On the Matter of Wikifeet and a Mystery Actor’s Testicles

Plus, highlights and lowlights from Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan this week.

I’d really hoped to dive straight into the news with this second post, but I’ve been derailed by an absolutely incredible email that I need to address first.

A social media manager for an up-and-coming actor reached out to me this week to complain that her client, who’s about to star in a “major Netflix show” and is at a pivotal point in his career, has a Wikifeet problem. When you google him, four of the first 10 photos that show up are shots of his feet that were posted to the celebrity foot-rating site. “This could be harmless enough,” the woman writes, “but unfortunately his Testicles are showing in three! You can imagine that’s something I never thought I’d be putting in an email.” 

She goes on to explain that the images are actually stills from a a spicy scene the actor did in an old film, and she hopes I might be able to help her get them taken down. “Who knows, the fans may love his feet/testes portfolio,” she writes, “But I’d much rather it not be the first thing a casting director sees.” (I’ll note at this point that she did give me enough details about the man’s career that when I showed the email to a fellow journalist, it took her less than 10 minutes to triangulate his identity and verify that his testicles are indeed on Wikifeet. I won’t share those details here, though, because I’m not an asshole.)

At least a few of you must be wondering now what this Wikifeet/testicle situation has to do with me. It’s been three years since The Cut published my chaotic interview with Robert Hamilton, a 58-year-old salesman from New Jersey who I discovered had been uploading photos of my feet to Wikifeet for years. While I was initially horrified to discover that someone had been going through my Instagram photos and posting the barefoot ones on a foot fetish site to be rated by strangers, my quest to find the man who had been doing that led to one of my favorite stories I’ve ever published.

But the Wikifeet story also haunts my daily life in ways I couldn’t have imagined. My DMs are chock full of men with usernames like ToeGuy69 requesting to pay me for custom foot content. My feet still manage to come up in conversation at a minimum 50% of social gatherings I attend. And a concerning amount of comms and PR professionals in my inbox seem to believe that I have some kind of control over their clients’ presences on Wikifeet.

So to clarify—as I did in response to the testicles email—I do not work for Wikifeet. I do not have a press contact at Wikifeet. I do not have any way to find the person who is posting your or your clients’ photos to Wikifeet. That said, I absolutely welcome any and all emails that will keep me and my reporter friends busy for 10 minutes trying to find your client’s balls on the internet.

Now for a bit of news—

I know we’re all tired of Trump updates, regardless of the fact that he (really) might become president again. But the jury selection process for his criminal trial in New York this week has been so funny—and then tragic—that it’s worth a brief rundown.

In the first few days of proceedings on the trial, which relates to Trump’s hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the former president reportedly appeared disheveled and couldn’t stop falling asleep in court. “Trump appears to be sleeping,” Maggie Haberman wrote in the New York Times live blog on Monday. “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.”

Minutes later: “Trump has apparently jolted back awake,” she wrote, “noticing the notes his lawyers passed him several minutes ago.”

By Tuesday, bored reporters were getting downright literary with their descriptions of Trump’s struggle to stay awake.

One has to wonder if Trump’s team literally tranquilized him so he’d stop incriminating himself. Either way, this does complicate his ability to continue calling Biden “Sleepy Joe.”

Meanwhile, prospective jurors were getting picked off one by one based on their mean tweets about Trump, which were hilariously read aloud in front of him. One potential juror had to listen to Trump’s lawyer read out her old posts calling Trump “a racist, sexist narcissist” and “anathema to everything,” to which she remarked, “Oof, that sounds bad.” She was obviously removed from the jury.

A few of more, per The Daily Beast:

By Friday, attorneys on both sides had managed to fill up the jury, though I have my doubts that literally anyone could be unbiased about Trump in one direction or the other at this point.

And now for the tragic: A man self-immolated across from the Manhattan courthouse on Friday as the jury was finally being sworn in. He’s a 37-year-old conspiracy theorist from Florida named Max Azerello who reportedly set himself on fire to bring attention to his beliefs, and as of this post, he’s currently in the hospital in serious condition. 

For more on the history of self-immolation, read this fascinating essay by my former editor Tommy Craggs in Flaming Hydra, which you should also definitely subscribe to if you’re into great writing.

And if you haven’t subscribed to Nightcap yet, what are you even doing???