Two Roy Cohn Documentaries This Fall, One from Granddaughter of Convicted Spies He Sent to Electric Chair

Trump with mentor Roy Cohn

By Roger Friedman

I told you last week that I’d seen the new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Matt Tyrnauer’s incendiary film, which debuted at Sundance, lays out the evil path taken by Donald Trump’s mentor and advisor, the same man who became infamous as advisor to Senator Joe McCarthy on his Communist witch hunt of the 1950s.


Cohn, who destroyed lives and lied about his own life, was the inventor of a kind of obfuscation, a political sleight of hand, that diverted attention from his own incredible misdeeds. Instead of running from scandal, he ran toward it, like a building on fire, and pretended it wasn’t there.

Tyrnauer’s movie will be released by Sony Pictures Classics on September 20th, one week before the start of the New York Film Festival. There will be some build up before that date, so audiences will flock to art houses.

But now we know that soon thereafter, in the New York Film Festival, will come another Cohn doc I told you about last year. Ivy Meeropol is the filmmaker granddaughter of convicted and executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Her film about them, “Heir to an Execution,” was illuminating and should be seen by everyone.

Read the rest here. .