The Courtroom Sketch Wiz Turning Trump’s Trial Into High Art

Donald Trump’s ongoing hush money trial is the pinnacle of American spectacle, a lurid phantasmagoria of shifty lawyers and adult failsons (Hi, Eric!) tweeting their way through the embarrassment of public scrutiny.

Any hard-nosed political reporter would kill for a regular spot in the courtroom, and visual artist Isabelle Brourman is one of the lucky few. The Pittsburgh native works in several mediums, but her current focus is courtroom sketches, which she’s producing at a breakneck clip for New York magazine while covering the trial.

Courtroom sketching is a centuries-old art, and its practitioners in the New York City media scene are mostly old-guard traditionalists. At 30, Brourman’s age sets her apart from her peers, but it’s her sketches that are the truly extraordinary draw. Rather than capturing one person at a time, Brourman’s watercolor and colored-pencil figures overlap and bleed into one another like atoms clustered within the same organism. There’s abstraction at play here, but journalistic diarism too.

And Brourman doesn’t just draw the major players like Trump, who in her renderings appears moody and simian; she folds the emotional atmosphere of the courtroom into her final products. Her sketch from the day of the hush money trial’s opening statements, seen below, buzzes with the anxiety of overlapping agendas.

Brourman cut her teeth as a courtroom sketch artist during another high-profile legal saga: the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation trial in 2022, during which the ex-spouses gave extensive, disturbing testimony detailing the other’s allegedly abusive behavior. Depp was previously found by a U.K. judge to have abused Heard on 12 separate occasions, a ruling for which there was “overwhelming evidence,” the original court filing stated. Heard, meanwhile, wept on the stand as she claimed her ex sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle.

But the internet, fueled by endless reels of footage from the televised trial, overwhelmingly went along with Depp’s version of events: that Heard was a liar who had physically assaulted him on multiple occasions, and who had defamed him when she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” During the proceedings, Depp’s fans would pack the courtroom every single day in a show of support for the actor.

Brourman’s decision to sketch the trial firsthand was spontaneous at the time, but now feels fated. As she recently explained to The Daily Beast, she became intrigued by Depp’s narrative because she herself was recovering from trauma; she said she was “groomed and abused” by a professor at the University of Michigan when she was 19. (In 2021, she and seven other women filed a lawsuit against the school over the alleged abuse.)

Finding a community of fellow survivors compelled her to follow Depp v. Heard. So one day, Brourman hopped in her car and drove from her home in Brooklyn to the courthouse in Fairfax, Virginia. She initially sat among the public, but eventually submitted her work to her media contacts and got approved for press access.

“There were people there that drained their entire fucking savings to be there for Johnny Depp,” she told The Daily Beast, explaining how the proceedings inspired both her art and her frame of mind. “A minefield of themes of fanaticism and delusion when it comes to forming an intimate bond with a superstar. And then you watch the superstar over and over and over again gesture in the same way, and it starts to feel quite surreal.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s criminal trial—in which the former president is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records—“is like Gotham,” Brourman said. “Trump is also very charismatic and he has the same thing that Depp has as far as being comfortable in front of the cameras. But Trump is a lot more heavy-handed than Depp. Depp’s performance almost had more female gaze to it.”

Compared with Trump’s civil fraud case earlier this year, for which Brourman also attended and sketched the proceedings, “Trump is much more under the gun” during the ongoing criminal trial, “and I think all of us in the room are tired,” she said. Even so, she told The Daily Beast, she’s enjoying the task of capturing the “raw power in the room.”

She likes dressing up for court days, she said, because it affords her the strategic advantage of being underestimated by her peers, who are more concerned with tradition and realism.

“I have the privilege of being free and not having to get anything done that’s like, ‘I have to get a perfect portrait of the witness today,’” Brourman said. “That’s what the other sketch artists have to do. I respect it. It’s hard work. But what I’m doing is, ‘Oh, I want to map that person’s skin, because they’re reddening at certain things. I’m noticing that the hands are clasping here, so I think I’m gonna do this.’”

“I do love the psychology of, ‘When’s the moment when you think nobody’s watching?’” Brourman went on. “Chances are, I’m watching.”

At Trump’s civil trial earlier this year, Brourman said, she even experienced being watched back—by Trump himself.

“He leaned over and told me he was going to judge my work,” she said. “He looked at my sketch and said, ‘Huh, I have to lose some weight.’ And I’m like, damn, I held up a mirror and he accepted, reflected, self-criticized. I was like, that’s powerful.”

“So I show up at [the criminal trial], and I’m like, he lost some weight!” Brourman added. “See, this is literally why art is important.”