Say what you like about Lindsay Lohan—for instance, that two decades of constant, unending public attention have hurt her in ways it would be impossible for an untrained outside observer to properly tease out, and which we are all passively or actively culpable in to some degree—but at least she keeps her reasons for trending varied. Past eye-catching LiLo drops have included impromptu legal seminars, accusations of racial profiling, a feint toward Trump support, possible British political analysis, crimes against accents, and that one time she told us all she was back, bitches. (She does not appear to have actually been back.)
All of these installments in pop culture’s most grubby ongoing soap opera-sitcom have one thing in common, though: They’re all kind of what the internet kids call “self-owns,” a trend that continued this weekend, when Lohan once again snagged down headlines, this time by posting a video that she seems to think shows beautiful humanitarian effort on her behalf, and which most of the rest of the world perceived as a sort of low-key kidnapping attempt.
Lohan posted the video on Instagram last night, showing her wandering around the streets of Moscow—because sure, why not, right?—harassing a family of homeless people sleeping on the street. It starts off sweetly (if misguidedly) enough, with Lohan—clearly upset at what she seems to view as mistreatment of the family’s kids—offering them a hotel room to sleep in for the night. But when the parents, understandably disinterested in following a random woman who walked up to them, slid into an occasional Middle Eastern accent while talking to them, and filmed them constantly on her phone, straight into a textbook setup for an Eli Roth movie, she turned angry, attempting to badger them into coming along or letting her take the kids. Her monologue gets increasingly worrying as it goes on, accusing the family of “ruining Arabic culture” and telling them “I won’t leave until I take you. Now I know who you are. Don’t fuck with me.” And through it all, she continues filming, as though to show her followers, “See? This is the insanity that I, Lindsay Lohan, am forced to put up with constantly in my life.”