Sacha Baron Cohen has been doing this for twenty-five years — finding people willing to reveal themselves on camera — and the formula still works for the same reason it always did: the marks believe the premise because they want to believe it. Michael Aboud, chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, thought he was participating in a documentary about illegal border crossings. He ended up on film wearing protective plastic buttocks, firing a rubber penis, abducting a pregnant woman in a fake ambulance, and dangling what he believed was a live infant from a drone over the US-Mexico border before dropping it. The revelation came not when the film was completed, not when the trailer dropped, not when he appeared in that trailer — but when the Guardian called him on Tuesday. At which point Aboud called Baron Cohen 'a liar and a pervert,' announced his intention to sue, and declined to comment on whether he stood by his actions in the film. The logistics of this particular embarrassment are worth sitting with. The second trailer for Ali G: Who Iz I? was released a fortnight before Aboud's Guardian phone call. It contains, by the article's account, 'considerable clues' that the project is not a straightforward documentary — including a Mossad 'terrorist expert' explaining that immigrants are not coming to America to mow lawns and trim trees and rake leaves and wash cars and build fences, but to kill you. Aboud is in this trailer. He had not watched it. His fellow recruit Joshua Loudermilk is a more complicated case. Loudermilk posted on Facebook that he 'got to spend 12 hours one on one with Sasha and he taught me soooo much about the fun of making others laugh,' linked to the film's promo, announced 'I am in the trailer,' and posted a headshot with the caption 'Done with Sasha Cohen movie and ready for more.' The film's representatives still insist Loudermilk was unaware of its true nature. His social media feed, as the Guardian dryly notes, 'suggests a level of understanding about the project not shared by most of his fellow participants.' George Santos also appears — the disgraced former congressman, himself no stranger to elaborate fabrications, participating in a gameshow where contestants stuff mannequins representing 'rapists, gay people, Muslims and Mexican babies' into fake shower cubicles and press a button to simulate Zyklon B. His takeaway, on camera: next time he would grab more babies, because they're easier to fit in the shower. Santos told the Guardian he was unaware of the film's true nature, 'as me and my team had no involvement,' and declined to justify his behaviour. The logic of that statement — 'we had no involvement' as a defence for the footage that exists — is its own kind of performance. The Ali G film arrives at a specific cultural moment: a post-January-6 America in which the behaviour Baron Cohen has been satirising for decades has become mainstream political practice, and where the gap between the exaggerated absurdism of the character and the actual behaviour of real political actors has narrowed to the point of near-collapse. The infant-drone sequence, the fake-gas-chamber gameshow, the para-military self-defence training with rubber genitalia — these read less as surrealist provocations than as slightly heightened versions of things that have actually appeared on political social media. That's either what makes the film essential viewing or what makes it exhausting, depending on your tolerance. The lawsuit threat is the oldest move in the Baron Cohen playbook and has never once succeeded. The legal mechanism requires proving actual malice, which requires proving the footage doesn't show what it shows. Aboud's actual position — that he was deceived into participating — is probably true, is certainly humiliating, and is not a defamation claim. Ali G: Who Iz I? opens in the UK, US, and Australia this Friday.
