the wrong crowd

[GoodTaste]

When Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center, visited a museum in Amsterdam with her family last year, she was spotted by the wrong crowd: people who hate Koopmans because of her work on COVID-19. “They started really yelling, banging,” she says. “Security locked the doors.”

Source: Science

Does "the wrong crowd" mean "the crowd that would wrong her"? Or does it simply mean "the unfriendly crowd"? I guess the meaning of the "wrong" is the same as Mr.Wrong (as opposed to Mr.Right). I am not sure.

 

[tedmc]

No, she was unlucky to have encountered people who didn't like her. It is to do with luck, as the idiom goes - being in the right place at the right time.

 

[emsr2d2]

In this context, I agree with tedmc. However, the more usual meaning of "the wrong crowd" is a group of people who have a bad influence on someone. For example:

My daughter has been expelled from school. She fell in with the wrong crowd last year and her behaviour has just gone from bad to worse.

The phrasal verb "to fall in" is commonly used with "the wrong crowd".

 

[probus]

I agree with @emsr2d2. In this context a common phrase synonymous with "the wrong crowd" is "bad company" (not the band Bad Company ).