In the '60s and early '70S, attorney William Kunstler seemed to be everywhere that mattered: on the bus with Mississippi Freedom Riders; defending the Chicago Eight in the aftermath of bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention; representing prisoners who took over Attica; negotiating a truce between American Indian radicals and the government at Wounded Knee. Famous for his long hair and loquacious summaries, Kunstler was a counterculture hero.
The clients he chose to defend in the late '70s and '80s, however, turned him from hero to pariah in many people's eyes: high-profile cases where he stood alongside accused cop-killers, gang rapists, terrorists, and mobsters. It was during this period, when Kunstler worked from his Greenwich Village townhouse, that his two daughters from his second marriage - Sarah and Emily, then in their teens - had to deal with the fallout from their father's controversial work: ridicule at school, protesters on their front stoop.