Episode 73 -- Roy Cohn with Matt Sitman (Part 2)
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 662 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The second part of Moira and Adrian's long conversation with Matt Sitman of Know Your Enemy on Roy Cohn -- lawyer to various deplorables, closet case and mentor to a young Donald Trump. This part deals with Cohn's return to New York, his work for the mob, the Church, and the drugs.
Here are the books and documentaries we discuss in this first half:
-- Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn (1988)
-- Ivy Meeropol (dir.), Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn (2019)
-- Matt Tyrnauer (dir.), Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying cannot pass a piss-a-ant anti-discrimination bill through city council. |
| 0:12.1 | Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows, who have zero clout. |
| 0:20.3 | And that is what makes Cone dying of AIDS so striking, right? |
| 0:26.2 | I don't even know what the right word uses. |
| 0:28.6 | The thing he spent his whole life telling himself and other people he was not. |
| 0:33.5 | He found himself in the same lot with all the weaklings he was looking down upon. |
| 0:44.3 | Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. |
| 0:45.9 | And I'm Laura Dodd again. |
| 0:47.1 | Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right. |
| 0:50.9 | So today we are coming at you with part two of our opus, our epic investigation of Polestar of Human Evil and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn. |
| 1:02.9 | So Adrian, when we left off, we had gone through Roy's biography and we had left off with the end of his time working for |
| 1:13.9 | Senator Joseph McCarthy. |
| 1:15.8 | That's right. |
| 1:16.7 | So we left off essentially with the last relatable thing that Roy Cohn was able to sneak into a long |
| 1:22.3 | career of evil, which was that he had a boyfriend that he wanted to gallivant around Europe with, |
| 1:28.8 | and when the army tried to, you know, cock-block him, basically, |
| 1:32.6 | he was like, well, I'm going to do the next obvious thing and accuse you of communism. |
| 1:37.6 | It did not go well. |
| 1:39.3 | And it really ended with a kind of curbi enthusiasm moment |
| 1:42.9 | where just like everything just blows up in |
| 1:45.3 | his face, well, the relatable moments will now sort of vanish from Roy Cohn's biography to be |
| 1:51.3 | replaced by mountains and mountains of cocaine. I mean, who among us has not called Senate hearings |
... |
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