Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist
“Watching the trials, ‘Is drama in its purest form . . .’”
The title, Drawn Testimony, draws the reader into the front row of the courtroom to the most notorious criminal trials of this century. It spans the four-decade career of the top courtroom sketch artist. Each trial reads as a true crime drama, the suspense building up until the judges’ decision. Her pastels have captured the Mafia crackdown of the 1980s and 1990s, the fallen titans of Wall Street, the sex abusers of the #MeToo movement, the police brutality culminated with Black Lives Matter, and the infighting of Trump world.
“I have filled the pages of countless sketchpads with faces that span the human experience: of survivors of rape and sexual assault breaking down as they recall the worst day of their life . . .”
According to the author an impressionist sketch can capture the dynamism and human emotion that a camera would not. She was surprised what people are capable of doing to themselves and to others when motivated by money, power, greed or just hatred. Watching the trials, “is drama in its purest form . . .”
Rosenberg seeks to capture the emotion or gesture that stands out. For example, Ghislaine Maxwell’s “bob of dark hair, the angular slant of her slim features, the almost dainty hand gestures as she stroked her hair . . .” But the sketch artist was taken by surprise when she saw Maxwell staring at her intensely. She realized the significance of that moment, one face studying another.
“Then I took in that she had a pencil in her hand, and, through the binoculars I sometimes use, that a likeness of my curls and glasses was starting to appear on the paper in front of her . . . and soon we were matching each other pencil line and pastel stroke.” This strange and one of her best drawings went viral.
Rosenberg sometimes finds herself adopting the same pose as the accused, especially the crinkling around or the lines across the cheeks . . . “a subconscious aid to the process of trying to put together all the moving parts of human expression on my sketchpad.”
One day, she was called into the courtroom to witness the execution of John Evans, who had murdered a shopkeeper in front of his daughters. Her drawings of Evans with a guard tying an electrical transmitter fixed to his shaved head is one of the most revealing. Although she was supposed to be detached, this execution was hard to hide her emotions. “As I worked, I had the horrible realization, one never repeated, that I was drawing a person’s eyes at the last moment they would ever see light.
Rosenberg has sketched some brash personalities during her career but “none of them loomed larger than the mafia men who dominated the New York crime landscape in the 1980s, filling page after page in the formative period of my career as a court artist.” One of those men was John Gotti, a crime boss accused of gambling, drug trafficking, and stolen goods. By threatening industries, they extracted sums. The mob lawyers insisted that there was no mafia and no crime.
She tried to show the evidence of a witness and the whispered conversations in her sketches, to tell the story without words. “The stories flowing from the witness box were remarkable, but the picture I really wanted was Gottti: how the always confident, often demonstrative boss would handle the spectacle of his most senior lieutenant turning rat in front of him, . . . gesturing, grimacing and most of all staring at Gravano.” The criminal trials of the mafia bosses were the best education in ambition, betrayal, and bloodshed.
The artist couldn’t help herself staying detached when she was called to sketch the trial of Susan Smith. She’d been found guilty of murdering her two young sons by driving her car into a lake and watching them drown. “There were moments when I couldn’t stop myself joining the wave of tears that seemed to lap onto the courtroom. . . . I would pull myself from the sketchpad, knowing that even one teardrop could smudge and wreck something I had spent an hour working on.”
“In it she is leaning to the side . . . choked with tears . . . and beginning to break down, her hand held to her heart . . . the loose flow of the lines reflecting the uncontrolled emotion of the scene.”
This is the nature of the courtroom; the evidence is weighed, and the worst of humanity is revealed in raw form. However, “no drawing of a banker giving evidence about fraud will ever come close to the agony of a mother who has their child, then come to face to face with the murderer in the confined space of the courtroom.”
The next chapter is about the Boston marathon bomber and the birth of terrorism in the USA. When sketching the trial of Bin Laden, for the first time the artist felt in danger. She had to dive for cover, clutching her pastels. One of the defendants suddenly jumped out of the jury and made a break for it. “Later, I was able to complete a sketch of this moment and another of him, leaping out of the jury box.” However, she was disappointed that she missed the one where he was tackled by a court officer and led out of the courtroom.
However, she did numerous drawings, having heard from emotional witnesses who survived. “In one sketch, two emergency workers lean over a cluster of bodies . . .” It might take decades before the public will find out the fate of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the perpetrators. “Drawing him taught me that . . . it may show hardly any traces of real human feeling at all.”
Read the rest of the chapters for a riveting, compulsively readable book about the most notorious criminal trials through the artist’s sketches. “And for as long as we are needed, the small band of court artists—summoned at the last minute and scrambling for a good seat—will keep working, making permanent the expression that crossed a face for only a moment; recording history as it unfolds. And for as long as I am able, I will be among them.”