, where his sweater caught on a nail. Rose said the older brother went back to police, and that they “didn’t think it was me anyway.”

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At Rockefeller Center in New York City on August 8, 2018, Ruby Rose appears on ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,’ seated cross-legged in a studded black mini dress. Photo by Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images.

Even so, the boy’s mother didn’t want her at the funeral. “So, everyone else went except for me,” Rose said.

Full-sleeve tattoos on display against an intricately beaded white gown, Ruby Rose arrives at the Met Gala’s “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons” Costume Institute exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 1, 2017. Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images.

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