French influencer Amine Mojito has been sentenced to prison for faking syringe attacks on strangers in a viral prank video.
According to the French newspaper Libération, Ilan M., known online as Amine Mojito, was sentenced on Friday (Oct. 3) by the Paris Criminal Court to 12 months in prison, six of which are suspended.
The 27-year-old content creator had filmed himself pretending to inject strangers with a syringe on the streets, as seen in video clips circulating online, just before the Fête de la Musique (World Music Day celebration) in June.
The French court convicted him of “violence with a weapon not resulting in work incapacity.”
Mojito said to be ignorant of the broader social implications of his actions during a hearing, saying he was “in his own world” and “unaware of everything.”
He also explained that his goal was to relaunch his online presence to promote a fitness program following a brief influencer career when he was a teenager.
“I had the very bad idea of doing these pranks by imitating what I saw on the internet, in Spain, [and] in Portugal. I didn’t think it could hurt people. That was my mistake, I didn’t think about others, I thought about myself,” he said in French, per Libération.
The prosecutor had previously asked for a harsher sentence of 15 months under electronic monitoring, with five months suspended, citing the panic caused by reports of needle attacks at student parties and festivals.
The court viewed his videos as having contributed, intentionally or not, to this climate of fear, even if few actual cases were reported.
Mojito was fined €1,500, or $1,761, and banned from owning or carrying a weapon for three years.
His lawyer, Marie Claret de Fleurieu, asked for clemency and told Libération that the court’s decision “brings the debate back to more reasonable proportions after the initial media frenzy” and “restores a bit of balance between public order and [her] client’s fundamental rights.”
Mojito had already spent nearly two months in pre-trial detention, during which he was kept in isolation at Fleury-Mérogis prison.