The Guy Who Put Dildos All Over the Wall Street Bull Explains Himself
Jeff Jetton has about 100 dildos he’s looking to get rid of. They were a gift.
“If you know anyone looking,” he told me over the phone, “I’m your guy.”
According to him, the dildos had already served his purpose: On early Monday morning, the same day Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a controversial summit in Helsinki, Finland, this freelance advertiser woke up in Brooklyn, packed the rubber dicks in a bag, and headed to Manhattan’s Financial District, where he stuck them all over the Charging Bull. Then he donned a mask of the Russian president and mounted the dildo-covered beast.
If you ever wanted to watch about ten minutes of a political protester plopping a load of fake penises on one of Lower Manhattan’s most-recognizable landmarks, the time has come:
Considering he did so in one of the most heavily trafficked and policed areas of the city, it’s a real wonder he pulled it off. He succeeded, he said, by getting there early. “At 530 AM,” Jetton told me, “there’s no one fucking there.” (Minus, he clarified, some “dudes unloading a truck.”) He had been planning this prank-driven protest since March 2018, a person who helped him obtain the dildos and wished to remain anonymous told me. Clearly a person of strategy, Jetton also emphasized that he had scoped the site out countless times before, to see if there was any chance he’d get caught. He was just waiting for the right moment—and he wasn’t shy. He put the dildos all over the animal—on its head, on its body, on its signature gigantic testicles.
Why?
“It was showing Putin’s dominance,” he said, “over the institutions that are put in place to protect us.” But honestly, as he told the Huffington Post, he’d rather people interpret the prank as they will, rather than explain it over and over again.
This sort of protest isn’t an all together new thing for Jetton—he said he had previously staged a fake hockey fight, for example, between a “Putin” and “Trump” outside the White House—and since the election in 2016, has been something of a serious Russia investigation hobbyist. Mother Jones once covered what Jetton described as his “drunken email battle with Ty Cobb,” Trump’s former White House lawyer who now headbangs to punk bands. He also once interviewed Carter Page, former foreign-policy adviser to Trump. You know, pretty much what you’d expect in the makeup of a man who would dress as Putin and mount dildo-decorated cattle.
While his latest prank ended without much fanfare or disruption from police, Jetton says he received a call from the cops on Tuesday evening and was told to report to a precinct in Downtown Manhattan next Monday. He knows not what fate awaits him, but says the officers on the phone were good sports about the whole thing. The NYPD could not yet confirm whether or not Jetton would be receiving a summons for his dildo prank, and said nothing official was on file on Wednesday afternoon.
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This article originally appeared on VICE US.