In just 33 posts on his Instagram profile, 26-year-old Australian Johnson Wen, who has 11,000 followers on the social network, has left a trail of photos with celebrities that could be a harmless graphic document for any fan who wants to treasure the encounters. But there’s more. Anyone who spends a few seconds poring over these images will see something strange about them, a tense expression on the faces of the stars Wen poses with that reveals that something is wrong, that something isn’t natural.
In fact, @pyjamamann (this is his username) has been sneaking in where he shouldn’t for years to get a photo of his transgression that serves as a sort of trophy. He began, as his Instagram shows, by entering football pitches without permission, then moving on to the world of culture and storming the stages where Katy Perry or The Weeknd performed – there are photos in which he appears next to them – and ending, on November 13, at the premiere of Evil: foreverin Singapore, taking the actress and singer Ariana Grande (Florida, 32 years old) by surprise, for which he was arrested, released and now charged with public disorder.
Unfortunately for Wen, it looks like there won’t be any photos on his social media profile this time. Him the most famous trollas he called himself on Instagram, he managed to reach the end of his career as an unfunny prankster (from his comments and subsequent videos, he finds what he does very funny) after the attack on the protagonist of Evil. He will have to be content with seeing the crime he is accused of in the videos that have gone viral, in which he evidently sneaks into the crowd to stand next to Ariana Grande and grab her from behind, in front of the amazed gaze of the two women accompanying him, the film’s actresses Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Erivo. The latter is also one of the first to react and approaches Wen to fight with him and convince him to free his co-star, amidst the commotion of people forming, with the intervention of the event security and the flashes immortalizing the scene.
The moment, not at all funny, can still be seen in the stories of Wen, right among the videos preceding the event, in which he films himself assuring himself that he will meet “his best friend Ariana Grande” and begins with a disturbing witch’s giggle – like the one embodied by the actress in the film – and the video in which he is seen subdued by the security guards. The sequence ends with another historyThursday evening, in which he himself admits to having been arrested and then released. So Wen still wanted to joke, so much so that a Singapore court has now charged him with disorderly conduct. According to the BBC, the incident sparked widespread outrage and local media reported that the defendant, who had no legal representation, plans to plead guilty.
As for the singer, in the images published after the attack she is seen in a state of agitation shockassisted by her cast mates before everyone continued with the premiere at hand with relative normality. It is impossible to forget that right at the end of a concert by the pop star, the attack in Manchester took place on 22 May 2017, which caused 22 deaths and more than a hundred injuries and following which the artist admitted to suffering from post-traumatic stress and depression.
It was April this year when the most hated troll he jumped on Katy Perry’s stage during the tour Screw of the singer in Sydney. Before, in 2024, he stormed onto another stage, during a The Weeknd concert in Melbourne, where he ended up grabbing and hugging the singer until security took him out of there. It’s all on his Instagram, at least for now. If Wen is found guilty of assaulting Ariana Grande, he could be fined up to 2,000 Singapore dollars (1,540 US dollars, approximately 1,300 euros).
