French Influencer Amine Mojito, whose real name is Ilan M., was recently sentenced to jail following outrage and fear that was generated in France from his syringe prank videos. 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 clips wherein he spoofed injecting bystanders with an empty syringe on Parisian streets. They went viral just days before the country’s Fête de la Musique (World Music Day) in June, when France was on edge enough due to unfounded rumors of attacks involving needles at festivals and student parties.
Courtroom Reck
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.
A History of Trouble
The case also revealed Mojito’s checkered history. Other than the syringe prank, he has been accused of assault and harassing others in the past, and thus, prosecutors depicted him as a habitual offender who was more interested in internet buzz rather than public safety.
For close to two months of preliminary detention, Mojito was detained in solitary at one of Europe’s largest prison complexes, Fleury-Mérogis prison. His defense attorney, Marie Claret de Fleurieu, resisted the heft of the conviction, saying that the decision “brings the debate back to more reasonable proportions after the first media frenzy” and serves to re-establish equilibrium between “public order and [her] client’s constitutional rights.”
