You Can’t Just Walk Around Masturbating in Public, Swedish People | VICE United States

Last week, the Swedish newspaper Mitt i Stockholm reported on a sexual assault case brought against a 65-year-old man who had been seen touching himself on a local beach. Weirdly, he’d been acquitted because “the masturbation wasn’t directed or aimed at any specific person.” No one seems to know what the man was looking at while he pumped away at his groin—the horizon? An empty boat? A gull—but nevertheless, over the weekend, the story started to ooze its way out to international media outlets.

When the English-language Swedish news website the Local picked up the story, however, something was lost in translation—they messed up one of the quotes given to Mitt i Stockholm by the case’s wonderfully named public prosecutor, Olof Vrethammar.

#meanwhile #criminals