After faking his own death and subsequent kidnapping, Elon University senior and acting major Nik Salah finds himself with a highly engaged audience of roughly 1.5 million followers on TikTok.
Over the past three years, Salah’s satirical TikTok page, judyhoppsl0vr69, has grown from a “joke” to a “passion project” to a source of income.
Salah’s username is a reference to Disney’s Zootopia, an animated movie featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit named Judy Hopps. Over the past few years, Salah has developed a TikTok presence centering around an exaggerated enthusiasm for the character.
Building on this persona, Salah and his friends spent the month of June weaving a complex, fictional narrative involving a series of puzzles for viewers to solve as they unraveled the story of Salah’s persona being kidnapped to Area 51 after faking his own death.
Salah said he never wanted the content to “actually raise alarms” but instead use his platform to engage with his TikTok following and make people laugh.
“Not everything needs to be serious,” Salah said. “At the end of the day, it can just be a funny joke.”
“Playing a Character”
Before Salah was posting online as judyhoppsl0vr69, he was posting as niksalad — the same username he uses on other platforms, such as Instagram. Then in 2021, Salah said his TikTok “For You Page,” or FYP, began showing him a trend where people made “hear me out” videos about crushes on cartoon characters.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, I have a funny idea,’” Salah said.
While it started as a fun joke with his friends, Salah’s videos gained traction and he decided to lean into it and continue posting comedic and satirical videos centered around a love for the character.
Recently, Salah said he has been getting recognized more in public. People have stopped him on the street for photos and a video a stranger took of him at a dance studio quickly got over 1 million views.
“It's a very surreal feeling,” Salah said. “That was the moment when I was like, ‘Oh, this is something that might stick with me for a while.’”
According to Salah, the video that led to his account’s initial popularity involved his sibling finding him in a room covered in photos of Judy Hopps. He estimated it took two hours to put all the photos on his wall. The video led to a series where Salah’s siblings or friends would find him with something absurd in relation to Judy Hopps or Zootopia.
“Then I renamed the account, and I changed my profile picture, and I have not looked back since,” Salah said.
As the account continued to grow over the past couple of years, Salah said the exaggerated personality he portrayed on TikTok has morphed into a full character.
“Ultimately, what I'm doing with judyhoppsl0vr69 is I'm playing a character,” Salah said. “It's a character that's ridiculous, but honestly in some ways, it has taught me a lot in tandem with my acting training.”
Salah described his portrayal of judyhoppsl0vr69 as an exercise in keeping an audience engaged — as well as being interesting, appealing to a crowd, talking to a camera and writing comedy.
“In a very weird way, my acting training has allowed me to do this — has allowed me to be creative in this way,” Salah said.
His profile features a variety of running jokes and bits outside of his character’s obsession with Judy Hopps. Some of his most common videos reference him being banned from a variety of establishments, places and events — which include the state of Ohio, Disney properties, PetCo and The Eras Tour. He also has a series featuring calls with his “therapist” — played by Elon acting alumna Brynn Lackey ’24 — as well as videos where Salah says “any bunny” instead of “anybody” in conversation.
“At this point, everything I do on TikTok is for fun — both for me and for people that I'm making videos for,” Salah said. “This whole thing was improvisational where I was like … ‘I've done so many crazy things, what is the next, crazy thing that I can do?’”
On June 15, Salah started his next endeavor as judyhoppsl0vr69.
The video starts with Salah’s younger sibling explaining that Salah has died and ends with a memorial-style photo and video compilation. The video garnered over 6.7 million views and over 16,500 comments, as of July 19. Many of which play into the account's comedic nature — “FLY LOW NIK” and “he will be remembered. not in a good way but we’ll never forget him for sure” — while others questioned if the video was sincere.
Over the next 15 days, Salah posted over 35 videos building a fictional narrative where he faked his own death and was then kidnapped by his roommate, Marina Jansen.
“It was just me being stupid at the beginning, and then everyone else kind of joined in somewhere along the line with their ideas,” Salah said.
Jansen, an Elon senior and music theatre major, had been featured in some of Salah’s previous videos, but their involvement was more intricate this time around.
Jansen said Salah initially reached out asking if they wanted to help him fake his death.
“He's like, ‘I have to fake my death,’ which is a crazy sentence. And at first I was like, ‘That's too far,’” Jansen said. “Then I thought about it. I'm like, ‘If we do it right, I think it could be funny’ — which I realized might sound insensitive, but I think in the context of Nik’s account and knowing how unserious it is, I still stand by our decision and don't regret anything that we did.”
Jansen posted a video on their TikTok account, marinamusicals, which showed them crying and included text that read “i loved you so much, nik. i can’t believe you’re gone.”
“I thought that was going to be it,” Jansen said.
“Yes, and”
The day after Salah’s “death” was announced, three more videos were posted, including one where Salah said he believed the Walt Disney corporation and U.S. government worked together to fake his death as a coverup for a kidnapping.
This sparked TikTok user brennenbeckwith’s first video on the series. Brennen Beckwith, a 26-year-old content creator, often makes videos analyzing internet culture and has been following Salah’s content since his initial viral videos in 2021.
Beckwith’s first video regarding judyhoppsl0vr69 focused on Salah’s role as an internet “troll” — someone whose content toes the line of general internet etiquette to prompt people to engage with it. Beckwith saw Salah’s death announcement and initial explainer video as his “latest installment of trolling behavior.”
“I thought that that was it,” Beckwith said. “I thought that he was maybe just taking a break, or doing whatever he needed to do, and he would just come back whenever.”
For Salah, faking his death and blaming it on Disney had been the original plan. But as the comments and views came rolling in, so did the theories.
“There were a lot of comments that were like, ‘Oh, he seems different,’ ‘He seems off,’ ‘Something about him is wrong,’ ‘He didn't come back the same,’” Salah said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, sure.’”
After compiling some ideas from the comments, Salah and Jansen decided to run with it.
“It just grew and grew,” Jansen said. “We never anticipated how far it would go, but we never had a plan.”
Even once they decided to keep making videos in the series, the duo never planned out a full arch. Instead, they continued to create the story by spontaneously incorporating theories they saw in the comments.
“I did not expect it to gain traction,” Salah said. “But once I saw that people were invested, I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun. This is a game, a clue-type game of where am I and what happened to me.’”
If it was a game, Beckwith and other TikTok users quickly became players.
“It just felt like a very ‘Yes, and’ moment,” Beckwith said. “My videos would change based on his videos.”
Salah said a lot of the series was influenced by what he’s learned through his on campus involvement in Elon student groups Twisted Measures and Instant Laughter, an a cappella group and an improvisational acting group, respectively. Salah said Twisted Measures taught him about keeping audiences engaged and Instant Laughter helped build up the comedy know-how that has propelled his TikTok presence.
“So much of this I learned from Instant Laughter. How can I keep the bit going?” Salah said. “Yes, and — that’s the number one rule of improv — and in a lot of ways that’s what I’ve been doing with my TikTok.”
As Salah and Jansen began posting more videos, Beckwith and others got out their notebooks and whiteboards to follow along and make their own videos, sharing recaps and theories of what was happening.
“It feels like the stakes are really high because that's how he was acting,” Beckwith said.
Tae Martinez, a recent high school graduate, has been watching Salah’s videos since 2021 and recently began spending her summer making videos analyzing Salah’s content, following his clues and presenting her own theories.
“I just noticed that some of the videos were kind of weird,” Martinez said. “Nobody's really talking about it that much, so I might as well because I have time and it seemed fun.”
Since June 15, Martinez has posted 30 different videos commenting on and dissecting judyhoppsl0vr69 “lore.”
Martinez, who posts under the username taelyr_rose, said she views Salah’s series as an alternate reality game, or ARG.
“It's basically an interactive story that has clues and mystery and you get to solve it with other people,” Martinez said.
With clues including morse code, a crossword puzzle, binary code, a cake and other interactive messages, viewers became increasingly invested in Salah’s character.
“This is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Martinez said.
Beckwith said he thought the “yes, and” nature of Salah’s content is what allowed it to thrive and noticed his videos centered more around comedy and audience experience, rather than focusing on the continuity of the storyline.
“It's just funny internet storytelling,” Beckwith said. “Anything can happen when you put a story out into the world like Nik did. It was very much an improv moment where you take this story and you run with it too.”
In Beckwith’s videos, he immersed himself in the storyline by depicting consequences for his investigation. One of Salah’s videos tells people to “stop looking for Nik.”
“I was like, ‘OK, I have to get in trouble because I've been looking for him,’” Beckwith said. “I got kidnapped and then I got my memory wiped and then there was a point where I was hiding out and being threatened. … It was just me doing improv back.”
Part of what made Salah’s story arch so engaging, Beckwith said, was how easy it was to participate.
“Get on your phone and add to it, build something off of it,” Beckwith said. “This kind of storytelling used to be so gatekept — you would need fancy gear and a script and all these things … but now the barrier of entry for storytelling is so minimal because everybody has a phone and everybody can get on TikTok. … We’re at a time in the internet where you just need an idea and a way to perform it.”
Martinez said her favorite part of the series was the way internet strangers gathered together to solve the puzzles and unravel the story.
“That's one of the things I love about ARGs, is how they are so community building, because everybody can work together to solve it,” Martinez said.
Salah quickly found his very fake story was creating a very real community. Through the month of June, Salah gained over 400,000 TikTik followers and his platform has continued to expand after the series six part finale. Salah’s also has a Discord server, judyhoppsl0vrs, with 4,440 members, as of July 19.
“I hope it stays communal,” Salah said. “Ultimately what makes it so fun for me — and what makes it so worth it for me — is, weirdly, just people's responses to it and people's comments and people’s laughs. That, to me, is what is really, really golden about it.”
“The bills are that high”
It’s a statement Salah occasionally leaves in his own videos’ comment sections, “Before anyone asks yes the bills are that high.” The comment plays on the perception that people would only post embarrassing videos of themselves online for monetary gain.
While it’s not Salah’s primary motivation for posting, many of his videos are eligible for monetization through the TikTok Creator Rewards Program and he’s even participated in paid partnerships with brands such as Duolingo. Salah said he’s been able to put the money he’s earned toward his bills and tuition.
In June, Salah also sold t-shirts reading “i’ve committed several crimes” and “sorry for faking my own death.” Salah said the shirts were initially a response to people being upset by his content. They were intended as a fun extension of his joke, but he quickly sold over 70 shirts and has since removed the online shop link from his TikTok profile.
More than half of the videos Salah has posted since June 15 were at least one minute long, making them eligible for TikTok’s monetization program. Salah said he typically receives about 40 cents per 1,000 views on his videos.
While most videos in the series had over 1 million views, not all views count for monetization. Beckwith also said he believed the videos were being suppressed by the TikTok algorithm.
“I think most of the views he got from that series were from people going back and checking his account,” Beckwith said. “And those views don't count for creator funds, only views on the For You Page.”
Based on Beckwith’s own typical analytics, he said his videos were not reaching the FYP at the rate they usually did and had a dip in views and engagement on videos about judyhoppsl0vr69.
“I expect a certain amount of views and if the video doesn't hit that, I'm thinking it might be suppressed,” Beckwith said. “But I also understand, because it was misinformation, it was a little scary. … It didn't seem advertiser friendly.”
While Beckwith and Salah’s videos were performing below par, Martinez and Jansen found themselves with more attention than ever before.
Martinez’ account now has over 31,000 followers and she said she has been putting money from the Creator Rewards Program toward her upcoming college tuition.
Jansen — who played the antagonist of Salah’s narrative — said in addition to followers and an influx of views, they’ve also received threatening comments and messages from strangers online. Opposite from the occasional death threat, Jansen said they have received a variety of positive, yet objectifying, comments about their appearance and their role in Salah’s kidnapping saga.
“Maybe in a year, maybe no one will remember this. And the Marina Jansen fan accounts … it's going to go inactive in four months,” Jansen said. “It's just weird. And I try not to look into much of that and feed myself that. But at the end of the day, I'm human.”
“Digital footprint”
As Salah’s internet presence and platform continues to grow, so does his need to “wield power responsibly.” After seeing the comments and messages Jansen received, Salah said he aims to be more intentional about keeping his content fun and not leading his viewers or collaborators into “dangerous territory.”
Salah also said he never wants to use his content to “punch down.” Instead, the punchlines of his videos usually target himself, consenting participants or large corporations.
While much of Salah’s content references Disney, including fictional stories about lawsuits and being banned from Disney stores and properties, Salah said he had previously been in contact with representatives from Disney.
“Basically, they told me that I couldn't sell merchandise,” Salah said. “My content was in the clear, but I couldn't sell merchandise.”
Salah has avoided selling merchandise items that would infringe on Disney’s copyright and trademarks surrounding Judy Hopps and Zootopia, and said he’s not worried that Disney would take any further action in regards to his content.
Salah said his main goal with his content is to use his brand of satirical humor to bring people joy.
In addition to making people laugh, Salah has also used his content to fundraise for a Palestinian family living in Gaza City.
“I want to use that privilege that I have for something that I think is meaningful and beneficial,” Salah said. “I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but if I can use the influence that I have to do something good on top of what I'm already doing, trying to make people laugh, … I think it’s something meaningful.”
Elon senior Nik Salah performs a cover of Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" on Feb. 23 at Irazú, during an open mic event for "Breakthrough," a student-run LGBTQ+ arts festival.
Following the wrap-up of his kidnapping series on June 30, Salah has continued to make comedic videos following his character, including a brief presidential candidacy. While the “digital footprint” of his social media presence can occasionally lead to awkward encounters, Salah said he’s not embarrassed or ashamed of the account.
“It's on my resume, if people ask me about it — which they have — I just say, ‘I make short-form comedy videos,’” Salah said. “For the most part, from casting directors and from people who have had theatrical projects that they've been casting for, I've gotten positive feedback. Just saying, ‘Oh, this is creative and shows a creative side of you. It shows that you can keep people engaged.’”
Recently, Salah and Jansen have been in London together for a study abroad program where the duo has been posting more videos. “Season two,” as Jansen referred to it, also includes Elon senior and music theatre major Charlee Rubino.
While the initial series was filmed remotely, with Jansen posting from Maryland and Salah posting from New York, Jansen said it’s refreshing to be able to film videos together. Jansen also said their favorite part of the series was getting to experiment with video editing, storytelling and writing. The spontaneity of the videos let them put out content without overthinking.
“Art is not meant to be perfect, and you should not make art for the purpose of being perfect,” Jansen said. “This really helped me do that — make art to make art and just put it out there, because that's how you get better.”
Salah’s been posting on TikTok for the past three years and has no plans of stopping anytime soon. He said he’s excited to continue making fun videos with his classmates and friends on campus in the fall.
“Something I discovered from this account is how much I like to make people laugh and how much I enjoy comedy,” Salah said. “That's not really an aspect of myself that I had recognized before this account, and now I'm very happy that I have.”