The Woman Who Threw Bugs on the Subway Has a Few Regrets

Apparently everyone, including me, wanted to talk to Pugh about her "stunt" on the New York City subway in which she posed as a homeless woman selling bugs. She had hired someone to lightly accost her, but he hit the bugs out of her hand too hard and they went everywhere, causing fear and chaos on the train. Someone pulled the emergency brake, and then the subway riders were both pissed off and scared. Pugh peed in her pants. That was not the plan: The bugs were only supposed to spill out a little—and the resulting footage was not supposed to make it online before she had edited it.

I had seen the footage before she had the chance to release it herself, however, as had thousands of other people. One of my coworkers had dropped a link to it in Slack last week, and another joked that the crisis might have been averted if I'd been on the train. (I have a chameleon who eats bugs, and I frequently have to buy him live worms and crickets.) I saw it again that night, at a bar, when another person texted me the link for the same reason. "I saw this and thought of you," they said. "I can't stop laughing."

After Pugh was taken off the train by the police and released from the hospital for a psych evaluation, she was dismayed to find out that someone had uploaded the video before she had. "When I went home I was going to edit the video, but I saw that someone had already tagged me in the video online," she said, explaining that some people know of her work and are familiar with her voice. "Then I realized it was on the TV and it was on the news. I was like, Yo, I hope no one took credit for my video. I quickly uploaded it to my page and that's when [the media] started putting two and two together. This was the first time one of my videos went viral before I uploaded it."

"The stunt in the subway was supposed to have three meanings," she said. "It was supposed to show people what homeless people go through and how people react to homeless people and look down on them. It was also meant to show how people are quick to record instead of help; that's the society that we live in. The last meaning is don't pull the emergency brake." She adds a fourth meaning: "Another thing is stop believing everything you see on the internet. You have to do research. In my videos I always put 'follow Zaida Pugh,' but people don't see that and they think it's real and call 911."

When she puts it that way—which to be clear, is very earnest—the stunt sounds less like performance art, as Fusion and other outlets have sarcastically characterized it, and more like a messy means to an end.

"I started making videos back in 2012 when I was 17," she explained. "I've always been into acting and editing. I would just record myself and play different characters. After a while I was just like, I should actually do something with acting. I know how it is as an actress trying to get out there. You have to get an agent and all of that. I didn't want to deal with that. In a way, my videos are like auditions for people who are doing movies."

By most modern measures, her basic premise is very normal and "millennial," something that's simultaneously encouraged and frowned upon. Her mistake is that she is doing it in what the world agrees is a bad way—or the worst way, if trying to attain internet notoriety as an ultimate goal is already seen as bad. With Youtube, Vine, and Snapchat, stardom—or at least a flash of recognition—seems like it's a click away. There is an existing infrastructure that practically begs people to do things that are increasingly nuts "for the Vine"; perhaps I'm cynical, but it only makes sense that we would eventually end up on a train full of bugs as a result.

She is also now facing charges for her disruptive act and many people agree that she should endure some sort of criminal penalty, especially given her fame-seeking motivations. "It just makes it worse that this is all a big hoax," a man who had been riding the train during the prank told Gothamist. "My girlfriend has asthma, it was 110 degrees, there were elderly people, a few children, a pregnant woman. What happens if the pregnant woman gets hit and loses her baby, what if people have panic or asthma attacks?" (Bleakly, people seemed to think the video was funny when they were under the impression that it actually featured a homeless person who was mentally ill; now that we know it features someone who was impersonating a homeless person for dubious reasons, we're more concerned with the commuters' well-being.)

Pugh declined to comment on anything to do with the police, but earlier today she posted a distraught video about the animosity directed toward her. "I just really had a dream and I wanted it to go far," she says in the video. "I wanted to spread messages out there, and I didn't want it to happen like this." When I talked to her over the phone she expressed a similar regret: "I'm really into acting and I'm following my dreams. It's not that I don't care about people."

Though it may have long-ranging consequences for Pugh, her viral moment was short-lived. As of yesterday, "McChicken" began trending on Facebook because someone literally fucked a McDonald's chicken sandwich, and the site's algorithm—which takes into account volume and momentum—calculated that everyone wanted to see it. I'm not saying that the internet is bad, but it kind of sucks: On it, we can be amused by things at a distance, until they get too close to us on our daily commute. Then, it makes a good news segment.