Artist known for images of Tom Brady and Harvey Weinstein portrays moment of former Trump fixer’s downfall

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Michael Cohen did not have a good day yesterday. But no headline captured the discontent of Trump’s former personal lawyer, sentenced to three years in prison for financial crimes and lying to Congress, quite as well as this courtroom sketch.

His despairing eyes and deep frown lines caught the attention of Stephen Colbert, who called it the “saddest” of all the images we’ve seen of Cohen’s “slow descent into finding out what the law is”.

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“As if Michael Cohen’s day wasn’t bad enough, here’s his courtroom sketch,” blared a headline from the Week.

This isn’t the first brush with attention for the artist Jane Rosenberg, who has worked in courtrooms for 38 years and sketched other famous faces including El Chapo, John Gotti, Martha Stewart, and Woody Allen.

In 2015, her “deflategate” trial sketch of Tom Brady, which transformed the Patriots quarterback into a cross between a depressed ET and Gollum, became a viral meme.

And in May, Rosenberg earned internet praise for her harsh portrait of Harvey Weinstein, which depicted the disgraced movie mogul as larger, more pinched and sinister than he appeared in court – a portrait both distorted and, some would say, more accurate.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tirso Martinez-Sanchez sits with a court interpreter as he testifies during the El Chapo trial. Photograph: Jane Rosenburg/Reuters

Her sketches can often reveal more emotional truth than a photo, though Rosenberg has said that she tries to illustrate what she sees and can’t think about the public’s reaction while she’s working. There simply isn’t the time – she only has the length of a court proceeding to produce multiple sketches for media outlets such as Reuters, CBS and Fox, often sketching positions from memory.

During Cohen’s sentencing, which lasted less than 90 minutes, she produced four sketches. (Federal courthouses do not allow cameras.) “My fingers were burning madly across the paper,” she said.

Rosenberg, also a venerable outdoor painter, said sketching events as they unfold is “very hard and very fast. People are moving and we have to try to remember what we see and keep it in our minds.”

As for critics of her verisimilitude, Rosenberg said you should try doing multiple sketches as quickly as possible. Once you make a mark, “that’s it, they’re done”, she said.

“It’s not like I can go home and fix them.”