On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison ”.The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year beginning in February 2024.
His return was met with an overwhelmingly effusive response.He’ll downplay it, but this is the guy who wet-nursed a generation of Little Monsters starving for any scrap of Mother’s whereabouts on a vastly more siloed internet.Nguyen was deliberately vague about the circumstances of his detainment, but speaking to Pitchfork, he revealed some of the details.
In 2020, Nguyen attended a protest in Belarus, where he’d been raised and lived most of his life.The former Soviet satellite had recently catapulted Alexander Lukashenko, “Europe’s last dictator,” into a sixth term as president, in an election widely disputed as fraudulent.
“I just came out with a flag and walked,” Nguyen says.“It was a regular protest like you guys have in America every day.” Four years later, Nguyen returned to visit his family in Belarus, where he was arrested by state police forces.Calling in from another country (he asked to keep his exact location off the record), Nguyen’s chipper mood either belies or befits someone who spent the last two-and-a-half years of his life behind bars.
Since his return, Nguyen has been busy cramming years of pent-up fandom into the span of days.He’s also been posting in his own voice more, something he once considered “unprofessional.” “Please excuse me if I act like it’s my first time experiencing the MAYHEM era because it literally is,” Nguyen wrote in one X post.
In another: “Someone just told me that Gaga held a fan conference and spoke about ARTPOP 2, Frankenstein, and Azealia Banks Do you guys think I’m stupid .” And needless to say, he’s already back on the clock.Pitchfork: Tell me about the respons...