By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Sacha Baron Cohen on Tuesday won the dismissal of a $95 million defamation lawsuit by Roy Moore, a former U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama, who claimed he was duped into appearing on the Showtime series “Who Is America?” and portrayed falsely as a sex offender.
U.S. District Judge John Cronan in Manhattan said the consent agreement Moore signed to be interviewed on the show barred him from suing the British comedian, Showtime and its parent ViacomCBS Inc, including for intentional infliction of emotional distress and fraud.
Moore and his wife Kayla, who was also a plaintiff, quickly appealed the decision. Lawyers for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit arose from a July 2018 broadcast where Baron Cohen, disguised as fictional Israeli anti-terrorism expert Erran Morad, demonstrated a supposed “pedophile detector” that when waved near Moore beeped.
Moore, 74, said he attended the Washington, D.C. interview believing he would receive an award for supporting Israel.
In his 26-page decision, Cronan called the segment “clearly a joke” and said no reasonable viewer would see it differently.
“It is simply inconceivable that the program’s audience would have found a segment with Judge Moore activating a supposed pedophile-detecting wand to be grounded in any factual basis,” Cronan wrote.
Moore, a Republican and former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, had sought to disqualify Cronan for alleged bias in opposing his political and religious beliefs.
“Judge Cronan’s ruling makes no factual and legal sense,” Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer representing the Moores, said in a statement. “To the contrary, Judge Cronan’s dismissal is the joke, and more than a bad joke at that.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and David Gregorio)
