For years, fans of Lady Gaga wondered why one of their main sources of news had suddenly and mysteriously gone silent.

Since 2009, Gaga Daily has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who devour posts on its prolific account on the social site X. Then, in February 2024, the updates stopped. They started again about a year later, with no explanation for the hiatus.

On Wednesday, the account’s founder, Kirill Nguyen, resurfaced for the first time in two years, revealing the reason the account went dark: He had been imprisoned in his native Belarus, and his friends had been running Gaga Daily since 2025.

“I never use this account to post anything personal, but I feel like I owe you all an explanation,” Nguyen, 32, wrote on X. “I was arrested in my home country for protesting against the government and sentenced to more than two years in prison.”

In a phone interview on Thursday, Nguyen said he had joined mass protests in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, after an election in 2020 that protesters said had been rigged by President Alexander Lukashenko. At the time, tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country to call for the resignation of Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994.

Moved Back to Belarus

Nguyen said he had come home briefly to vote and participate in the protests before returning to his job as a translator in Moscow. He said he decided to move back to Minsk in 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Lukashenko, an ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, has positioned Belarus to support Russia in the war and has launched a chilling crackdown on dissent. For years after the protests, Belarusian security forces scoured social media posts, photos and videos to arrest those who opposed Lukashenko. In February 2024, they arrested Nguyen.

Viasna, a Belarusian human rights group, estimated that there were more than 900 political prisoners in the country before 25 people were released last week in exchange for sanctions relief from the United States.

Nguyen said he left prison earlier this year after serving his sentence, not as part of a negotiated release. His arrest in 2024, he said, was “so chaotic and so sudden” that he did not have a chance to find someone to run Gaga Daily.

“The account wasn’t even on my mind while I was being moved to different jails,” he said. “I gave all of my passwords to one of my best friends, but we didn’t know if we could find someone who would have the time and skill to run the account.”

Representatives for Lady Gaga and her label, Interscope Records, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Keeping Up With Lady Gaga

Nguyen said that while in prison, he kept up with news about Lady Gaga through letters from friends and family, who provided morsels of information about his idol. About a year after his arrest, they wrote to tell him that Lady Gaga had released a new single, “Abracadabra,” from her seventh studio album, “Mayhem.”

The album won critical acclaim though some said the album rehashed her old material. For Nguyen — who became a Lady Gaga fan when he was 14, around the same age he founded Gaga Daily — hearing “Abracadabra” last year over the prison radio was a comfort during a dark time in his life. This year, he said, he listened to the album for the first time after his release.

Nguyen said he did not openly discuss his admiration for Lady Gaga in prison, nor reveal that he had a sizable internet platform. But her presence was still felt, he said: “I’ve been in so many situations where I’m talking to, like, a person who murdered two people and is serving 25 years, and ‘Bad Romance’ comes on the radio and he’s like, ‘Oh, I love that song!’”

And when he was allowed to pick a movie for the inmates to watch, Nguyen chose “Joker: Folie à Deux,” in which Lady Gaga played one of the main characters.

The film was panned by critics — and by Nguyen’s fellow prisoners — but he stands by his selection.

“One of them disliked it so much that he made me turn it off. They never let me choose again,” he said, adding, “I liked it. I was invested.”

Nguyen said he resurfaced on Gaga Daily only after he had moved to a country in the European Union, which he asked The New York Times not to disclose because he feared for his, and his family’s, security.

“I’m just getting my life back together, so I have a lot of things to figure out like finding a place to rent,” he said.

“As for Gaga Daily,” Nguyen added, “I’ll just keep doing what I have been doing since 2009.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Francesca Regalado

c.2026 The New York Times Company