There’s a lot of crime and random, angry people. “I’m less comfortable taking my easel on the streets of the city these days,” she says. Doesn’t seem like they cover that much anymore.” Though she admits to having had some trepidation about stepping foot in a courtroom after 9/11, for the most part she feels entirely safe in courthouses - even though she’s often sitting mere feet away from some of the most dangerous criminals on the planet. There was a time period when there was a lot of ISIS and terrorism after 9/11.
There was a wave of financial cases with Bernie Madoff. “Now there tends to be a lot of #MeToo or sex abuse. “It seems like the news media tends to have a lot of trends ,” she says. Since then, she has borne witness to the evolution of the criminal justice system and news media coverage, even as the introduction of televised trials in the 1990s threatened to put her out of work. She was first hired by NBC to work as a courtroom sketch artist during the trial of Craig Crimmins, the so-called “Met Murderer” who killed Metropolitan Opera violinist Helen Hagnes during an intermission in 1980. As a “starving artist” in New York City who’d just graduated fine arts school, she was looking to make money when she saw a courtroom artist give a lecture at the Society of Illustrators. Rosenberg became a courtroom sketch artist full-time in the late 1970s. “ Since then we’ve developed some kind of rapport which I do not want to lose,” as it helps her render her drawings, she says. Maxwell has also attempted to initiate contact with Rosenberg, at one point turning around and pulling down her mask to say, “Long day, isn’t it?” Rosenberg responded that yes, it was. Rosenberg adds that Maxwell is also “quite animated compared to a lot of defendants.” “A lot sit like a lump in their chair and don’t do anything. She’s isolated in her jail cell all the time. That’s quite unusual….I guess she needs affection. “She does a lot of hugging and kissing of her lawyers in the courtroom. Maxwell was also permitted by the judge to briefly speak with her siblings during the proceedings, something that Rosenberg says she has rarely witnessed before. I wasn’t gonna be thrown off my game.” She doesn’t think it’s necessarily a power move on Maxwell’s part - “I don’t know what’s in her mind” - but she does note that Maxwell is extraordinarily demonstrative with her legal team compared to other defendants she’s sketched.
“I was just like, oh, she’s sketching me. So when Rosenberg realized Maxwell was sketching her, “it was kind of cute to me. He was making fun of me, bobbing his head”), as did Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas during his recent trial (“that one was a little unsettling”). Though many on the internet were bemused by the image, interpreting it as a “power move” on Maxwell’s part, Rosenberg says this is not the first time a defendant has sketched her during a trial: very early on in her career, Eddie Murphy did (“ he gave me his sketch on a Post-It. Most recently, however, Rosenberg became part of the story when one of her sketches went viral on Twitter an image of Maxwell sketching her during the proceedings. “I don’t see how my opinion would play into it.” But I’m trying to capture the moment I’m going after, what I see visually,” she says. It’s Rosenberg’s job to cover trials for various news outlets by maintaining as neutral a stance as possible.
Maxwell is accused of recruiting girls to provide sexual favors to Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. Now, Rosenberg is covering the trial of Maxwell, the socialite accused of aiding and abetting her former ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex trafficking ring.