Republican Party chair says he will sue Sacha Baron Cohen over Ali G film

Michael Aboud, chair of the El Paso County Republican Party, says he plans to sue Sacha Baron Cohen over footage of him used in the new film Ali G: Who Iz I?. He said so in an interview with the Guardian, published on 22 October 2026.

Aboud told the paper he believed he was taking part in a nonfiction film about people crossing the US border without papers. The filmmakers, he said, first described it that way. Later, he said, they told him they were adding "a self-defence guy from Israel."

In the film, Aboud is shown in a training session led by Col Erran Morad, a Baron Cohen character described as an ex-Mossad terrorism expert. Morad was a fixture of Baron Cohen's 2018 show Who Is America?.

The Guardian describes the training as crude and absurd. Morad teaches recruits to wear protective plastic buttocks over their clothes as a self-defence method, and to fire from them by working a rubber penis up and down.

The plot follows Aboud and Joshua Loudermilk, a former preacher and aspiring actor, who are recruited to stop a fictional South American drug lord's baby being born on US soil. The two men help abduct Ali G's girlfriend Julie, played by Morgana Robinson, while she appears to be in late-stage labour. She is driven to a remote, abandoned medical facility in a kebab van disguised as an ambulance, and gives birth there to a lifelike prosthetic baby.

Aboud and Loudermilk then leave Julie behind and drive the baby toward Mexico in a zipped bag. In the final reel, the baby is dropped from a drone at height, so that it does not touch US soil.

Aboud called Baron Cohen and his crew "a bunch of liars" who deceive people for their own benefit. He called the comedian "a liar and a pervert," and said no one should spend money on anything he produces or appears in. Asked whether he stands by his actions in the film, he declined to comment.

Loudermilk has taken a different public line. He posted on Facebook that he had spent 12 hours one-on-one with the comedian, and shared a promotional link saying "I am in the trailer." In January he posted a headshot saying he was done with the movie and ready for more. Representatives for the film told the Guardian that Loudermilk did not know the film's true nature. The film itself repeatedly states that neither man is in on the joke.

Aboud and Loudermilk appear in the film's second trailer, which came out about two weeks before this report. The film's wider reception has already been heated. Baron Cohen has defended the film and his revival of the Ali G character, which critics have called problematic, and he has said it will be the last guerrilla comedy of its kind he makes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Calls to boycott the film have also been made, as reported by The Independent.

Baron Cohen has faced legal threats before. In 2021, a federal judge dismissed a $95 million defamation suit brought by former Alabama judge Roy Moore against him and Showtime, after ruling that the interview at the centre of the case "was clearly a joke," as Reuters reported. Aboud has not yet said where or when any case would be filed.