TRENTON — The questions for Bridget Anne Kelly from reporters were so relentless — Does she have any regrets? How would it hurt her to surrender her emails? How is she holding up? — that her lawyer finally felt compelled to answer.

“I’ll tell you for Ms. Kelly,” Michael Critchley said. “She’s a 42-year-old single mom with four children trying to make do at a difficult time.”

She is unemployed, doing her best to find work. Contrary to what her former boss Gov. Chris Christie said, she is not “stupid,” Mr. Critchley said. And she came to court here on Tuesday — her first public appearance since finding herself in the middle of a political scandal, beyond dodging the cameras camped outside her house — because “she is not someone who’s running away and living the life of a hermit.”

Ms. Kelly herself revealed little, standing at attention but almost obscured behind her lawyer as he answered questions before a scrum of television cameras. When he said her life had been “affected dramatically,” her chin quivered. When he said she was not afraid of prosecution — “not afraid of anything” — she pulled in her lower lip.