HBO's new documentary on Roy Cohn, McCarthyite lawyer and Donald Trump mentor, gets a trailer
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Bully. Coward. Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn is directed by Ivy Meeropol, which is notable considering her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were prosecuted by Cohn in the early ‘50s and sentenced to death based on his fierce recommendation. In this new HBO documentary about the infamous, notoriously cruel lawyer, Meeropol grapples not only with his history as a key proponent of McCarthyism, but also his queasy legacy in modern politics and conflicted sexuality.
John Waters, Alan Dershowitz, and Nathan Lane each appear in the below trailer, which also includes an interview with Tony Kushner, the Angels In America playwright who won a Pulitzer in part due to the play’s complex depiction of Cohn. Al Pacino portrayed him in HBO’s excellent 2003 adaptation of the play.
Per the trailer, the documentary will also explore Cohn’s mentorship of a young Donald Trump, who’s proven time and again as president just how much he’s internalized Cohn’s own refusal to ever apologize or admit fault. A 2018 piece in the New York Times reports that Trump, in a fit of frustration, asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?,” a quote that will no doubt haunt one’s viewing of Bully. Coward. Victim.
Check out the trailer below.
Bully. Coward. Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn premieres on HBO on June 19.
19 Comments
Obligatory:
I hope this is better than that trailer. My BS detector is flashing.The use of “victim” in the title had better be ironic, because Cohn got only a fraction of the payback he deserved.The guy who says in essence “it’s true he was evil BUT there are a hundred other things that explain him” also makes me fear this is BS pop psychology tour. Evil was the deep, underlying motivation for Cohn, and they had better not downplay his fundamental cruelty in the name of nuance, because he was not a nuanced man.The appearance of Alan Dershowitz as a talking head is a warning sign.
He knows how the Cohn association damages Trump, and no way is
Dershowitz speaking candidly about anything affecting Trump.The brief bit about how he was the guy who made the mob leave you alone completely softsells Cohn’s relationship with the mob. Cohn went far beyond the role as honest broker or defender of mob leaders. He was an active conspirator in their violent schemes, providing advice on how to commit crimes, which is the line lawyers cannot legally cross.What I suspect is this ends up being as much an apology for the people who hired Cohn as anything else, or a weak attempt to let him off because other people were also bad. NYC and DC elites are filled with people who want to justify deals with the devil on the grounds that it’s the only way to get things done, or say they’re helpless because everyone else sucks. Which of course is nonsense. Trump didn’t get anything of value from using Cohn to pay off the mob. Trump would have made more money in the end by turning his back on Cohn and finding a different place for all of the money he got from his dad.
Dershowitz is a goddamn rapist for fuck’s sake
https://apnews.com/dc4a9e03da4c4e7382eece16998b6239
It would be pretty hard to make Cohn look even the least bit sympathetic. The guy was a fucking monster.
And if that were to be attempted, I don’t think a grandchild of the Rosenbergs is gonna be the one to do it.
The appearance of Alan Dershowitz as a talking head is a warning sign. He knows how the Cohn association damages Trump, and no way is Dershowitz speaking candidly about anything affecting Trump.While I can’t help but think a grandkid of the Rosenbergs is unlikely to be too kind to Cohn, the fact that Dershowitz is asked to talk is… intriguing and scary, to say the least, given his proven dedication to all things wrong in the last 20 years or so.
James Woods played him in an HBO movie too. Yikes.https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103973/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_89
As was the case with ‘White House Down,’ Woods probably thought he was playing the hero.
I hope they rebroadcast these things in October when it will do some good.
I am hoping this isn’t “everybody is the hero of their own story and nobody thinks they are doing evil” because that is complete and utter garbage. Cohn, Manafort, Barr, they are knowingly dedicated to evil.I’m watching that show “Quiz” and the show keeps trying to make the main characters look like they don’t know they’re cheating to the point where the actions they took make zero sense. People lie cheat and steal, get used to it.
A lot of people who do those things are good at convincing themselves it’s for good reasons, though.
there is a difference between good reasons and good reasons. For Cohn “I want more money” and “because it will hurt people and that’s how I feel important” were good reasons, thinking everybody is in this together and we all want what’s best for everyone and the planet is how greenies keep walking into buzzsaws, it’s like a muppet massacre sometimes.
It’s not just the subject who can get exonerated, it’s the people who were partners. So maybe this goes deeper than the trailer — trailers can be misleading, for better and worse.
But if it doesn’t dig into the ways the powerful in NYC and DC knew how evil he was and were still complicit, it will be a failure. Nancy Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, the Archdiocese of NYC — they knew him and they still sought him out when they had other options. If it comes down to they just wanted to get things done, and leaves out they wanted Roy Cohn because they liked his irreducable malice, it will have failed.
Ronald Reagan was the head of the Screen Actors Guild who sold everybody out to the HUAC, that’s how he met Nancy Davis, they were evil from the start.
Please add McConnell to your list, please.
McConnell is evil as hell, but he isn’t somebody who organically came into specifically Trump’s orbit and was hired by Trump. I meant more the Bannons, Conaways, Millers, etc., of the world, those whose specific predilection for crapulence brought them next to the shitpile in chief.
Valid point
From Cohn’s Wikipedia, a Roger Stone quote:“Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around.”You have to admire the stupidity (and heinous) of this sentence.