Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn said "Cohn really paved the way for Trump and set him up with the right people, introduced him to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—the people who helped him get to the White House." Where's my Roy Cohn? director Matt Tyrnauer told Esquire that he "was very aware of [Cohn's] relationship with Donald Trump and the fact that he had a huge influence on him. Having done a lot of research and now made a film, I think that that's actually understating it. I think Roy Cohn created a president from beyond the grave". Vanity Fair'''s Marie Brenner wrote in an article about Cohn's mentorship of Trump: "Cohn—possessed of a keen intellect, unlike Trump—could keep a jury spellbound. When he was indicted for bribery, in 1969, his lawyer suffered a heart attack near the end of the trial. Cohn deftly stepped in and did a seven-hour closing argument—never once referring to a notepad… When Cohn spoke, he would fix you with a hypnotic stare. His eyes were the palest blue, all the more startling because they appeared to protrude from the sides of his head. While Al Pacino's version of Cohn (in Mike Nichols's 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America) captured Cohn's intensity, it failed to convey his child-like yearning to be liked." The late Wayne Barrett, who spent dozens of hours interviewing Cohn and Trump beginning in the 70s, told Democracy Now! in 2016: "He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk... yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald's mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York." Media portrayals A dramatic figure in life, Cohn inspired several fictional portrayals after his death. Probably the best known is in Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991), which portrays Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he denies dying of AIDS. In the initial Broadway production, the role was played by Ron Leibman; in the HBO miniseries (2003), Cohn is played by Al Pacino; and in the 2010 Off-Broadway revival by the Signature Theatre Company in Manhattan, the role was reprised by Frank Wood. Nathan Lane played Cohn in the 2017 Royal