In 2022, Elizabeth Williams only worked 11 days as a courtroom sketch artist, relying on her other job as an illustrator to pay the bills. This year, work exploded.
Williams has covered these cases since the 1980s, providing sketches for outlets such as the Associated Press and CNN as countless celebrities made their way through New York City’s court system. Just when she thought she’d seen it all, the scene outside Manhattan courts started to resemble a red carpet, with news cameras and paparazzi jostling to get their photo of the many famous faces who stopped by in 2023. Whether it was one of Donald Trump’s numerous appearances or Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto trial, sketch artists like Williams had no shortage of inspiration as they gave the public a peek at proceedings inside the cameras weren’t privy to.
Robert De Niro, Ed Sheeran and the Real Housewife Jen Shah all passed through New York courts in 2023 – sometimes, two on the same day, which meant that Williams skipped lunch to cover both of them. As the year ends, she’s swimming in sketches. “I might put together a calendar of all these people,” she said. “I’ve got enough Trump sketches to do just a calendar of him in court.”
A lot goes into Williams’s sketches, even if, in some cases, she only has mere minutes to complete them. After all, she’s sketching a first draft of history’s crooks, alleged perps and vindicated VIPs.
Though Williams followed Trump’s many court appearances in New York (and Miami) from the press box, she admits the former president has a “challenging face”. She hasn’t exactly nailed it yet, but he’s given her lots of chances to practice.
“Some people are just easy to draw, others are not, and that’s the way he is. Bernie Madoff had the easiest face in the world to draw. Trump’s constantly moving, and he’s usually agitated, so I just do the best I can,” Williams said.
Williams first sketched Trump in 1986, back when the former president owned the ill-fated United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals team. Trump desperately wanted to own an NFL franchise, and hoped that an anti-monopoly lawsuit against the NFL could force a merger between the USFL and NFL. (It didn’t; while the NFL was found guilty of violating antitrust laws, it was ordered to pay just $1 in damages to the USFL.)
At that time, Williams captured a then 40-year-old Trump with a less dramatic, dirty blond head of hair, arched eyebrows and sharper jawline.
Though Trump now calls the press the enemy of the people, back then he was chummy with tabloid journalists. “He was hanging around with all of the reporters and chatting it up with them while the jury was deliberating,” Williams recalled. “Imagine that. Now, he’s surrounded by Secret Service agents, and he never gets that close to us.”
In a portrait from this year’s New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization, Williams depicted the 45th president on the witness stand, gesticulating with his hands, as he’s known to do during speeches and rallies. She calls it “the accordion”, because it looks like he’s pushing his hands together and pulling them apart. “When he started doing that on stand, I thought that’s very typical of him, so I tried to focus on getting those hands right,” Williams said.
Williams, who is the co-author of The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art, attended the SBF trial – unfortunately, he’s tough to depict, too.
“The artists were all complaining about him,” she said. “That mouth is tough, and so is his nose construction. He would take these different expressions when he was talking. He had very poor eye contact, he was always looking down or off to the side. I kept waiting for him to look up.”
On the final day of Bankman-Fried’s trial, Williams didn’t get to take lunch … because she had to run off to sketch De Niro, during the actor’s gender discrimination trial. Ultimately, De Niro’s company Canal Productions was ordered to pay $1.3m to an ex-assistant, who filed suit against the Hollywood star.
“I was more nervous for sketching De Niro than I was for Bankman-Fried, because everyone knows what he looks like,” Williams said. “But he was easier to draw. He was sitting closer to me, and the courtroom had a lot of light, which helped a lot. And, like Trump, De Niro is very animated.”
Another lively sketch came from Trump’s fraud suit in late October, when the former president’s lawyer Alina Habba dramatically confronted Michael Cohen. In a classic case of court theater, Habba attempted to paint the former president’s former fixer as a serial liar. “You have made a career of publicly attacking President Trump, haven’t you?” she asked. “Yes,” Cohen replied.
“You want them going at it, because it adds to the drawing,” Williams said. “If someone’s just sitting there like a potted plant, it isn’t interesting. In that exchange, Cohen was animated and so was Habba, which tells a story.”
The writer E Jean Carroll, who won a civil trial against Trump in May, possessed a quieter presence on the witness stand. While describing how Trump sexually abused her inside the department store Bergdorf Goodman, Carroll remained reserved. “She did not use her body and hands to talk, and though she wept, she wasn’t very physically expressive,” Williams said. “Trump wasn’t there, but they showed a photo of E Jean meeting Trump in the 80s, so I used that in my sketch to include him.”
During a break in the Carroll trial, Williams ran over to sketch Ed Sheeran, who was then facing a copyright lawsuit accusing him of ripping off the Marvin Gaye song Let’s Get It On. (Sheeran won the trial.) “He had a guitar and placed it right behind him in the witness stand,” Williams recalled. “There were a lot of people in that courtroom. I remember having to stand while I did my drawing.”
It’s a tough job – a thankless one, too, as keyboard critics are more than happy to complain if they deem Williams’s work subpar. (“That’s been a whole thing with Trump this year,” she said, referring to a reccurring social media debate about whether or not her depictions resemble the former president.) It’s a lot of energy to spend on portraits that only stay relevant for a day or two, before the next big news cycle comes along.
Though Williams only covers Manhattan cases, high-profile courtroom dramas played across the country in 2023. People memed Gwyneth Paltrow’s ripped-from-a-soap-opera skiing trial (a doctor accused the Goop founder of colliding with him on the slope; she won). Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher drew anger from sexual assault survivors for writing character letters ahead of Danny Masterson’s sentencing for rape (they later apologized). The rapper Tory Lanez was found guilty for shooting the hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion (he got 10 years).
“Another artist once said to me: ‘The stuff we cover has the shelf life of fish,’” Williams said. “It’s hot for a short period of time, and then everyone forgets about it. When we pick cases to sketch, we want them to stand the test of time.” Perhaps 2023 will be the exception to the rule. After all, Williams concedes: “Most of them this year were pretty noteworthy.”
