Why was YouTube star Nikita Dragun arrested and what were the mixed reactions?

YouTube sensation and influencer extraordinaire Nikita Dragun has never shied away from the limelight. 

The 26-year-old makeup guru has been posting content online ever since she joined the social media sphere in 2014. In that time she’s amassed a following of over 3.54 million subscribers on YouTube who eagerly tune into her makeup tutorials, life updates, and long-standing habit of creating controversy. In 2020, her focus shifted to the short-form video platform TikTok where she boasts a whopping 14.6 million followers, the largest of all her platforms, and where she regularly – and unapologetically – flaunts her beauty. 

Being beautiful and feeling comfortable in her own skin are aspects of Nikita’s life that she has invested a lot of time and money into, partly because the journey to get there has been an uphill one. In 2015, she came out as transgender, revealing as so many transgender people do, a desire to express her true self. Over time, she’s brought her followers along as she created an exterior life to match how she felt on the inside. That has included legally changing her name, undergoing various cosmetic procedures, and parading her beauty on runways, in photoshoots, and even in the middle of streets. 

People can’t seem to get enough of Nikita Dragun. While a vast majority of her followers shower her with praise, a fair amount also hurl criticism at her for her oftentimes questionable behavior. For that reason, a handful of fans and Twitter users were unabashedly pleased to learn that the influencer’s actions had finally caught up to her. Breaking news reports shared that she’d traded the limelight for the flash of a mugshot, ultimately getting arrested at a Florida hotel.

However, after the news of her arrest was made public, reactions quickly changed from shamelessly humored to outrageously disgusted as certain details of her arrest were made known. Here’s what you should know. 

The reason behind Nikita Dragun’s arrest and why reactions went from humorous to sour

Just days before her arrest, Nikita posted a collection of photos and videos to Instagram assuring her fans (and her mother) that she had not been arrested, for reasons not made clear at the time. However, days later on Nov. 9 at The Goodtime Hotel in Miami Florida, Nikita was indeed arrested for alleged battery and disorderly conduct, according to TMZ.

Reports share that Nikita had been walking around the pool naked acting “extremely disorderly” for quite some time before the police finally arrived. When they did, Nikita was back in her hotel room blasting loud music. When she was asked to turn it down or leave, she slammed the door in the officers’ faces. Eventually, she swung an open water bottle at them, resulting in her arrest. 

Upon learning the news, the overall reaction from fans can be summed up in a single tweet. 

However, things took a turn for the worse when Reddit user Brave_Lady shared a short 17-second clip revealing a zoom call between Nikita, a judge, and others. The post is captioned “Nikita Dragun forced to stay in a men’s unit despite being female on her ID and having changed all her legal documents.” In the video, a clearly shaken Nikita asks the judge whether or not she has to “stay here in a men’s unit still.”

While the judge agrees Nikita should receive “proper accommodation” she also says she “doesn’t make the rules up there.”

Almost immediately, news piled up in both the comments section of the Reddit post and all over Twitter with people calling the situation “disgusting” and “inhumane.” Many admitted they weren’t even fans of the makeup guru, nor did they support her often controversial actions, but how she was being treated in custody was alarming and wrong.

In the United States, unless a law is created by the federal government, decisions about how to govern its people are often left to individual states, and in this case, Florida does not have a track record of being tolerant of the LGBTQ+ community. Much of the blame for Nikita’s treatment rests on the shoulders of the state and its leaders, and as such, members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community once again called for the state’s boycott and all of its intolerant policies.

However Nikita’s time in custody plays out, her fans are sure to receive an update as soon as she’s released, and if details worse than these are shared, the state of Florida is in for a rude awakening.