Ryan Reynolds Hit With Wild Claim After Journalist Resurfaces Disturbing Stories From His Past

Old accusations against Ryan Reynolds have gone viral again after journalist Maureen Callahan’s recent comments about the actor’s childhood.

On May 8, 2026, Callahan appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show and brought up Reynolds while talking about the legal drama surrounding the actor’s wife, Blake Lively, with Justin Baldoni.

He labeled him a “psychopath.”

Callahan claimed that the Deadpool star had committed a grave crime as a kid and has openly talked about how he “got away with it” in several interviews throughout his career.

“Good Lord. What is wrong with this man?” one viewer said.

Ryan Reynolds allegedly committed “arson” as a teenager

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On Megyn Kelly’s show, Maureen Callahan made a segue into Ryan Reynolds’ past from the Lively-Baldoni saga, referring to him as a “psycho arsonist.”

“When Ryan Reynolds was a teenage boy, he burned down his elementary school in Canada to the ground,” she explained when Kelly asked her to elaborate.

“This was an arson fire. He set it in the middle of the night. This school was over a hundred years old. It went up like that,” she added.

Image credits: The Nerve with Maureen Callahan

“He’s a psychopath, I believe. He has given varying accounts of this story.”

Callahan claimed that in one version of the story, Reynolds said he only wanted to set fire to one wing, and in another, to a tree.

“When I hear that, I could cry. Who would set fire to a tree, to a living thing?” she continued, adding that Reynolds has admitted to the crime in interviews after becoming an actor.

Image credits: Megyn Kelly

“He was not a huge star yet, but he was coming up, and he was asked about this,” Callahan said, referring to one such interview. “He said, ‘Yeah, you know, I did that. I did do that. I just got away with it. I just hope some poor schmuck isn’t sitting in jail for what I did.”

“He’s a piece of sh*t,” Callahan concluded, after referring to Reynolds making his then-7-year-old daughter, Inez, deliver an explicit line in the 2024 film Deadpool & Wolverine.

Maureen Callahan showed proof of Ryan Reynolds admitting he set fire to the school

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On Kelly’s show, Callahan clarified that she had done a deeper dive into Reynolds’ past on her own podcast and provided proof to back up the allegations.

In the October 2025 premiere of The Nerve At Night, Callahan called Reynolds “a monster who just gets off on bullying other people and making them do his bidding.”

Image credits: Megyn Kelly

Around 35 minutes into the video, Callahan brought up the arson allegations, showing the front page of The Vancouver Sun dated March 30, 1987, and pointed at a story about a school fire written by one Gavin Wilson.

She read aloud the article describing a “thundering mass of flames” at Queen Elizabeth Elementary School in Vancouver, which Reynolds reportedly attended. Reports at the time claimed that the fire was caused by arson, and no suspect was ever arrested.

Image credits: VancityReynolds/X

Callahan speculated that Reynolds had set the fire and showed interviews the Free Guy star had given to support her claim. She dug up another news article, published in the Arizona Daily Star on December 8, 2004, written by Phil Villarreal.

In this interview, Reynolds admitted to Villarreal about burning down “a wing” of his elementary school.

Investigative journalist Maureen Callahan exposes Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds for being a “psycho arsonist” and burning his school in Canada to the ground when he was a teenager, something he previously humorously admitted to 😳👀 pic.twitter.com/qyFyAfiwBN
— Killa 🌺 (@KillaKreww) May 9, 2026

“I apologize to all the fine students and the faculty,” he said, confessing to setting a fire to a tree, which led to the building catching flames. “No one found out who it was. I think the statute of limitations has run out.”

Several netizens who reacted to Callahan’s video opined that Reynolds was being sarcastic and joking about the arson. A few even accused her of leading a “smear campaign” against him amid the Justin Baldoni trial.

Ryan Reynolds once blamed the alleged arson on his “twin brother”

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Ryan Reynolds has three older brothers — Jeff, Patrick, and Terry Reynolds — but no twins. Nevertheless, he made one up and jokingly blamed him for the alleged arson of the elementary school.

In a June 2007 essay as a guest contributor on the HuffPost, Reynolds wrote about his “twin brother,” called “Gordon Reynolds” or “Gordie,” and described the shenanigans the two of them did as children.

Image credits: blakelively/Instagram

“He once set fire to a tree at the side of our elementary school and, in an aborted attempt to extinguish the rapidly spreading structure fire, fled to retrieve water IN THE BURNING SCHOOL,” Reynolds wrote about his brother.

“Needless to say, he was apprehended almost immediately — invariably punctuating each stunt by flashing me a look of heartbreaking bewilderment.”

Image credits: Cody Froggatt/PA Images/Getty Images

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The essay gained traction after Maureen Callahan’s October 2025 podcast, leading some netizens to be shocked by the revelation and others to dismiss it as satire.

“I noped out after two paragraphs because my skin was crawling from the creepiness,” one person wrote. Another said, “Half the stuff that Ryan says is sarcastic, exaggerated, or made up for comedic effect.”

He brought back “Gordon” in the November 2016 issue of GQ, after the outlet named him one of their Men of the Year. He was interviewed by “Gordon” at the Gramercy Park Hotel in November, who trolled Ryan throughout and made an explicit joke about Lively.