I never got people mad at me for making a jerk character. What I HAVE had happen, however, was that the jerk character was, despite still actively contributing to the arc villain's demise, utterly demonized and the rper never missed a chance to have their character inform other characters about the fact that my jerk was actually a Bad Guy. There was no way to fix it without metagaming, unfortunately, so after a few months I just went with it and made her into a villain.

Granted, this guy also did meet my intended (somewhat useless - think Frankenstein's monster, if he kept losing limbs) villain and upgraded her status to the local monster hunters, changing it from 'ehhhh kinda small scale just stay out of the way' to 'GLOBAL THREAT KILL IT WITH FIRE' after exploiting her to get an upgrade. He also used different characters for these encounters. So make of that what you will.