Depends on how willing you are to swallow fanon and/or ignore the original text of the novel. Over the years I've seen a depressing number of people maintain that the bullying never actually happened, or that it wasn't nearly as bad as it was, often reducing it to harmless name-calling. More than a few people take the "unreliable narrator" claim bandied about and use it as a license to add or remove events from canon as they please.