He’s fêted by the critics. He’s adored by the media commentators. And now, after a merciless $26 million (£13.6 million) haul from last weekend’s US box office, Borat Sagdiyev has demonstrated that even the great unwashed American public, formerly known as his satirical target, is somehow on the side of this fictional faux naif Kazakh reporter (aka Sacha Baron Cohen). And yet there’s one group of increasingly vocal people who remain unimpressed by the puerile antics of Baron Cohen — and that’s the real-life “victims” of the Borat movie’s many humiliating pranks.

People such as Linda Stein, a New York artist and veteran feminist, and one of the first Americans to be ridiculed by Borat on his transcontinental journey (he is supposedly travelling across America to meet Pamela Anderson). Or Pat Haggerty, a public-speaking coach from Washington who earnestly attempts to “teach” Borat the art of humour. Or Cindy Streit, an over-fastidious etiquette consultant from Birmingham, Alabama, or the Tennessee-based rodeo veteran and avowed right-winger Bobby Rowe, or the solicitous Maryland car salesman Jim Sell, and so on.

These people are ultimately the backbone of Baron Cohen’s movie, Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and normally they would have remained hidden from public view. But thanks to the film’s conspicuous commercial triumph they have suddenly materialised in the media ether. And their testimonies, crucially, have already begun to remove the sheen from the Borat success story.

The victims unanimously describe the same set-up. An approach is made from a fake production company claiming to represent a documentary programme from Belarus (Kazakhstan was never mentioned, for fear, one suspects, of triggering some innate pop cultural recall). This is followed by a hasty arrival on the day by camera and crew, who are often late, to avoid lengthy scrutiny. A wad of cash is then handed over to the participant, up front — anything from $150 to $400. Finally, at the last minute, and just before the eleventh-hour arrival of Borat himself, a “Standard Consent Agreement” is hurriedly produced, one which, the victims claim, buries references to “misleading portrayals” and “offensive behaviour” deep within its legalese.

The participants mostly describe the set-up as fishy. “One tenth of 1 per cent of my clients pay me in advance,” Haggerty, the speaking coach, said recently, “and nobody pays me in cash.” Some describe a level of manipulation that goes beyond the jocular hoodwinking suggested in the body of the film itself. The feminist Stein, for instance, an established artist whose exhibition Women Warriors and the Power to Protect opened on the same day as Baron Cohen’s movie, describes the production team’s emotional appeals to her human decency.

“They called me and said: ‘You could help Third World women if you would talk about what it’s like to be an American woman.’ Now I believe very strongly in the equality of women in all societies around the world. So I wanted to do that very much. I was very earnest, and feel now that I was naive, but at the time I thought I was dealing with a very uneducated man.”

The greatest and loudest defence of Borat, of course, is that it is a work of satire that exposes the real underbelly of contemporary America. But the complaints of those involved suggest that the film is pre-rigged to create a very specific version of America that it can then hilariously satirise. There is nothing organic about the film’s process, and nothing spontaneous about its targets. Why, asks Stein, didn’t Cohen ridicule top-level Harvard hypocrites or other intelligentsia?

Furthermore, is there not something innately selfparodic about many of his “victims” anyway, such as the reactionary rednecks or the born-again Bible-belters? Do we really need to laugh at them to know how ridiculous they are?

Worse still, for Cohen, are the murmurings of legal action that are emerging from the victims’ camp. “The release form was a fraud,” Stein says, “because it was signed by a non-existent person. I believe that’s fraud.”

Interestingly, Cohen’s attempts to spoof the public have themselves come under fire. While filming in Salem, Virginia, in 2005, angry locals began firing shots into the air after Cohen said: “I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq . . . and may George W. Bush drink their blood.”

But now other participants in Baron’s latest film, possibly eyeing the film’s humungous box-office haul, have also started to claim that Borat is responsible for a lack of earnings (a TV producer in Mississippi even claims that she was sacked by her bosses after being duped by Borat).

Stein, however, is circumspect on the subject of legal action. “Look,” she says, “I’m so busy with my own show that I’m not dealing with that.” She adds that Baron Cohen is clearly a talented man, and that some of the movie was indeed hilarious. Yes, but will you sue him? “Let’s just say I think he should buy one of my sculptures. I think he really should buy a sculpture.”

The producers of Borat declined to make any comment about the claims of some of those involved in the making of the film.

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