‘Borat’ Sequel Fans Raise $50,000 for Unemployed Babysitter Duped in Sacha Baron Cohen Film

Fans of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” have raised over $50,000 for Jeanise Jones, the grandmother who appears in the film and is hired to babysit Borat’s daughter, Tutar, after Jones revealed that she was compensated only $3,600 for her time.

According to a GoFundMe started for Jones by her pastor, she did not realize she was filming a “Borat” movie — and is currently unemployed due to pandemic-related downsizing at the Oklahoma City insurance company where she’s worked for three decades.

In a series of interviews published this week, Jones and her pastor Derrick Scobey explained just how convincing Sacha Baron Cohen and co-star Maria Bakalova were.

Jones appears in two scenes in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” in which Borat asks Jones to look after his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (Bakalova) and brings her into her home wearing a ball and chain. She then learns that Tutar is to be married to an older man — all of which Jones believed to be real and part of a documentary that would only be seen overseas, according to Showbiz911. She later appears in a scene in which Borat comes back to see Jones and asks if she’ll be his “new Black wife.”

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“I’m thinking she’s really from a third-world [country] and that’s how they treat women and young girls,” Jones told Variety. “I [suggested they] take her to a school and let her observe girls in a classroom who can read and write just like boys. I was thinking it was real, so my thought was they were going to take her to see different things and make it so she could be able to stay in the United States. Evidently, that’s not what happened.”

Jones lives in Oklahoma City but did not film the scene inside her own home, instead flying to Washington state, where the movie was filmed. But she also has not seen the finished film and only recently learned after seeing the trailer how her scenes were actually used.

She said that she spent weeks worried about Tutar and is now relieved that she was not really in danger. “I would give her a hug. I’m glad to know she’s not really in that situation. I hate to hear of anyone in that situation,” Jones told Variety. “Him, I don’t know. It wasn’t real, so I would shake his hand and say, ‘You got me.'”

Though The New York Post quoted Jones as feeling “betrayed” by Baron Cohen and the filmmakers, she clarified to Variety that she felt safe while filming her scenes and blames herself for not fully reading the contract she was asked to sign.

Representatives for Amazon and Baron Cohen did not immediately reply for a request for comment.