For those that don't know, Sacha Baron Cohen is a comedian that truly pushes the envelope between what's funny and what's disturbing. Perhaps most famous for his stints in Da Ali G Show and Borat, his most recent escapade has been a show on Showtime called Who Is America?, which recently won a Golden Globe. This latest venture is Cohen in various characters interviewing hardline right-wing politicians and funders to mostly hilarious results.
In a new
interview posted over at Deadline, he describes one of his stints that unintentionally went a little too far. It went so far, in fact, that he never aired the episode and instead turned the recording over to the FBI, who ultimately did nothing. The entire thing is fairly disturbing. It starts off as really, pitch black dark humor, but it ended with even Cohen himself thinking that it was most likely criminal.
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DEADLINE: I recall that moment in Bruno, where you brought in Paula Abdul for an interview. She went along when asked to sit on a Mexican laborer on all fours, but when that smorgasbord came out, canapes spread across the body of a naked Mexican man, that was too much and she left in a hurry.
BARON COHEN: Exactly. Immediately after that interview, the next person I interviewed was again with the character Gio. The satirical aim of him was to show the levels to which people would go to, out of greed. What would they do for money? In one of the interviews a yacht builder is ready to build a yacht for Colonel Asaad even though it’s going to be used to transport women, basically sex slaves. And during the interview Gio receives fellatio and [the yacht broker] is ready to carry on and keep on talking about the deal.
And there was an interview that didn’t make it in, with Gio. We were shooting some of this at the time of Harvey Weinstein. 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. During the interview, I revealed that basically Gio has molested an eight-year-old boy. Now, mind you, this is extreme comedy and we thought that the guy would leave the room. Instead, this concierge stays in the room and I go, listen, you’ve got to help me get rid of the problem. And 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.’ And then, in the end, he puts me in touch with a lawyer who can silence the boy. I[t] became really dark stuff. And then at the end of the interview I say, listen, I want to go out and celebrate now. Can you get me a date for tonight? 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.’
DEADLINE: None of this remotely qualifies as comedy. What did you do?
BARON COHEN: We immediately turned over the footage 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. But in the end the FBI decided not to pursue it.
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Keep in mind that Cohen is a guy that got Dick Cheney to thank fake "live internet chat" participants for killing Arabs.
BARON COHEN: At one point, we had a live internet chat. Obviously, we had created all the questions, and so people were saying ‘Dick, thank you. You’re the man. I always wanted to kill Arabs and you gave me the opportunity. I got 16 of them. Thanks. You’re the man.’ And he was like, ‘thank you very much.’ Another says, ‘thank you, I’m Iranian. You killed 800,000 Iraqis. You’re the best. You’re my hero.’
The fact that Cohen is so good with his impressions and duping people to spill beans they'd normally keep in the can is amazing enough. (Borat had a few futile lawsuits against it after its release that were dismissed.) But when he's uncovering something as massive as a pedophile ring for billionaires, you'd think the FBI wouldn't just brush it aside.
Maybe the FBI thought the whole thing was a setup for some meta-joke, but according to Cohen (who presumably sent it to the FBI saying, "This shit's real" in so many words), they unceremoniously swept it under the rug.
The whole thing makes me cringe. If anything, it makes me wonder how many other things are also brushed aside for whatever reason.