Who Is Roy Cohn? Donald Trump’s Lawyer In The Apprentice Explained

The Apprentice explores Roy Cohn’s mentorship of a young Donald Trump, leading audiences to wonder about the real-life figure behind the movie. Directed by Ali Abbasi, the 2024 film follows Trump in the 1970s and ’80s as a young businessman with high hopes for his future. He begins the film sitting at a high-end social club, admiring the great and wealthy men around him, and it isn’t until meeting Roy Cohn that he acquires the tools perceived as being necessary to become like them. Cohn and Trump are played by Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice’s cast.

Abbasi’s movie introduces Roy Cohn as a cold, calculating, practically devil-like figure who teaches Trump how to mingle with the wealthy and survive in a cutthroat business world. By the point audiences are introduced to Cohn, he’s already an established figure socializing with the likes of Tony Salerno, Rupert Murdoch, and others. When fact-checking The Apprentice, what’s perhaps most shocking is that this character who feels larger than life, like a soulless force of evil that couldn’t possibly exist, is portrayed with authenticity and candidness that’s almost completely true to the real person.

Roy Cohn has also been portrayed by Al Pacino in the HBO miniseries
Angels in America
.

Roy Cohn’s Life Before Meeting Donald Trump

Roy Cohn Is Best Known For The Lavender Scare & Work With Joseph McCarthy

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, actor Jeremy Strong referred to Roy Cohn as “one of the worst human beings of the 20th century.” In a period of history riddled with two world wars, the invention of nuclear weapons, and much more, Roy Cohn is still regarded as one of the most vile, twisted figures of the past 100 years, and much of this comes from the period of his life prior to meeting Donald Trump. As explained in the film, Roy Cohn was a prosecutor known for using dirty tactics to bend the law, from extortion to whatever unethical maneuver one can imagine, to win his cases.

In his early 20s, Roy Cohn rose to prominence during the Second Red Scare in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The trial suspected the Rosenberg couple of being spies for the Soviet Union, and Cohn earned his reputation for forcefully prosecuting the pair and later convincing Judge Irvin Kaufman to have the Rosenbergs executed. It’s commonly considered that while the Rosenbergs were guilty, the trial was tainted by Cohn’s misconduct and that the pair should not have received the death penalty.

Recognition from the Rosenberg trial saw the young Roy Cohn rising quickly, finding himself next as the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy was widely known during this period for his anti-Communist agenda, with the pair working extensively to oust Communists and Soviet allies from the US government. This led to an alternate campaign known as the Lavender Scare, where McCarthy and Cohn sought the removal of homosexuals from government positions, believing them to be more susceptible to Communist manipulation.

For the following two decades following his resignation from Joseph McCarthy’s staff, Roy Cohn began his career as a lawyer in New York City. As McCarthy’s reputation deteriorated in the years following their work together, Cohn still prospered as a fixer for wealthy New Yorkers, ranging from Mafia figures like John Gotti and Carmine Galante to George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees.

Roy Cohn Was Donald Trump’s Lawyer From 1973-1985

Cohn Became Trump’s Lawyer & Mentor For Over A Decade

As depicted in The Apprentice, the Justice Department pressed legal action against Donald Trump for his role in the Trump Corporation’s discrimination against African American tenants. Buildings owned by Trump and his father, Fred Trump Sr., were accused of making false claims of “no vacant” to potential Black tenants, resulting in Trump and Cohn’s initial union. The means of their meeting are likely fictional and dramatized for the film, but they importantly demonstrate the strategies used by Cohn to assist Trump in the case, beginning a partnership that would last over a decade.

Roy Cohn continued to work with Donald Trump on various cases, along with personally mentoring the future president. He’s shown in the movie to be instrumental in establishing the political and business tactics that Trump would continue to implore for subsequent decades, as well as introducing him to future allies like Paul Manafort, Rupert Murdoch, and more. The film highlights certain lessons that Trump notably obtained from Cohn in real life, such as constantly being on the attack, never admitting defeat, and that winning is all that matters, even at the cost of human decency.

Roy Cohn Was Disbarred For Unethical Conduct

Roy Cohn Wasn’t Able To Practice Law In His Final Days

Not long before his death, a panel of the New York State Supreme Court finally disbarred Roy Cohn for decades of unprofessional and unethical conduct in the courtroom, a fact that The Apprentice only quickly mentions. Specifics of said unethical conduct included the misappropriation of clients’ funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will. It’s stated that, in 1975, Cohn entered the hospital room of an unconscious man, forced a pen into his hand, and added marks to a paper in order to change a will (via The Washington Post).

The disbarment came at the end of a four-year battle between Cohn and the state of New York, and he likely was only found guilty of a small fraction of his actual crimes. Regardless of the mass evidence stacked against him, Donald Trump still attended the panel to serve as a character witness in favor of Cohn.

Roy Cohn Died In 1986 From AIDS

Roy Cohn Refused To Admit He Had AIDS Until His Death

One of the most disturbing aspects of Roy Cohn’s true story, even beyond the Lavender Scare, is the man’s vapid, outward homophobia. Despite that, Cohn was a closeted homosexual. He was a profoundly twisted man who felt the need to publicly deny his homosexuality until the day of his death, claiming on national television that he had liver cancer instead of AIDS. The scene in The Apprentice where he’s shown on TV is beat-for-beat taken from a real-life segment that’s worth watching for anyone interested in studying his horrifying character.

Roy Cohn’s sexuality and partners have long been speculated on, but the most important aspect of his life is that he did, in fact, contract AIDS at some point in the 1980s. This led to years of him appearing sickly, leading to public pressure on him regarding the matter, which he consistently denied while supposedly receiving experimental drug treatment. Trump’s opinion and involvement on the matter might be original to The Apprentice, but the Roy Cohn aspect of the story is told accurately.