From Diddy to Trump: The NY courtroom artist who's sketched them all
From Mafia bosses and Hollywood predators to crypto criminals and presidents, New York courtrooms have seen it all.
But unlike New Zealand courtrooms, news cameras are not allowed in The Empire State's judicial precincts.
That means there are two main ways for the news to report inside the courtroom of some of the biggest criminal and civil cases ever – one of those methods is typing out court reports (or for the old school journos, filling out notepads with shorthand).
The other option is creating courtroom art.
Kiwis have probably seen a lot of these from our reporting over the years of US court cases. These cartoon-styled images have to do many things at once. Capture a moment. Convey a feeling. Show a story. All with the same journalistic rules of fairness, accuracy, and balance.
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A courtroom sketch by Jane Rosenberg. (Source: 1News)
It's a craft that few ever take their hand to, and even fewer perfect. But one of the country's most prolific and well-respected courtroom artists is Jane Rosenberg.
I caught up with her after court finished for the day during the trial of music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, known as P Diddy.
"I did all the big cases there ever were here in New York," she told me.
"John Gotti — mafia, Martha Stewart, police brutality cases, all the terrorism cases we've had. And all the MeToo cases. I did Cosby two times; I did Harvey Weinstein. R Kelly and now P Diddy — and Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein," she listed.
That list grows longer by the year – Rosenberg has also covered Donald Trump's trials, crypto-boss Sam Bankman-Fried, and Sarah Palin's defamation case against the New York Times.
A court sketch from Donald Trump's trial. (Source: Breakfast)
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Around 45 years after creating her first piece, she told me it was a career she fell into — almost by accident.
"I was always an artist — I was a starving artist, drawing Rembrandt and Vermeer right on the sidewalk with a hat out for money for the 10 years after I graduated college. I didn't know how to make money,' she said.
"And then I went to a lecture by another courtroom artist at the Society of Illustrators. And I said 'oh, this looks like so much fun. I'd love to do that. I just don't know if I'm good enough'."
A lawyer friend took her to night court – not far from where we chatted – and bombarded the court officers with questions. Where do the artists sit? What do they bring?
Eventually they told her to come back in a week, and they'd let her sit with the media.
After phoning around – including the new TV startup CNN - she struck gold with NBC.
"They said come in and show us what you got – and then they kept calling me and the other stations kept calling me. That's how it all started."
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