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“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” is collecting nominations on the pathway to Oscar season. The film just earned two bids from Cinema Eye Honors, an awards group that honors nonfiction films and series as voted on by programmers and experts. The HBO doc, which chronicles the life of Roy Cohn, former attorney to Donald Trump, earned bids in the categories of Outstanding Broadcast Film and Outstanding Editing in a Broadcast Film or Series. In both cases it was nominated in a field of five, beating out tough competition, which could make it one of the films to watch in the upcoming Best Documentary Feature race at the Oscars.

Seehbo’s Roy Cohn documentary ‘Bully. Coward. Victim.’ is a uniquely personal look at Trump’s former lawyer

Directed by Ivy Meeropol, “Bully. Coward. Victim.” is a sprawling look at Cohn’s impact in the legal world, delving into...

“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn” is one of multiple projects tackling the life of Roy Cohn, but few are as personal as director Ivy Meeropol‘s HBO documentary. Meeropol is the granddaughter of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage and put to death on Cohn’s recommendation. “Bully. Coward. Victim.” features Meeropol talking to her father, Michael Meeropol, about his experience advocating for his parents.

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The documentary explores the many twists and turns of Cohn’s life, not only encompassing his work in the Rosenberg trials but his association with various influential figures from the ’50s through the ’80s like Joseph McCarthy, President Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch and future President Donald Trump. Interspersed throughout the film we check in on Ivy’s conversations with her father...

Roy Cohn had always been a haunting presence in filmmaker Ivy Meeropol’s life, but the full extent of his existence was only apparent after she watched Meryl Streep play her grandmother, Ethel Rosenberg, in HBO’s 2003 “Angels in America.” “I think seeing the film made me finally connect emotionally to my human story, and this was a story I needed to tell,” Meeropol says. “I could do something no one else could because of my family history.”

The result is the documentary “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn,” which debuts June 19 on HBO.

Cohn was one of the most ruthless lawyers in American history — working with Sen. Joe McCarthy during the anti-Communist Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Cohn was also responsible, with McCarthy, for creating the Lavender scare of the ’50s, leading the government to repress and purge itself of homosexual people. And he pushed hard for...

Even when Ivy Meeropol was just a little girl, the boogeyman always had a name in her house: Roy Cohn. To the rest of the world, Cohn was the unscrupulous power broker who had first risen to notoriety as the assistant prosecutor responsible for the executions of “atomic spies” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. To Meeropol, born more than a decade after the fact, Cohn was the man who effectively murdered her grandparents long before she would ever have a chance to meet them.

From a young age, Michael Meeropol taught his daughter about how her family was torn apart for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Russians, and perhaps also about the ruthless, pug-nosed, pit bull of a lawyer who all but did the deed with his bare hands. Now a 51-year-old filmmaker, Meeropol even opens her latest documentary with black-and-white home video footage of her childhood, in which Michael...