Ken Auletta: 'The worst human being I've ever profiled was Roy Cohn'
Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is on trial for sex crimes this week in Los Angeles. The 70-year-old is already serving a 23-year prison sentence after a jury convicted him of rape in New York, and reportedly at least 100 women have accused him of rape or sexual assault.
On a recent episode of "Influencers with Andy Serwer," the New Yorker staff writer Ken Auletta compared Weinstein to another "evil" yet talented person he profiled — the late Roy Cohn, a key figure during the Red Scare and a former mentor to Donald Trump.
“The worst human being I've ever profiled was Roy Cohn,” said Auletta, who recently wrote, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence." Auletta added: “Flawed, he was beyond flawed. I mean, he was evil in some ways, and yet he was brilliant.”
Cohn, a notoriously unethical lawyer, had ties to both Donald Trump and his father, Fred. When the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit in 1973 accusing the Trumps and their real estate business of refusing to rent to Black people, they hired Cohn to defend them. Cohn, who came to the fore as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist hearings in 1954, eventually helped the Trumps reach a settlement in which they admitted no wrongdoing.
Cohn's other clients included the five major crime families and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Cohn was also charged with a number of crimes himself during his career, including bribery, extortion, blackmail. In 1986, a Manhattan court disbarred Cohn after he tried to swindle a dying client out of his fortune. He died of AIDS-related complications just over a month later.
“Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government's legs, hire Roy Cohn,” Auletta wrote in his 1978 profile, “Don't Mess With Roy Cohn." “He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.”
Auletta describes Weinstein in similar terms. The Miramax co-founder produced a number of modern classics such as "Good Will Hunting," "The English Patient," and "Pulp Fiction."
“He had a real talent, Harvey could read a script. He was much, much more knowledgeable about movies than the so-called suits of Hollywood Studios,” Auletta argued. “He really knew movies and read scripts and read books and was a brilliant marketer.”
Still, he said, “The evilness of what Harvey did to women. It's incomparable.”
Dylan Croll is a reporter and researcher at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @CrollonPatrol.
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