French Influencer Amine Mojito, whose real name is Ilan M., has been sentenced to jail after his syringe prank videos sparked outrage and fear in France.
The Paris Criminal Court made the ruling on Friday, October 3, and sentenced the 27-year-old to 12 months in prison, of which six months shall be served in custody, and the rest suspended.
Mojito was also fined €1,500 ($1,761) and prohibited from possessing or carrying a gun for three years.
The prankster went viral when he posted videos where he injected bystanders with an empty syringe on Parisian streets.
The video went viral just days before the country’s Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) in June, when France was on edge due to unfounded rumors of attacks involving needles at festivals and student parties.
The court in France convicted Mojito of “violence with a weapon not resulting in work incapacity.”
Prosecutors initially demanded a more severe sentence, 15 months in electronic monitoring for five years, claiming that the jokes knowingly aggravated public outrage in an otherwise volatile context.
One prosecutor described Mojito as a “public menace,” stressing that even though the syringes were empty, the fear they incited was real. Several victims testified to experiencing genuine panic, with one likening the experience to a nightmare given ongoing public health anxieties.
Mojito, though, defended himself by claiming the videos were never intended to do any damage.
“I had had the very bad idea of performing these tricks doing mimicry of what I had seen on the internet, in Spain [and] in Portugal,” he told the court, as published in Libération. “I didn’t think it could hurt people. That was my mistake, I didn’t think of others, I thought of myself.”
He went on to detail that the stunt was designed to revive his internet career and to market a physical exercise program, after having experienced, in his own words, a brief period of being an influencer in teen life.
