When Donald Trump is relaxed — or as relaxed as anyone can be while on trial for 34 felonies for falsifying corporate records — you can see his socks. It's a thin black fabric, probably cashmere, and you only glimpse it as he leans back in his chair, his calves showing over the elastic seam.
I know this thanks to Isabelle Brourman, a visual artist who sketches the theatrical aspects of Trump's hush money trial from the second row of the courtroom, dressed in striking outfits that she combines. the day testimony. Ms. Brourman lives for these little moments — the kind of details that can reduce even a boastful former president to a mere mortal: someone whose skin turns red when he's tense, bringing out an orange-brown color on his forehead, and whose lips, sour he purses when he's angry, casting a shadow over his chin.
She takes it all in, and all of this in turn forms the basis for her work, which has appeared in New York magazine. But rather than capturing key moments or producing realistic representations of the day's events, Ms. Brourman's expressive images traverse space and time. She uses watercolors, colored pencils, graphite, glitter pens; sometimes she looks for texture, or scribbles words in corners. In her portraits of Mr. Trump, he is both frenetic and hulking; her Stormy Daniels, in the shade of blue and purple, looks emotionally bruised.
“The other artists are so professional,” she told me recently. “I'd like to say I'm unprofessional.”
I got to know Ms. Brourman because, while much of the rest of the country has been preoccupied with the Trump trial itself, I have been fascinated in recent months by the world of courtroom artists. drawing the Trump trial – a world she is both part of and not part of.
Ms. Brourman, 30, has spent the past year living uneasily with three veteran artists who sit in the front row of the courtroom and produce images for Reuters, CNN and The Associated Press, which are then reproduced around the world, as they have done. for more than four decades. These artists are legendary in the world of the New York courts: three women over fifty years old, among the last practitioners of a dying craft, whose perspectives are suddenly very important. They are the eyes of the public during the most important political trial in American history, in a rare space where cameras are not allowed.
Ms. Brourman calls these women “the sketch ladies,” and they exist because of a legal vestige that largely bans cameras in New York and federal courts. The judge has made a small exception in this case, allowing a small group of photographers to briefly capture Mr. Trump at the start of each day – in which he poses and puts on a reliable frown. Which leaves the rawer, unwritten moments entirely to the artists.
I first sat behind the sketch ladies during the E. Jean Carroll sexual assault and defamation lawsuits, and I was fascinated by watching them at work. Dressed in dark-rimmed glasses and draped scarves, with chalk marks on their fingers, the women seemed at odds with the stiffness of the room; sometimes their scratching on paper was the only sound when I was so tense I was holding my breath.
I watched as Christine Cornell, 69, contoured Mr. Trump's hair with a pale yellow pastel color, giving it a hint of lemon meringue. I saw Jane Rosenberg, 73, use small binoculars to look at the side of his face and carve deep shadows into his cheeks. Elizabeth Williams, who wouldn't tell me her age other than to say she was the youngest of the trio, scribbled with an ink pen as Mrs. Carroll tearfully testified, producing an image that reminded me a bit of Munch's 'The Scream'.”
There was something intriguing about the fact that the public viewed the Carroll trial – a trial about sexual violence, misogyny and power – exclusively through the eyes of older women. Could they, I wondered, see themselves in her, in a way that would imbue their sketches of Mrs. Carroll with just a little more determination? Is it just me, or did that Trump sketch look a bit mocking?
Then came the hush money trial. One memorable sketch, made by Ms. Rosenberg during Mr. Trump's arraignment, ran through the cover of The New Yorker – the first time a courtroom drawing has appeared there. Some compared Ms. Rosenberg's Trump to a gargoyle; others to the Grinch. Was his exaggerated pastel pout some kind of statement?
Each of the women is emphatic: No. Their job is to draw what they see. No editing, no hidden messages, just the facts, in ink and chalk.
In fact, they say drawing Mr. Trump isn't really that different from any other day: They've previously sketched murderers, rapists, mafiosi and even Mr. Trump himself, when he was in court for a sports antitrust case in the 1980s ( he owned a football team in New Jersey). Mrs. Rosenberg was only inches away Osama bin Laden's personal secretary, who was on trial for terrorism, when he lunged at the judge and had to be dragged away by guards. Ms. Cornell was asked on a date while drawing another terrorist, the one convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (She declined.) The women have been called in to repair hairlines and smooth wrinkles.make me look sexy”, as Donald Trump Jr. asked in his father's civil fraud case.
“It's a strange life,” Ms. Cornell said when I visited her home in New Jersey.
The next time I saw Ms. Cornell was in the ladies' room on the 15th floor of the New York State Supreme Court building in Lower Manhattan, where she had placed a picture of Ms. Daniels on the radiator and noted that she had seen her “ too beautiful.” I learned that this is where she and the other artists escape during breaks to photograph their sketches – she on the radiator; Mrs. Rosenberg over the garbage can.
The women work at a breakneck pace, sometimes making six or seven sketches a day, often with only minutes to complete each one, and are under enormous pressure not to miss a single critical moment. None of this lends itself to particularly in-depth reflection, which is not really the intention of the work.
Yet there is also inevitably a level of interpretation required: displaying facial expressions, sometimes lip-reading, deciding on which moments to zoom in or not – like, for example, Mr Trump yawning at the start of the courtroom. “I was a little hesitant,” Ms. Rosenberg told me. “I thought, that's a bit mean, maybe rude. But I signed it.”
These are all small acts of subjectivity; small decisions that contribute to the way we understand the dynamics of a place that can sometimes feel as sensational as it does mundane.
And even the most impartial artist makes choices. Say, to Mr. Trump's “accordion hands,” as Ms. Williams does, or his “caterpillar” eyebrows, which Ms. Cornell likes to draw. Ms. Rosenberg's Trump tends to be angular and scowling, while Ms. Williams's is more cartoonish and confused.
But when the sketch ladies try to downplay the significance of these choices, Ms. Brourman plays them up. She doesn't pretend to be objective, and her interest in the courtroom stems from something personal: her own lawsuit against a former college professor, whom she accused of sexual abuse.
That experience led her to the defamation trial that pitted Johnny Depp against Amber Heard, where she modeled herself on a professional courtroom artist she met there to to get a seat. Then she drew that of actor Danny Masterson rape conviction, then the defamation lawsuit against E. Jean Carroll, and finally Mr. Trump. For her, this is high art, the kind she would like to see in a gallery or museum, but it is also catharsis, even healing. The professor in her case, she said, shared many characteristics with Mr. Trump.
Ms. Brourman's foray into courtroom sketches may be temporary, but she quickly recognized that there are simultaneous dynamics at play in every trial. There is the main performance, or what is done in front of the jury. Then there are sideshows, which the artists watch, sometimes literally, magnified. (Ms. Brourman told me how, at the same time that former Trump aide Hope Hicks broke down in tears on the stand, she was studying the face of one of Mr. Trump's lawyers through her binoculars. She saw him talking to his client : “It is well.”)
Finally, there is interpretation. Ms. Brourman described watching Ms. Daniels walk out of the courtroom after her testimony, and how just before she turned to exit through a side door — and within clear view of Mr. Trump — she lifted her chin ever so slightly. “I thought, damn, I know what that is: that's pride.” she said, standing up in the coffee shop where we met to mimic the move. She was not so much bearing witness as attributing meaning, something that is crucial to her work and at odds with that of the other artists.
This sense of court as theater, and the attention Mrs. Brourman approximation has captured her, has not always sat well with her colleagues. They initially had their doubts about her and excluded her from their negotiations for front row seats. But the relationships were, like the courtroom itself – which Mr Trump complained'to freeze' early on – have warmed up slowly. “She brings a different perspective,” Ms. Cornell said.
I wondered if that perspective had made them think more about their own country. Was it possible to be a woman in their field, where so many men are on trial for doing a lot of bad things to women? not involve themselves even a little?
“I think we're so focused on trying to get these drawings done,” Ms. Williams began, “that our personal feminine view of …” She trailed off.
“Well, the men are gone, so I can't compare our art,” Ms. Cornell said. (Others can and have: During Mr. Trump's arraignment in Miami last year, media outlets the drawings placed side by side of Mrs. Rosenberg and Mrs. Williams with that of Bill Hennessyanother accomplished artist, whose sketch of Mr. Trump some found too flattering.)
“He's a third rail,” Ms. Williams said. “Everyone has an opinion.”
Except apparently the women who draw him.
But there is also something refreshing about that. The world is often male by default; politics and the law even more so. There's something unique, even fun, in knowing that this little corner of the universe – temporarily elevated to new heights of importance – has been so thoroughly co-opted by the female gaze that the women themselves don't even notice.