Watch Sacha Baron Cohen use his "pedophile detector" on Roy Moore
In the lead up to Showtime’s Who Is America?, failed Senate candidate (and alleged pedophile) Roy Moore joined a slew of other right-wing political figures in admitting that they’d been duped by Sacha Baron Cohen’s series. Moore, for example, threatened Showtime with legal action if they aired a “defamatory attack” on his character. Well, we hope his lawyers are ready to fight another losing battle, because Moore appeared on last night’s Who Is America?, though it’s unclear whether or not the sketch we saw is the one to which he’s referring in his statement.
In his statement, Moore refers to an awards ceremony where he was to be lauded for his support of Israel. What we saw last night, however, was an interview between Moore and Erran Morad, Baron Cohen’s Israeli defense expert, in which the pair discussed the latest in Israel defense technology, namely a device that can detect a pedophile by measuring a particular “enzyme.” As Morad explains, “The phrase ‘sweating like a rapist’ is actually based on science.” Though we don’t know when the interview was filmed, we can safely assume that it was around the time Moore was accused of being a serial pedophile by eight different women, because the central joke of the bit is that the device goes off every time it passes by Moore, though not for anyone else.
Moore, clearly flustered, inaccurately claims he’s “never had an accusation of such things” before claiming that “Israeli technology has not been developed properly.”
The interview ends soon after and, for a moment at least, we’re reminded of that moment in history when it was a genuine surprise that Alabama chose not to elect a likely pedophile into office, despite the fact that he was endorsed by Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, and Steve Bannon.