Who was Roy Cohn? All about the closeted gay lawyer who mentored Donald Trump

The name of Roy Cohn will forever live in infamy, but those who aren’t students of LGBTQ+ history may not know why. Cohn is in the spotlight again thanks to the new film The Apprentice, with Jeremy Strong as Cohn mentoring a young Donald Trump, played by Sebastian Stan. Yes, as if the damage Cohn did to many Americans with accusations of communism in the mid-20^th century wasn’t enough, he helped unleash Trump upon the world. Cohn was gay but denied it to the end of his life. He didn’t come out even in The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, published in 1988, two years after his death from AIDS complications, but in posthumously written sections, coauthor Sidney Zion confirmed that Cohn was indeed gay. Here’s more about the man Politico once called “a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe.”

Who was Roy Cohn? And how did he rise to prominence?

Roy Marcus Cohn was born in 1927, the only child of a wealthy New York City couple. His mother, Dora Marcus, came from a banking family; his father, Albert Cohn, was a judge. Albert Cohn was involved with the Democratic Party, but Roy would become famous for his work with a Republican U.S. senator, Joseph McCarthy.

Roy Cohn earned a law degree from Columbia University at age 21. He was already cutting corners, however. “He had accelerated his education by using programs designed for returning war veterans, although he reportedly dodged the U.S. military draft in 1945 by having himself nominated three times by a friendly congressman to attend the United States Military Academy (West Point) and repeatedly failing the physical endurance exams,” according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

He soon became a federal prosecutor, and he helped prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish couple convicted in 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage — they were accused of providing information on nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. They were executed in 1953, the first American civilians to suffer that penalty for espionage. Many historians and political commentators have questioned their guilt; some have concluded that Julius was most likely guilty, but Ethel was not. David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, gave damning testimony about her to Cohn, and he later said Cohn persuaded him to lie under oath. Greenglass’s testimony helped save his wife, Ruth, from prosecution in the case.

The Rosenbergs were members of the Communist Party, an affiliation that was widely despised in mid-20^th-century America. Cohn next set about rooting out communists as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which McCarthy led. Cohn, however, was considered the brains of the effort.

McCarthy and Cohn accused many people who were simply left-wing of being communists, and they assumed all communists were involved in subversive activity. Some of their targets had never joined the U.S. Communist Party, some had repudiated it, and at any rate, not all party members wished to help the Soviet Union bring down the U.S. government. Nevertheless, many of the accused saw their careers destroyed.

Also, by implying that many supposed communists were gay, McCarthy and the ever-closeted Cohn contributed to the Lavender Scare alongside the Red Scare, driving many LGBTQ+ people out of government jobs. “He and McCarthy were also going after gay people in the government,” Matt Tyrnauer, director of the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, told NPR in 2019. “Cohn himself was a closet homosexual, yet he and McCarthy conspired to ruin many gay people’s lives because they were accusing them of disloyalty. And this hypocrisy and this bare-knuckle win-at-all-costs philosophy — which, I will add, he passed on to his great student, Donald Trump — is what caused people to consider Roy Cohn to be an evil person.”

In 1954 the Senate censured McCarthy for his wildest allegations, in addition to other improprieties, and he died in disgrace in 1957. Cohn moved on in his career but remained a loyal supporter of the senator. “I never worked for a better man or a greater cause,” Cohn wrote in his autobiography.

The post-McCarthy era — and Donald Trump

Cohn’s career took him back to New York City, where he practiced law for “a client list that ran the gamut from the disreputable to the quasi-reputable,” as The New York Times put it, until he was disbarred shortly before his death for numerous violations of legal ethics. He represented such famous and infamous clients as mobster Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and socialite Claus von Bulow (although not in either of Von Bulow’s trials for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bulow).

But according to many accounts, Trump was one of Cohn’s favorite clients. They met in 1973, when Trump and his father were facing a suit from the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging that they refused to rent apartments to Blacks at the many New York properties they owned or managed. Cohn advised the Trumps to fight back and contended the Justice Department “did not file a lawsuit” but “slapped together a piece of paper for use as a press release.” The Trumps eventually reached a settlement with the DOJ, agreeing not to engage in racial discrimination but never admitting they had.

Cohn and Donald Trump continued a close personal and professional relationship up to Cohn’s death. Early on, Cohn pegged Trump as a promising young man, saying, “This kid is going to own New York someday,” according to the Times. The lawyer assisted Trump in many of his real estate ventures and in his prenuptial agreement with first wife, Ivana Zelnickova. Cohn’s lobbying of Reagan administration officials in the 1980s may have been a key factor in the appointment of Maryanne Barry, Trump’s sister, to a federal judgeship — although even those who cite Barry’s connections note that she had formidable skills (she died last year). Trump and Cohn dined together often, hobnobbed at Studio 54, and talked on the phone constantly. Perhaps most important for Trump’s political career, Cohn introduced him to Republican activist and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone, another Cohn protégé, who became a frequent Trump surrogate in the mogul’s first presidential campaign.

Solidifying his reputation as a gay homophobe, Cohn even worked against LGBTQ+ causes, such as a civil rights ordinance in New York City, and frequently used antigay slurs. Along the way, he remained a mover and shaker in New York society, faced indictments for various crimes but was always acquitted, and often failed to pay his taxes and other bills. In addition to denying being gay, he denied that he had AIDS, insisting until his death that his disease was liver cancer.

Other media portrayals

Where’s My Roy Cohn?, the documentary released in 2019, takes its title from a statement attributed to Trump, who has found his subsequent lawyers wanting, or else they’ve turned against him, like Michael Cohen. “This film connects a direct line between Roy Cohn’s belligerent, boorish and obstructionist ways and our current, less eloquent nightmare,” that being Trump, Guardian critic Jordan Hoffman observed. That same year, HBO had a documentary on Cohn and his many misdeeds, Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. It was directed by Ivy Meeropol, a granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The words “bully,” “coward,” and “victim” are on a panel dedicated to Cohn on the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

James Woods played Cohn in the 1992 HBO movie Citizen Cohn, directed by Frank Pierson and adapted from Nicholas von Hoffman’s Cohn biography. The fictionalized film portrays Cohn on his deathbed, being visited by ghosts from his past. Woods, in a bit of irony, is now a huge Trump supporter. Trump was not depicted in the film.

The most famous media portrayal of Cohn is another fictionalized one — in Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play, Angels in America,which deals with AIDS, homophobia, the Rosenberg case, and much more. Ron Leibman played Cohn in the original 1994-1995 Broadway production, and Nathan Lane took the role in the 2018 revival. Both actors won Tony Awards. In the 2003 HBO miniseries of Angels in America, Al Pacino played Cohn. He won a Golden Globe and several other awards.

“To someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men,” Cohn says in the play. “But really this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying can’t pass a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout. Does this sound like me … ? No. I have clout. A lot.” That springs from Kushner’s imagination, but it’s easy to believe Cohn said or thought something very much like that.

Now we have Jeremy Strong as Cohn in The Apprentice. “Strong does a magnetic impersonation of the Roy Cohn who turned bullying into a form of cutthroat vaudeville (and a new way to practice law), putting his scoundrel soul right out there, busting chops and balls with his misanthropic Jewish-outsider locker-room wit,” Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety. “He’s not just cutting, he’s nasty. And that’s to his friends!”

Sounds about right.