It’s difficult to think of the notorious lawyer and unscrupulous power broker Roy Cohn as a victim. A coward and bully, most definitely, but a victim? Over the course of his long career, Cohn wielded a talent for victimizing others, no more spectacularly than during the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviets when the then 23-year-old assistant U.S. district attorney finagled the testimony that led to the couple’s conviction and execution in 1953.

So why did the granddaughter of the Rosenbergs, filmmaker Ivy Meeropol, who had examined her grandparents’ legacy in 2004’s Heir to an Execution, choose to turn her camera on the man responsible for her family’s greatest sorrow? She never quite answers that question satisfactorily. Still, her interweaving of her father Michael Meeropol and his brother Robert’s campaign to clear their parents’ names with an anecdotal portrait of an unrepentant Cohn offers a different perspective from documentarian Matt Tyrnauer’s more comprehensive Where’s My Roy Cohn? (2019).

Particularly fascinating are the odd connections that linked the Meeropols with Cohn over the years. In one moving scene, the director and her father recall how on a visit to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the first panel they saw was Cohn’s, stitched with the epitaph “Coward Bully Victim.” “It was like a Holy Shit moment,” says Michael. And then there is the interview with journalist David L. Marcus, Cohn’s cousin. As he describes the shame Cohn felt at having an uncle, Bernard Marcus, sent to Sing Sing prison for financial crimes in the 1930s and his determination never to become a victim, Marcus recognizes the irony of his talking to the granddaughter of the couple whose execution, at the very same prison, Cohn had engineered.

Meeropol’s documentary covers much the same territory as Where’s My Roy Cohn? (the conviction of the Rosenbergs, the McCarthy hearings, Cohn’s law practice in New York, his relationship with Donald Trump, his life as a closeted gay man, his disbarment, and death from AIDS), but Tyrnauer’s film digs deeper into Cohn’s childhood, especially his relationship with his mother, his business dealings, and his disbarment.

However, it’s the sometimes eye-opening, jaw-dropping stories her interviewees divulge that bring Cohn—and the documentary—so vividly to life. Journalist Peter Manso, who interviewed Cohn for Playboy magazine, pulls out the bills that the wealthy Cohn never paid: a $1,500 debt for laundry, $10,500 owed to the 21 Club. Scribbled across many of these bills are Cohn’s instructions to his secretary not to pay. The result was that he was constantly being sued, lessons obviously well learned by his mentee Trump. Gossip columnist Cindy Adams, who planted stories for Cohn in the New York Post, recalls going into Cohn’s townhouse to repossess unpaid Indonesian artwork for her dealer friend.

In the gay resort town of Provincetown, MA, director John Waters would see Cohn in Front Street bars with hustlers and “that always irritated me.” There Cohn would host restaurant dinner parties for 25, each place setting accompanied by a candy dish full of cocaine and a Tuinal pill in case a guest became too high. His Provincetown landlord, artist Anne Packard, remembers the lawyer as always being surrounded by people, never alone except when he went swimming.

Despite these colorful stories, Cohn remains an inscrutable and complex figure. “It became clear,” says Manso, “that my stereotyping of Roy Cohn as evil was inadequate. Yes, evil, but he was more than that.” Meeropol’s film captures some of Cohn’s contradictions, but it also reflects poignantly on the damage he left behind. In a striking scene, David L. Marcus notes to his cousin Alice that every family has a Roy Cohn. “Oh, I hope not,” she responds. “The world would be a terrible place.”