Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn reveals the full, richly controversial character of Roy Cohn, American lawyer, cultural icon and early proponent of a national Republican revolution that began with Ronald Reagan and lead directly to the presidency of Donald Trump. Roy Cohn is a name synonymous with ruthless social division, demagoguery and the politics of paranoia, but for director Ivy Meeropol (granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), he is the moral cypher who argued relentlessly for the execution of her grandparents. Stark contradictions formed the core of Roy Cohn’s personality. A bellicose public figure, he was a closeted homosexual who persecuted gays until he met his death from AIDS in 1986 following a wide ranging, sexually active, club hopping lifestyle; he was a Jewish Democrat who mentored a young Donald Trump on the ways of hypocritically managing the world as one wishes as opposed to how one should–proof again that the past is mere prologue. (Woodstock Film Festival)