Roy Moore vs Sacha Baron Cohen (legal issues)

Factual Questions
1

Leaving aside opinions about these people (especially Moore), I’m curious as to what seem, at this point at least, to be the key legal issues in Moore’s lawsuit.

  1. Moore signed a waiver before appearing on the show. Moore’s counterargument is that this waiver was based on a misrepresentation as to who was interviewing him, what the interview was about etc. This seems like a valid argument to me. If you go see a doctor to have a colonoscopy and sign a waiver, I wouldn’t think this waiver would hold if it turns out that the guy was impersonating a doctor and was intending all along to amputate your foot. (Assuming the facts as alleged by Moore are true, of course. I would guess that they are or the prank wouldn’t have worked, though you never know if there might have been some clever legalese covering that. But this is really about the legal question and not the specific facts of the Moore case.)

  2. SBC is protected by free speech rights. I don’t know what Moore’s counterargument is here, but the claim itself seems dubious to me. People are protected by free speech for their own actions. But Moore isn’t suing SBC for what SBC said about him. He’s suing him for being induced to appear on SBC’s show, and thus adding to his own humiliation. AFAIK there’s no free speech protection for misleading other people into humiliating themselves.

But I’m not any sort of legal scholar, so I’m interested in comments from those who are.

2

Signing a waiver, accepting a fee (donated to the charity of Moore’s choice) and Cohen’s own First Amendment rights would pretty much close the door to this lawsuit, I’d say. The actual wording of the waiver might be critical, but this isn’t Cohen’s first rodeo, so I’d expect the language to be pretty ironclad.