Daughters’ film honors famed defense lawyer

NEW YORK (AP) — They grew up in a home like no other — where bullets arrived in the mail and where their father went to the basement to open packages he feared could hold explosives.

That was life for the daughters of the late civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, whose clients included a wide range: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and John Gotti. Now his daughters are telling their stories and bringing him back to life on film for a new generation.

Emily and Sarah Kunstler made the 85-minute film, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” to tell their father’s story through the eyes of young girls who sometimes could not understand his representation of society’s most despised.

They weren’t always sure how to answer taunts of schoolmates who wanted to know why their father was representing villains accused of shooting at police officers or raping a Central Park jogger or committing terrorism.

“We were obsessed. We wanted them to be innocent,” said Emily, 31, said. Sarah, 33, agreed, citing the times protesters gathered outside their home. “You wonder why is this so important that it’s worth doing this to our family.”

By his death in 1995, Kunstler’s booming baritone voice and unmanaged hair were expected in New York courthouses whenever the most unsavory of clients needed a lawyer willing to take up a seemingly lost cause. A surprising amount of the time, Kunstler ended up winning.

He was an ordinary New York City lawyer in the 1950s. His life changed when he traveled to the South in 1960 to join the civil rights movement with the American Civil Liberties Union.

He became famous when he represented anti-war protesters arrested at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, a group that became known as the Chicago 8.