The man who rushed Ariana Grande at the Singapore premiere of “Wicked: For Good” has been deported and banned from the city-state.
Johnson Wen, 26, was returned home to Australia on Sunday and has been “barred from re-entering Singapore,” a spokesperson for Singapore’s Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) said.
Local media reported Wen had been sentenced to nine days in jail for public nuisance after the incident at the Nov. 13 premiere at Universal Studios in Singapore. Video showed Wen jumping over a barricade and running toward Grande, briefly putting his arm around her before co-star Cynthia Erivo and others intervened.
Erivo and co-star Michelle Yeoh could then be seen comforting Grande.
“I just wanted to make sure my friend was safe,” Erivo told NBC News last week.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean us harm, but I just, you never know with those things and I wanted to make sure that she was OK,” she said.
Wen, also known as “Pyjama Man” on Instagram, has a history of rushing concert stages and sporting events and ambushing celebrities, including at a Katy Perry concert in Sydney in June.
In an Instagram video posted after the Singapore premiere, Wen — who was arrested the next day — thanked Grande for “letting” him jump on the carpet. He told NBC News in a message that he was a “mega fan” of Grande who “dreamed about meeting her.”
Grande has not commented publicly on the incident.
A Singapore judge told Wen that he was “attention-seeking” and that he was wrong to think that his behavior in Singapore would have no consequences, according to Channel News Asia.
The incident also drew criticism from fans of Grande, 32, who has previously spoken about dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder after a 2017 bombing at her concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people.
Universal Pictures’ “Wicked: For Good,” which opened in the United States on Friday, earned an estimated $150 million at the domestic box office and $226 million worldwide for the biggest-ever opening weekend of a Broadway adaptation, a record that was previously set by the first “Wicked” last year.
(Universal Pictures is owned by NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
Doha Madani and Andrew Jones contributed.
