Expedition Robinson

240 hours, no prison: the Robinson 2000 winner's assault conviction

On 7 November 2001 Mölndal District Court convicted Mattias Dalerstedt, winner of Expedition Robinson 2000, of assault, not aggravated assault. He received a conditional sentence with 240 hours of community service and SEK 75,000 in damages, and no prison term. The man he punched was hospitalised and had his spleen surgically removed.

Court record The 2001 conviction and its terms come from contemporaneous named-author reporting of the Mölndal District Court judgment, preserved in a verified archive capture. A separate 2005 aggravated-assault charge appears on this page only as a charge, because no judgment in it has been located.

Expedition Robinson Court record

What the record shows

  • Court record Mölndal District Court convicted Dalerstedt of assault, misshandel, on 7 November 2001. The sentence was a conditional sentence with 240 hours of community service, plus SEK 75,000 in damages. No custodial term was imposed.
  • Confirmed The man he punched was hospitalised and had his spleen surgically removed.
  • Admitted Dalerstedt admitted throwing two punches to the face. He argued self-defence, saying he had been attacked first, and the court found his response disproportionate.
  • Confirmed The case had been brought as grov misshandel, aggravated assault, an offence carrying up to ten years. The conviction was for the lesser offence of misshandel.
  • Charged, unresolved In July 2005 prosecutors charged Dalerstedt with aggravated assault at Gothenburg District Court over an incident on Linnégatan in September 2004, alleging that a press photographer was struck and kicked unconscious. He denied it, saying he was not there. No verdict, sentence, acquittal or dismissal in that case has been located, so it has reached no outcome on this record.
  • Unverified No appellate outcome in the 2001 case has been located. Whether the judgment was appealed, upheld or altered is not established here.
  • Unverified The Gothenburg District Court judgment that would resolve the 2005 charge sits in a pre-2015 court archive that must be requested by hand, and no such request has been answered. Nothing on this page should be read as saying that charge ended in a conviction, and nothing should be read as saying it ended in an acquittal.

What the court decided in 2001

On 7 November 2001 Mölndal District Court convicted Mattias Dalerstedt of assault. The sentence was a conditional sentence carrying 240 hours of community service, together with SEK 75,000 in damages to the man he had hit. Marcus Noterius and Tobias Lindner reported the judgment and its terms for Aftonbladet the same day, and an Internet Archive capture preserves that report.

Dalerstedt admitted throwing two punches to the face. His defence was that he had been attacked first and was protecting himself. The court accepted neither the whole of that account nor the label the prosecution had put on the case: it found the response disproportionate to what he faced, and it convicted him of the lesser offence.

Assault, not aggravated assault, and no prison

The distinction that most summaries lose is the one the court actually drew. The matter had been brought as grov misshandel, aggravated assault, which in Sweden reaches up to ten years. The conviction entered was misshandel, ordinary assault. Those are separate offences with separate penalty ranges, and only the second one appears in the judgment reported here.

The sentence followed from that. A conditional sentence with community service is not a prison sentence, and no custodial term was imposed. Writing that the winner of Expedition Robinson was jailed, or that he was convicted of aggravated assault, states two things the located record does not support.

The spleen

The detail that keeps this case in circulation is medical. The man Dalerstedt punched was hospitalised, and his spleen was surgically removed. That is what the reporting records as the outcome for the injured man, and it is why the damages figure is what it is.

It is worth being exact about what that is and is not. The removal of the spleen is a consequence set out in the reporting on the case. It is not a stated element of the offence the court convicted him of, and this page does not describe the act in those terms. What the court found was assault; what the reporting records is that the injured man lost his spleen to surgery.

The 2005 charge, which has no ending here

There is a second, later matter, and it is unresolved. In July 2005 prosecutors charged Dalerstedt with aggravated assault at Gothenburg District Court over an incident on Linnégatan in Gothenburg in September 2004. The prosecution alleged that a press photographer was struck and kicked unconscious. Dalerstedt denied it, saying he had not been there. Aftonbladet's Tomas Kvarnkullen and the Gothenburg edition of Expressen both reported the charge in the first week of July 2005.

That is the whole of it. A charge is an accusation by the state, and this one has reached no outcome in any record located for this page. No verdict, no sentence, no acquittal and no dismissal has been found. The judgment would sit in the Gothenburg District Court archive, which handles pre-2015 material only by direct request rather than through its online service, and no such request has been answered. The prosecution's account of what happened on Linnégatan is repeated here as an allegation because that is all it has ever been shown to be.

Expedition Robinson is not the CBS series

Dalerstedt won Expedition Robinson, the Swedish series whose format the American Survivor was built from. The two shows share a premise and nothing else: different network, different production, different cast. He has never appeared on the CBS series.

So there is no CBS finding, no CBS statement and no American proceeding anywhere in this story. It is a Swedish criminal matter, decided in Swedish courts, and the sanction attached to it was a sentence, not anything a television production imposed.

Questions people ask

What was Mattias Dalerstedt convicted of?
Assault, misshandel, by Mölndal District Court on 7 November 2001. He was not convicted of aggravated assault, grov misshandel, although the case had been brought under that heading.
What sentence did he get?
A conditional sentence with 240 hours of community service, plus SEK 75,000 in damages. There was no prison term. Aftonbladet reported both the conviction and the terms on the day of the judgment.
Did someone lose a spleen?
Yes. The man Dalerstedt punched was hospitalised and had his spleen surgically removed. That is recorded in the reporting on the case as the consequence for the injured man.
What did Dalerstedt say happened?
He admitted throwing two punches to the face and argued self-defence, saying he had been attacked first. The court found the response disproportionate and convicted him of assault.
What happened with the 2005 case?
Not established. Prosecutors charged him with aggravated assault at Gothenburg District Court in July 2005 over a September 2004 incident, alleging a press photographer was attacked. He denied it. No verdict, acquittal, sentence or dismissal has been located, so the charge has no known outcome.
Was he on the American Survivor?
No. He won Expedition Robinson, the Swedish series the Survivor format came from. He has never appeared on the CBS show, and no CBS statement or sanction exists in this case.

Sources

Checked on 2026-07-26. If something here is wrong or out of date, we want to know: get in touch.