I enjoyed the series, shame its a one and done deal. Last episode was the series finale but I could see how it'd become incredibly difficult to keep up the ruse especially since the series has gotten so much publicity......
Suing and winning is the American Dream Roy Moore sues Sacha Baron Cohen, CBS' Showtime in $95 million defamation case Roy Moore, the former U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama, on Wednesday filed a $95 million defamation lawsuit against Sacha Baron Cohen, claiming he was duped into appearing on the British comedian’s Showtime series “Who Is America?” and falsely portrayed as a sex offender. Moore, a Republican and former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, also sued Showtime and its parent CBS Corp (CBS.N) for defamation, and accused all three defendants of fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Baron Cohen’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CBS and Showtime did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit arose from a July 29 broadcast where Baron Cohen, disguised as Israeli anti-terrorism expert Erran Morad, interviewed Moore and demonstrated a supposed “pedophile detector” that beeped when waved near him. Moore, whose wife Kayla is also a plaintiff, said he had been lured to Washington, D.C. on the pretense he would receive an award for his support of Israel, and would not have met Baron Cohen had he known what was planned. After the beep, he told Baron Cohen: “I support Israel. I don’t support this kind of stuff,” and walked out. “This false and fraudulent portrayal and mocking of Judge Moore as a sex offender ... has severely harmed Judge Moore’s reputation and caused him, Mrs. Moore, and his entire family severe emotional distress, as well as caused and will cause plaintiffs financial damage,” the complaint said Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer representing Moore, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moore, 71, running in heavily Republican Alabama, lost his Senate race last December to Democrat Doug Jones after being accused of sexual misconduct toward female teenagers while in his 30s. He has denied wrongdoing. The lawsuit was filed in the Washington, D.C. federal court. Baron Cohen is known for portraying characters like Ali G, Bruno and Borat Sagdiyev whose interactions with people, who do not realize they are serving as foils, often result in their revealing more of themselves than they realize. His sketches have gotten him in legal hot water before, including when two former college fraternity students claimed they were duped into appearing while drunk in his 2006 film “Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” That case was dismissed in 2007.
Sorry if this bit with Barney Frank has already been posted, but I couldn't find it. It's one of my favorites. The receipt from the pizza parlor might be one of the best details in the series. That Frank thinks the guy is for real, at some level, is hilarious and tragic all at once, kind of like the whole show.
https://www.newsweek.com/sacha-baro..._GvY69i_yK616Ja4t-mZiaRYeoUw26GmFdpuaH9HzOSSY In Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest series, Who Is America?, the character comedian and provocateur nudged former and current Republican members of Congress into endorsing armed kindergartners, revealed anti-Muslim racism and got Dick Cheney to autograph a waterboarding kit. But there was one scene the Showtime series captured on camera that was too dark and extreme, even for Baron Cohen. In a new interview with Deadline, Baron Cohen describes how the election of Donald Trump inspired him to get back into costume (“I realized, I have to do something else to deal with this kind of anger and total disgust at what was going on”) and explained the agonizing detail that went into fictional characters like former Mossad agent Erran Morad and far-right conspiracy theorist Billy Wayne Ruddick. Along the way, Baron Cohen was astounded by the increase in open American racism. “When we were shooting Borat, if somebody said something anti-Semitic or homophobic, we were surprised and we knew that it would make the cut,” Baron Cohen told Deadline. “Now, going out all these years later, you realize that the political dialogue that’s come from the top has made an extremely negative impact on other politicians and to the populace. People are saying things that they never would have dreamed of saying publicly, prior to Trump.” The interview also gives some new insight into how Baron Cohen gained Cheney’s confidence. “I think he felt happy and almost excited to sit in a room next to my character, because I had done the one thing that he hadn’t actually done. He’d ordered people to be killed but he never actually killed someone with his bare hands,” Baron Cohen said. “It’s a bit like a virgin sitting next to a womanizer and being enamored by them.” But more than Cheney or the man he convinced to “murder” three people at the Women’s March (the interview subject triggered a fictional bomb), Baron Cohen’s most shocking encounter came when, in character as Italian playboy Gio Monaldo, he convinced a concierge to help him find an underaged boy to molest. We wanted to investigate how does someone like Harvey Weinstein gets away with doing what…get away with criminality, essentially. And the network that surrounds him. We decided that Gio would interview a concierge in Las Vegas,” Baron Cohen describes. During the interview, believing the admission would drive the concierge from the room, Baron Cohen, as Gio, reveals that he’s molested an eight-year-old boy. “This guy starts advising Gio how to get rid of this issue. We even at one point talk about murdering the boy, and the concierge is just saying, ‘well, listen, I’m really sorry. In this country, we can’t just drown the boy. This is America we don’t do that,’” Baron Cohen describes. After the concierge offers to put Gio in touch with a lawyer who can help “silence the boy,” Baron Cohen asked for his help securing a date for the night. “He says, ‘what do you mean, a date?’ I go, you know, like a young man. He says, ‘well, what kind of age?’ I say, lower than Bar Mitzvah but older than eight. And he says, ‘yeah, I can put you in touch with somebody who can get you some boys like that.’” Rather than airing the segment, Baron Cohen and his production team turned the footage over to the FBI, “because we thought, perhaps there’s a pedophile ring in Las Vegas that’s operating for these very wealthy men. And this concierge had said that he’d worked for politicians and various billionaires.” While Baron Cohen judged the interview too “dark” and “extreme” to be included in the show, it’s a revealing look at how the powerful can get away with decades-long sexual abuse, including pedophile sexual abuse, such as in the massive cover-up of the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, orchestrated by President Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta. According to Baron Cohen, the FBI decided against pursuing the tip.
