Well known comic Sacha Baron Cohen – famous for his Ali G, Borat and Bruno characters – has been sued after a woman was allegedly attacked and crippled at a bingo hall where Cohen was filming.
Richelle Olson has sued Cohen and NBC Universal after Cohen, playing the character of Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion journalistm, was asked to call the numbers at a charity game she ran for pensioners in Palmdale, California.
Olson said Bruno was “extreme, outrageous, offensive caricature of a gay man dressed in sexually revealing clothing with an Austrian accent” and used “vulgar and offensive language”. When she tried taking the microphone from Bruno, a “physical struggle ensued” and she was “offensively touched, pushed and battered” before falling to the ground.
Olson claims three cameramen then took to the stage “where defendants attacked [her] for a period of one to five minutes to intentionally create a dramatic emotional response … while [they] recorded her humiliation and embarrassment.” She then claims she went to another room where she was “sobbing uncontrollably” before becoming unconscious and “falling forward onto the thinly covered concrete slab, passing out and causing her to hit her head.”
Olson’s lawsuit says she was rushed to hospital with a “diagnosis of two brain bleeds”and that she has been confiened to a wheelchair ever since.
