America’s top courtroom sketch artist has lifted the lid on what celebrities are really like on the stand – and why they can look unrecognizable in print.
Jane Rosenberg, a veteran sketch artist who has spent four decades capturing trials in New York City, admits in her upcoming memoir that she was left with ‘nightmares’ over her work being scrutinized by millions.
In particular, Rosenberg’s attempt at drawing Tom Brady during his 2015 ‘Deflategate’ trial became infamous as critics panned her for making the handsome quarterback look like he was ‘put in one of those machines that crushes cars’.
The artist was also noted for her apparent distaste at Harvey Weinstein‘s ‘toned down’ look at his MeToo trial, as she famously drew the movie magnate and his baby blue jumper as a looming figure with a gigantic belly.
In 2015, social media flew into a frenzy after court sketch artist Jane Rosenberg drew this image of Tom Brady, which she said left her with ‘nightmares’ after it was panned online
Brady was hauled into federal court over alleged ball tampering, but it was his depiction in courtroom sketches that drew the most attention
Although Rosenberg had a front-row seat to some of the most famous trials to go through New York in decades – from John Gotti to Martha Stewart – it is her history with Tom Brady that captured the most headlines.
Rosenberg lifted the lid on this trial, and more, in her memoir ‘ Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist’, which is out on August 13th.
TOM BRADY
The legendary quarterback ended up in federal court in New York in 2015 after being suspended for four games by the NFL over the ‘Deflategate’ ball tampering scandal.
Rosenberg admits she ‘knew almost nothing about Brady’ other than that he was a football player. That in itself should have been a ‘bad omen’, Rosenberg says.
‘As people would not tire of pointing out once the furor began, this was an extremely good looking man, classically handsome with his jaw strong and cheekbones high,’ she writes.
‘But I couldn’t quite work out what defined him, what made that face Tom Brady… he was all chiseled and cropped, smooth and almost disconcertingly featureless. This should have been a warning sign’.
Rosenberg said she struggled to draw Brady because of his ‘excessively long forehead’, ‘disconcertingly featureless’ face, and his ‘squashed and bunched’ eyes and nose
Once Rosenberg arrived at the courthouse, the scale of the story dawned on her.
Her sketch of Brady was part of a wider scene showing numerous people in court but once the picture went viral, everyone just zoomed in on Brady – which Rosenberg blamed on his face being ‘out of proportion.’
Brutal memes put the sketch in place of ET on the poster for the classic movie, or the face in The Scream, by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
After facing backlash over her efforts, Rosenberg agreed to an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, which her son convinced her would be ‘great for your brand’.
But Rosenberg said felt ‘terrible’ about the attention as she took her work seriously, and this sketch obviously wasn’t up to her own high standards.
She took to heart the mean emails that flooded her inbox and so sat at home drawing Brady over and over again ahead of his next court appearance, which was two weeks away.
Rosenberg said the difficulty capturing Brady’s visage came from his ‘excessively long forehead’, ‘disconcertingly featureless’ face, and his ‘squashed and bunched’ eyes and nose.
Rosenberg issued a public apology and confessed that she had ‘nightmares’ about her viral fame, but thankfully her second effort passed without so much attention.
After facing severe backlash over her first Brady sketch, Rosenberg’s second effort passed without so much scrutiny
Rosenberg says: ‘Studying Brady in detail helped me understand where I’d perhaps gone wrong with the first sketch.
‘If you look at that famous face without a helmet or those dark stripes the football players wear under their eyes, you can see that it’s actually a little out of proportion.
‘The forehead is long, excessively so, giving the impression that the eyes, nose and mouth are all closer than they should be. Those main features are a little squashed, all bunched together in the middle of the face’s elongated oval’.
Matters worked out better for Brady and his suspension was overturned and he was allowed to compete in the rest of the 2015 season.
Rosenberg lifted the lid on this trial, and more, in her memoir Drawn Testimony
For Rosenberg the histrionic online response to her work has become part of the job which began back in 1980 when, as a struggling young artist, she attended a lecture given by courtroom artist Marilyn Church.
Inspired, Rosenberg decided to give it a go for herself and even though her first case was a grisly murder, she was hooked.
‘I fell in love with the rush of getting a fast-moving scene onto the page in time to illustrate the news that evening,’ she writes. ‘I quickly got the bug of work that is unpredictable, often stressful but never less than interesting’.
Rosenberg settled on pastels rather than pencils or watercolors because they ‘simultaneously soften and accentuate the moments of emotional gravity’, and said she was soon commissioned by the likes of CNN, CBS and Reuters, which today is her most regular client.
The calls can come with hours’ notice or days, but they invariably end with Rosenberg standing outside a courthouse in the early hours, often in the freezing cold, waiting anxiously to get her seat in court.
She starts every day with 20 minutes of transcendental meditation at home, followed by another 20 minutes somewhere else, usually in court, to deal with the stress.
Nowadays she takes a photo of her sketches on her phone and sends them to her editors, who blast it out for the world to see.
In the book, Rosenberg says that the mob trials of the 1980s gave her the best on-the-job training imaginable – nobody more than John Gotti.
JOHN GOTTI
The trials of mobster John Gotti captured America’s attention – which Rosenberg said gave her the best on-the-job training imaginable
The sketch artist said drawing the infamous gangster was ‘like a one-man study in power, intimidation and self-confidence’
Rosenberg covered all four of Gotti’s trials, including the three where he was found not guilty, earning him the name ‘Teflon Don’.
Gotti was a ‘peacock’ and dressed in $1,800 suits with a pocket square always in place – he complained when the press said his suits were only $1,000 as it made him look cheap.
For Rosenberg, she said it took a good number of sittings to nail Gotti’s ‘distinctive crown of his hairstyle’ and his ‘studied arrogance’, as she describes it.
She observed the way his eyes would ‘follow people around the courtroom, boring into a witness or beadily observing his lawyers at work’.
‘Drawing Gotti was like a one-man study in power, intimidation and self-confidence,’ Rosenberg writes
Sometimes Gotti would crack jokes, like when he looked over to the sketch artists and gestured to his face in mock indignation for making it look like he had a double chin.
His biggest trial took place in 1992 and saw devastating testimony from Salvatore ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano, the Gambino family’s second in command and Gotti’s stand-in.
Given the jury tampering in previous trials, the jury had been locked away and Gotti’s usual pitbull of a lawyer had been barred from representing him.
According to Rosenberg, Gotti’s constant grumbling and audible protestations seemed to say: ‘Can you believe this guy?’
‘For a man so used to controlling events, to be fawned over by his mafia associates…it must have been a form of torture to sit and watch his fate decided by others’, Rosenberg writes.
Gotti was found guilty – and Rosenberg was there to capture the moment.
HARVEY WEINSTEIN
The MeToo trial of Harvey Weinstein in 2018 was a seminal moment with Rosenberg’s unflattering sketch of the movie mogul making headlines of its own
When capturing the disgraced producer’s image, Rosenberg wrote Weinstein’s ‘unmistakable core’ was his ‘prodigious belly, accented even further by the pale blue sweater covering it’
The arrest of Harvey Weinstein in 2018 was a seminal moment for the MeToo movement and he became the highest profile target to be charged with sex crimes.
Rosenberg managed to get a front row seat to the arraignment in May of that year and recalled how the movie producer ‘lumbered in’ to the courtroom at the Manhattan Criminal Court with no warning.
‘This once untouchable figure seemed confused and disorientated, as if he had wandered onto someone else’s movie set,’ Rosenberg writes.
‘No lawyer was guiding him and he veered off script, away from the bench and towards the rows of seating. Toward me’.
Rosenberg managed to stifle her surprise at this unexpected full frontal view of Weinstein and drew him as a looming figure with a gigantic belly.
In the book she says that the ‘unmistakable core of the sketch is Weinstein’s prodigious belly, accented even further by the pale blue sweater covering it’.
Once the sketch was published it sparked a debate online, with some saying it captured some kind of truth about Weinstein – while others felt it showed that ‘the sketch artist doesn’t like him.’
Rosenberg says that some speculated that it summed up his ‘foreboding physical presence’ or the ‘sprawling physique he used to prey upon so many women’.
Others thought it made Weinstein look like a ‘pantomime villain’.
In fact, Rosenberg says that she just recorded what she saw, and feeling he seemed ‘larger than life’ – literally in this case.
DEREK CHAUVIN
The 2021 trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd was, for Rosenberg, the ‘most distressing experience’ of her career
The sketch artist said that she waited for Chauvin to turn his head towards a witness to capture the killer cop’s side profile
The 2021 trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin over the death of George Floyd was, for Rosenberg, the ‘most distressing experience of my career’.
Seeing the video of Floyd being choked to death played back frame by frame with an expert describing the exact moment when life left his body was more troubling than terrorism cases.
Rosenberg writes: ‘I had never encountered anything as devastating as the evidence presented in this case.
‘Never had to watch a man’s life be snuffed out, a horror movie that kept playing on a loop as each new witness took the stand.
‘Rarely have I seen such inhuman cruelty as was displayed by Chauvin’.
Rosenberg writes that she had ‘never felt so distressed’ as watching the body of Floyd being loaded into the ambulance – he was already dead but still handcuffed.
The trial also presented another challenge for Rosenberg: covering it remotely via a live feed due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Rosenberg decided to give herself more artistic license than usual with her images and so when witness Donald Williams pointed at Chauvin, she waited for a moment when the former cop turned his head so she could see his side profile and used that.
According to Rosenberg, she needed both of them in the frame to capture that moment, and so that was her sketch.
WOODY ALLEN AND MIA FARROW
In her early career, one of Rosenberg’s most high-profile gigs was the trial involving filmmaker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow
Rosenberg said Woody Allen was practically a living ‘caricature’, while Farrow was the hard one to sketch due to her ‘pale, almost translucent skin’
In 1993 Rosenberg covered the explosive custody battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.
Her sketch shows them in court with a lawyer between them: Farrow stares ahead meekly while Allen has his arms folded and exudes frustration.
Rosenberg writes that Allen was a ‘dream subject’ because in real life he appeared ‘exactly as he had in all his movies’.
‘The same slightly disheveled figure, talking with his hands, resting his chin on steepled fingers and with the shoulders permanently on the verge of an exaggerated shrug,’ she writes.
‘He felt almost like a caricature of himself’
Farrow was the hard one to sketch due to her ‘pale, almost translucent skin’.
Farrow’s ‘gorgeous, apple-shaped cheeks’ were tricky and Rosenberg had to draw lightly so as not to destroy her ‘ethereal beauty’, she writes.
Uma Thurman presented a different challenge in 2007 when she faced her stalker in court. The stress and harsh lighting of the court made Rosenberg worry that people would think her sketch of the actor would make her look ‘haggard’.
MARTHA STEWART
When it came to drawing Martha Stewart, Rosenberg said the lifestyle innovator’s ‘signature bob and smooth cheeks’ were tricky to draw
According to the artist, Stewart demanded that she be made to look ‘prettier’ in her courtroom drawings, and was known for being ‘particular about how she was being depicted’
Martha Stewart also gave Rosenberg difficulties during her 2004 trial for securities fraud and obstruction of justice.
Stewart’s ‘signature bob and smooth cheeks’ were tricky to draw and the work wasn’t helped by Stewart being ‘particular about how she was being depicted’.
Rosenberg writes: ‘She asked one of my colleagues if she could make one of her drawings ‘prettier’ and another how clear her skin was looking through the binoculars she was using to follow proceedings’.
From her side view, Rosenberg didn’t always get to see Stewart’s face but when she did it showed her ‘vulnerability, as if this megastar was eager to please and anxious about what people would make of her’.
Other celebrities who found their way into Rosenberg’s sketch pad include Eddie Murphy who was sued by his ex manager in 1987. Murphy had fun with it and drew Rosenberg on a Post-It note.
When Robert De Niro gave evidence against the director of an art gallery accused of fraud, Rosenberg was pleased to capture what the New York Times called a ‘look of befuddlement or bemusement’ that was characteristic of the Raging Bull star.
Seeing Mick Jagger in court was the only time that Rosenberg has been star struck and the two drawings she has are ones she will never sell.
In the book Rosenberg laughs at how sketch work has been considered a dying art for longer than she’s been working, with people mourning its demise since the 1950s.
While cameras record the moment, courtroom art ‘conveys a dynamism and depth of human emotion that is an artform and storytelling medium on its own’, Rosenberg says.
She writes: ‘I wouldn’t swap the stress and adrenaline for a quiet life, even on the days when my fingers left chapped and bleeding after hours of digging around in my pastel box.
‘It’s simply too much fun having a (hopefully) front row seat to the most momentous trials.
‘It is drama in its purest form, the basis for the best work I could have dreamed of doing when I first started flipping through art books as a kid’.
