YouTuber in Spain sentenced to 15 months in prison for stuffing Oreos with toothpaste
A Spanish YouTuber has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for posting a video that shows him offering a homeless man Oreo biscuits filled with toothpaste, according to the New York Times.
Kanghua Ren, who was 19 at the time of the prank, has been ordered to pay compensation of 20,000 euros (or about $22,300) to the victim for the humiliation, the Times reported.
Ren, also known as ReSet to his followers on YouTube, had published the video on his channel in January 2017 which has since been removed, was found guilty of violating the moral integrity of the victim, the Barcelona Court said.
In the video posted a couple of years ago, Ren is seen filming himself removing cream from Oreo biscuits and replacing it with toothpaste. He then paid 20 euros to a Romanian homeless man to eat them.
“Maybe I went a little far, but let’s look at the positive side, it will help him clean his teeth, I don’t think he has often brushed his teeth since he became poor,” Ren told his followers. The homeless man threw up, wrote the judge in her verdict dated May 29.
The 52-year-old homeless man later told a paper that he had, “never been treated so poorly while living on the street.”
The video generated a lot of negative comments online, so Ren posted a second video that shows him going back to see the beggar and giving him another 20 euros.
“If I had done this with a normal person, no one would have said a thing, but as he is a beggar people are complaining,” Ren said in a message accompanying the video, according to the court document.
He and his friend visited the homeless man a third time to make yet another video in which they would spend the night with him, but a witness called the police.
It appears that Ren is unlikely to serve his prison sentence of 15 months, as Spanish law normally suspends sentences of up to two years for first-time offenders in non-violent crimes. In addition, the Barcelona court has ordered that all of Ren’s YouTube channel and various social media channels will be shut down for five years.
