Documentary spotlights infamous fixer ‘Roy Cohn’

Matt Tyrnauer readily allows that “Where’s My Roy Cohn?,” his new documentary on the closeted disbarred lawyer who mentored Donald Trump, is completely one-sided.

“Of course it’s biased. It’s a movie, I’m a filmmaker and not doing a news segment on NBC Nightly News or for the paper of record. There is no pretense it would be called fair and balanced,” Tyrnauer, 51, said.

It was Donald Trump’s plea, not a question, that gives this doc its name, uttered when the president learned of Mueller’s inquest. It’s never mentioned in the film.

Cohn (1927-1986) became famous as a Cold War warrior, the prosecutor who in 1953 sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for espionage.

A year later he became notorious, a reviled, controversial figure, as chief counsel to Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings and in McCarthy’s witch hunt for suspected Communists and gay men in the State Department.

As a lawyer for New York’s five mafia families and Donald Trump, Cohn was revered for his willingness to do anything to win.

Tyrnauer notes how Cohn, disbarred just weeks before he died from AIDS-related complications, went to his grave denying he was gay. A cousin and the boyfriend Cohn met at Studio 54 confirm his homosexuality.

“One of his cousins says, ‘He was a self-hating Jew,’ and on his face (due to botched plastic surgery) it was obvious he was a self-loathing gay man. Look at the context,” Tyrnauer said.

“Cohn came of age when there was no such thing as ‘out.’ To be a gay or lesbian, to be anything other than heterosexual, was to be at a huge disadvantage. It was a horrible time for that. Many people were forced to lead double lives.

“That’s not the issue with Roy Cohn. It’s hypocrisy and misuse of power throughout his whole life. He was a part of what was called ‘The Lavender Scare’ in the State Department. In collusion with (FBI chief) J. Edgar Hoover — a gay man — they were going after gay people, smearing their reputation, getting them fired — and the hypocrisy of that is world class and should be called out and remembered.

“He continued to his death from HIV-AIDS to deny he was homosexual. Yet he got special treatment from the Reagans, who were very guilty of ignoring the AIDS epidemic but giving special treatment for their friend Roy Cohn at the National Institutes of Health.”

(“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” opens Friday.)

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2n8kxbu