Staring the devil in the eyes
Roy Cohn helped send her grandparents to the electric chair. She gets her revenge on film.
Imagine running into the monster that has haunted your nightmares since you were a child — and feeling sorry for him. That’s a little how filmmaker Ivy Meeropol felt back in 1987 when she visited Washington, DC to view the AIDS Quilt memorial and the first panel she spotted was dedicated to Roy Cohn. The infamous lawyer—who gained notoriety as the chief counsel to communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and then represented a string of mob kingpins before succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1986—was also the bête noire of Meeropol’s family. Cohn is the prosecutor who convinced a federal judge in the summer of 1953 to execute Meeropol’s grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after they were convicted of spying for the Soviets.
Meeropol was born a decade and a half later, but her childhood was dominated by the Rosenberg trial — her father Michael fought for years to try to prove his parents’ innocence and a line drawing that Picasso did to raise money for that effort hung over the mantle in the living room of her childhood home in western Massachusetts. As a student at Sarah Lawrence, she used to nurse revenge fantasies about Cohn and David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg whose testimony helped convict the couple, calling her father up and half-joking, “Let’s get him.”
So, on that trip to the nation’s capital, when she and her father stepped on the National Mall, they were stunned to see a simple black panel with red yarn stitched to write out “Roy Cohn: Bully. Coward. Victim,” not knowing that Cohn had been a closeted gay man who had succumbed to AIDS. “Both of us were shocked. It was chilling, to feel this strange combination of grieving for all these people who’ve died and ‘Look at that bastard.’ Not an easy feeling to reconcile.”
But it led Meeropol to start thinking of Cohn as a more complex character, it turned a very clear story “on its head in a way that I couldn’t have predicted.” So, when Cohn’s name started resurfacing with the 2016 election of his most famous client, Donald Trump, who careened his way to the White House using the bare-knuckle tactics that Cohn had taught him decades earlier, she felt motivated to make a documentary about Cohn’s complex character: Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, which airs on HBO on Thursday, June 18.
It wasn’t an easy decision—Meeropol’s 2004 documentary, “Heir to an Execution” focused on her grandparents’ case and was an emotionally draining experience. “That had been a dark and upsetting and confusing at times, though also cathartic, to make that film. I started to wonder, because Roy is so connected to them, am I similarly going down a path like that?’ She admits, “I should really hate this guy, but at the same time, I’m fascinated and I want to know where that hatred comes from.”
And she was determined to be fair, to describe the demons that drove Cohn and to display his lighter side, while also showing how he played a Dr. Frankenstein role in molding Trump into the monster who overcomes his master. When he was just a boy, Cohn’s uncle, who ran the only major Jewish-owned bank in in the country, was the only one of the heads of the banks to go to jail at the end of the Depression. Roy grew up visiting Bernie Marcus at Sing Sing, though his parents told him that it was a camp and not a prison. Later, when he found out the truth, he was convinced that his uncle was innocent and that he’d been railroaded because he was Jewish, deciding at an early age, “No one’s going to fuck with me,” explains Meeropol.
Learning about that difficult childhood and even hearing him try to explain himself in old interviews made Meeropol feel empathy for him while still understanding what an evil person he could be. “That he was once a little boy who had to hide a lot of things about himself.”
She also discovered many more details about Cohn’s life as a deeply closeted gay man, vacationing in Provincetown, tenderly caring for friends who were dying of AIDS. “That showed me he had some capacity for love,” says Meeropol, though Cohn strongly opposed gay rights legislation. The film includes never-before-seen photos of Cohn lounging on the beach and hanging out with gay friends in the resort town, where he was neighbors with John Waters and Norman Mailer, the side of his life he tried so desperately to hide from the world and his conservative allies.
“What could his life had been like if he had found some support somewhere,” says Meeropol. “It doesn’t mean I forgive him but I can see what happened to him, anyone who loathes himself that much, it’s going to come out. That’s what helped turn him into the monster he became.”
She also uncovered new details about Cohn’s relationship with Trump, with whom he first worked in 1973 when he aggressively defended the Trump Organization after a federal indictment for housing discrimination. To fight that case, Cohn taught the young Trump three key lessons that have stayed with the real-estate developer throughout his ascent to power: Always attack, never apologize or admit guilt, and always counterattack.
Through his close ties to the Reagan White House, Cohn was able to get favors done for Trump, including the nomination of Trump’s older sister Maryanne Barry to a federal judgeship in 1983. Cohn worked every angle, calling Reagan officials and getting members of Congress to help in the effort. John LeBoutillier, a young Republican from Connecticut who had been elected to the House of Representatives just a few years out of college, tells Meeropol how he was contacted by Cohn’s law firm, asking him to write a letter of recommendation for Barry. “They asked me to write this letter and they keep pushing it,” LeBoutillier tells Meeropol. “I’ve never been asked to do such a thing in my life.”
Soon after she was named to the bench, Trump publicly bragged about the favor. In newly-unearthed footage of Trump at a National Fitness Foundation ceremony, the future president smirks and thanks Reagan for his sister’s judicial nomination.
Cohn also pushed the Reagan White House to consider letting Trump handle nuclear arms negotiations with the Soviet Union, despite his complete lack of foreign policy experience. Trump bragged about his negotiating skills to a reporter who was a close source of Cohn’s, telling her: “You know who wants me to do this — Roy.”
Soon, the ambitious student leapfrogged the teacher, with Trump cozying up to Reagan while Cohn got sick with AIDS—and was soon abandoned by the president and by Trump, who dropped him as his lawyer. “Cohn introduced Trump to Washington,” says Meeropol, “but before long, he was left behind. There is Trump standing with the Reagans on the receiving line and Cohn is being pushed along like every other average Joe visiting the White House.” When Trump stopped using Cohn as his lawyer, “it hurt Roy,” former Washington Post reporter and editor Lois Romano tells Meeropol.
Though it’s not the main focus of this documentary, Meeropol also revisits the Rosenberg case, including an eyebrow-raising interview with Alan Dershowitz, who briefly worked with Cohn during the 1982 trial of socialite Claus von Bülow. Dershowitz tells Meeropol that Cohn admitted to him that “we tampered with the evidence in order to persuade the judge and jury” of the Rosenbergs’ guilt and claimed, “we frame guilty people.”
Dershowitz believes that there was a “plot afoot from the highest levels of government to frame Julius Rosenberg, adding that Ethel Rosenberg was “not guilty.” He asserts: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a miscarriage of justice that parallels the Rosenberg case in my lifetime.” The Rosenbergs’ sons appealed to President Obama near the end of his term, calling on him to formally exonerate Ethel, but it never happened.
“People assume it was my revenge film — and there is some aspect of that,” admits Meeropol. “But I don’t feel like I need to take revenge on Roy Cohn, I want to use this to go after Trump.”
