‘I didn’t finish it yesterday,” says Jane Rosenberg, leaning forward over her drawing board, filling in the edges of a vast scene.
She is like any other artist, back at the easel the next morning, although hers is at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. And Rosenberg is not quite in the same seat. “Look how far away I am,” she complains. “Pretty bad.”
Maxwell’s chief attorney, Bobbi Sternheim, sweeps by now in a long grey blazer, her collar turned up beneath it, her short grey hair side-parted in a flamboyant sweep, looking as always like the leader of a punk rock band. “Hello, Jane,” she says as she passes.
Rosenberg is the Holbein of the Maxwell trial, a court artist capturing the principal characters and sending out scenes of the unfolding drama that reach a massive audience. You see her pictures everywhere. “I’m going viral,” she says one evening, when one of her pictures from a pre-trial hearing bubbles up again on social media. Maxwell had turned in her seat that day and begun to sketch Rosenberg, who of course began sketching Maxwell sketching her. It was like a rap battle, with pencils.
Maxwell’s family, recognising the power of a portrait, have hired their own courtroom artist to knock up a sympathetic picture for their website realghislaine.com. But Maxwell herself has begun to look to Rosenberg, waving to her in court. “It’s been wonderful for me,” Rosenberg says. “I’m so happy, I want to keep it going. I need to see her face.”
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The only time the courtroom artists can reliably see Maxwell from the front is during a seven-second period at about 8.30am when she walks into court through a heavy door to the left of the judge’s bench, flanked by two young women in suits who are US Marshals. Both wear their long brown hair pulled back: one in a bun while the other favours a ponytail.
This is the critical moment for the artists. Usually, Maxwell walks in and hugs every member of her legal team. Her attorneys come around the desks to greet her, folding her in tight embraces while the artists sketch furiously. They have so little time to get it down. “Was ponytail in front?” one of the artists asks urgently one morning after Maxwell made her entrance. “Or was it bun?”
Before their chief subject appears they are like coiled springs, working nervously. Today Rosenberg is toiling over the one she made earlier, showing the full field of battle: the jurors in their seats, a key witness on the stand, the judge in her black robes, Maxwell’s lawyer Laura Menninger in full flow and, looking on from the far left of the picture, the defendant herself. The cross-examination will resume again today, so the picture should still work.
“If she walks in, let me know,” Rosenberg says, and I promise to do this, then get distracted. “Heads up,” she says a moment later, and here comes Maxwell in an olive jumper and black trousers. She nods and waves to her sister Isabel, who stands in the front row of the gallery with two guys in grey suits. More lawyers, presumably.
Rosenberg jumps up with a blank sheet on her board, which she lays across the back of a reporter’s seat. The journalist is not happy. “I have a job to do too,” she snaps, so Rosenberg advances a few rows forward and stands in the aisle, her board balanced on the end of one of the pews. Maxwell is in her usual seat now, against the wall, talking with one of the two grey men, who leans towards her over the rail. After a while he sits down and the other grey suit gets up to chat to Maxwell.
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Rosenberg gets the scene down in broad strokes: Maxwell with one hand on her knee, a man leaning over the rail. She sits back down and makes a more precise outline with a fountain pen. The scene has vanished but she has it more or less.
Then a reporter taps one of the grey suits on the shoulder and the fellow identifies himself as Kevin Maxwell. It is the first time her brother has been in court: none of us recognised him. “Was that Kevin talking to him, or the other guy?” Rosenberg asks.
What she means is: which man have I drawn? She studies her sketch. “It was Kevin,” she says. The other fellow is bald and heavier set. She shrugs. “It’s not a face profile anyway.” It’s just the back of his head.
She does Kevin’s spectacles as we see them from the back, a small white line where the light hits the glass, a sliver of blue for the edge of his mask as it wraps around the side of his face, and white lines for the mask’s strings. She tilts her head on one side, unsure of whether to add more. Then she flaps her hands at the picture, as if to say: “It is done.”
Rosenberg grew up on Long Island in New York and studied art at the University of Buffalo. It was the early 1970s and “abstract art was very in”, she tells me. “My teachers always discouraged me from doing realism. They said it’s very passé.” She did it furtively. “I was a closet portrait artist,” she says. “I would sit at home with a mirror and draw myself.”
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After college she wound up scratching out a living as a street portrait artist. She would spend her summers at Cape Cod, drawing tourists in charcoal, and her winters studying at an art school in New York City. She did pavement pictures too, usually one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. “People would throw money in a hat.”
Once, she did the Vermeer on a sheet of paper laid out on the pavement and one of her parents’ friends bought and framed it. When she started to make it as a court artist her parents would sometimes call to say: “Ellie still has your Vermeer hanging on her wall.”
Rosenberg ended up in court at the age of 30, after hearing a lecture from a courtroom artist. “I said: ‘I could never do this, I’m not fast enough,’ ” she says. But things were “really rough financially”. Pitching up at the Manhattan criminal court in the 1980s, she covered a murder case featuring a stagehand who attempted to rape a violinist and then threw her from the roof of the Metropolitan Opera House.
Oh my God, I say. “Oh my God?” she replies. “I have had 41 years of that.”
Rosenberg’s picture was used by NBC, and after that “they kept showing me”, she says, making the national network sound rather like a SoHo gallery. She is now with Reuters. “I always think I’m going to be done,” she says. “For many years I thought cameras will be in court any day.”
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But they are still barred from the federal courts, leaving it up to Rosenberg and her comrades to provide the visual record of the Maxwell trial. On the day I sit beside her she finishes the Kevin and Ghislaine picture and the big cross-examination scene, then dashes out to photograph and send them from a press room. “What should I draw now?” she asks on her return.
It’s only 11am. Kevin? She does him, plus four other pictures, including one of the witness weeping on the stand that seemed almost instantaneous. Then her husband drives her back uptown: she will be in bed by eight, she hopes, and on her way again before dawn the next morning to get her spot and start drawing Maxwell all over again.
Rosenberg first clapped eyes on her last summer, when Maxwell appeared via a video link at a bail hearing in New York, charged with aiding Epstein in his abuse of minors — charges she denies. “She had her hair pulled back, she didn’t look so great,” Rosenberg says. “I think she looks not so bad now. Her hair’s fluffy and shiny, she’s all happy and smiley and kissy with her lawyers.”
In one pre-trial hearing she spoke to Rosenberg. “Long day, isn’t it?” Maxwell said to her during a break. “Now we are like buddies,” Rosenberg says. And there was the famous sketch-off.
Alone in a lift with Maxwell’s lawyer, Sternheim, I ask if they would consider releasing Maxwell’s sketch of Rosenberg. “We’re not releasing anything,” she replies and smiles tightly. But I wonder if the request gets back to the defendant.
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On Tuesday afternoon this week I’m in court again, sitting next to the reporter Lucia Osborne-Crowley. We’re in the same row as Rosenberg. The judge has summoned all the lawyers to discuss something in private. Alone at the defence table, Maxwell turns in her chair and begins to sketch Rosenberg. Rosenberg jumps up and begins to sketch her. Osborne-Crowley and I start whispering about it. Then Maxwell’s head turns and she looks right at us. “I think she’s sketching us,” Osborne-Crowley says. “She’s got such intense eyes.”
Her face is mostly obscured by her black mask: her dark eyes flick up at us and then down to the pad on her lap as she works. It’s oddly unsettling, like the moment in a play when a character you were watching breaks out of their scene and looks right at you.
