NEW YORK CITY— Jessica Jarva scanned the growing line of anxious people waiting alongside the New York City courthouse where Donald Trump was on trial.
The sun had set and rain fell unabated. Jarvaland, as the artist calls herself, knew she, too, would be spending a rainy night in a dark alleyway — for the love of Michael Cohen’s right eyebrow.
“It’s incredible,” the Brooklyn artist told Raw Story of the Trump fixer-turned-foe’s arching brow. “Some people are a delight to draw.”
Jarvaland had only missed one day of Trump’s historic trial — the same day conspiracy theorist Max Azzarello fatally immolated himself in the plaza across the street from the courthouse — and she did not intend to miss a moment of Cohen’s cross examination.
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So she reserved her spot in the line, rushed back to Brooklyn for art supplies, then spent the night trying to protect her materials from the rain — while snagging pillows from a throwaway sofa to ease her vigil.
It paid off: Jarvaland was the last spectator allowed into the courthouse to watch Trump’s trial on a Thursday earlier this month. She found a seat next to the final journalist through the courtroom door, a reporter from Raw Story.
Jarvaland — an artist whose media include music, performance and paint — first began drawing high-profile cases in 2021 when Ghislaine Maxwell stood trial on child sex trafficking charges linked to her relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The artist felt compelled to seek for herself information she felt the Justice system had concealed for the sake of protecting powerful men in Epstein’s luxurious — and pedophiliac — orbit.
She wanted to know why.
“The truth of the situation was so covered up,” Jarvaland said.
The trial, she said, “was the closest you’d get to understand.”
As the Maxwell trial continued, Jarvaland felt a growing disappointment at the redacted names and evidence not introduced. But the artist found something new in the work of capturing — on paper — the narrative of a fall woman taking the fall.
“When you go to a trial, it’s this layered thing,” Jarvaland explained. “It’s not like you go in there and see total honesty. You see layers of strategy and manipulation.”
The trial sent Maxwell to federal prison on a 20-year sentence.
It also sent Jarvaland on a journey toward a known Epstein associate: Trump.
With waves of bleach blond hair tucked under a sequined-studded baseball cap and an ink-stained jacket trailing gauzy pink string, Jarvaland appears more likely to be a regular of an avant garde art studio or a grunge band show than a municipal court building.
But in her pursuit to capture the truth of celebrity justice on the thick white pages of her small artist’s sketchbook, Jarvaland has become the unofficial courtroom artist for celebrity trials, such as those of actors Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp.
She didn’t initially envision herself in the midst of Trump’s legal messes, but the temptation of personally viewing Trump and his family dynamic ultimately proved too strong to resist.
“I sort of got sucked into it,” Jarvaland said. “It just becomes a part of my life.”
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Jarvaland first found herself pulled into the courtroom where Trump was found liable for fraudulently inflating the value of Trump Organization holdings by New York civil court Judge Arthur Engoron to the tune of $450 million.
One day, Jarvaland felt what she described as a “weird energy in the room,” the source of which she could not identify.
The artist’s gaze then landed on a man whose name has appeared on steaks, vodkas, universities, Oval Office orders and criminal court indictments.
Despite any obligation that he do so, Trump had come to court.
“He kinda seemed like a big fish in an aquarium,” Jarvaland said. “He looks around like he owns the place.”
Jarvaland was hooked.
Of the many figures Jarvaland has drawn as she attended Trump’s trials, the former president himself has proven the most difficult to capture, she said.
The problem is a strange contrast: While it’s easy to exaggerate Trump’s most obvious features, his person as a whole lacks the characteristics that immediately draws the eye.
“We’ve so, like, animated him, made him cartoon-like in our culture,” Jarvaland said. “How he is and who he is is greater than what he actually looks like on a daily basis.”
Javaland tries to draw Trump without undue emphasis on the helmet hair, the puckered mouth, the (allegedly) small hands and orange-tinted skin so associated with the former president.
But she admits her most evocative, or truthful, portrait of Trump has him looking like a sack of potatoes.
“I’ve mostly drawn him kinda small and stuffed in his chair,” Jarvaland said. “I think that’s pretty much how he’s been.”
To look over Jarvaland’s shoulder in the overflow room of Manhattan criminal court is to watch a nonfiction graphic novel emerge from the page.
This overflow room is packed each day with journalists and spectators and patrolled by court guards who ensure no one breaks court rules — the first and foremost of which is a ban on photography.
In this room, reporters are limited to the pictures they can paint with words.
The rules of Trump’s courtroom vary slightly but face equally strict enforcement: a pack of credentialed photographers rush daily toward Trump’s table to snap fresh shots of a glowering Trump before proceedings begin.
Then, court artists commissioned by large news outlets, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, rely on pastels, paper towels and binoculars to create a neutral but complete snapshot of the day.
All of these people are reporting to newsrooms, to readers — even to friends whom they hope to regale with the best cocktail hour chatter of the century.
But Jarvaland is drawing for an audience of one.
Jarvaland sits hunched on a wooden pew, clutching a black-ink pen that rushes across the notebook resting on her lap. Her gaze darts up toward the large screen airing the courtroom where Trump stands trial, then back to the page where she recreates the faces she sees over and over again.
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Her materials are that pen and paper plus the official trial transcripts published nightly by the New York State Unified Court System.
The faces she draws will later be surrounded by lines from court testimony that strike Jarvaland as significant or meaningful.
In one such drawing, two faces appear in a small box above the word “AFFAIR!”
On the page, a small Trump stares out from the bottom corner at the words of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who had described the supermarket tabloid’s coverage of Playboy model — and alleged Trump paramour — Karen McDougal.
It ranked among the more salacious moments of a generally salacious trial, where Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to hide hush money paid to McDougal and Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The prosecution alleges that Trump did so in a successful bid to bury salacious stories that might have torpedoed his campaign and handed the election to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Pecker also testified about catch-and-kill schemes that saw the tabloid pay sources for stories that never ran.
“Did the ENQUIRER release a statement saying that they hadn’t bought the story to kill it & only made a deal to feature McDougal in publications?” the testimony reads. “(‘Yes.’)”
“‘Was that true?’ ‘(No.)’”
This image encapsulates a dynamic that has come to fascinate Jarvaland more than Trump’s relationship with his children: that which he has orchestrated with the media.
It’s this relationship Jarvaland hopes both to capture and to challenge with her work.
“I think there is so much hidden, so much lies and manipulation and propaganda in everything, in all of our culture and all of our media,” Jarvaland told Raw Story.
“You can believe there is some objective truth in the media, but there really isn’t.”
Jarvaland’s mistrust of the news industry is hardly reconciled by the evidence presented in Trump’s trial.
Testimony revealed that the National Enquirer tailored coverage on demand to both prop-up Trump and decimate the reputation of his foes.
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It also included details about the work life of journalists with whom Jarvaland now comes into contact daily.
New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, for example, watched from the trial courtroom seats as her text messages with Cohen were dragged into the limelight by Trump’s lead attorney Todd Blanche.
Her behind-the-scenes dealings with a valuable source were both condemned by critics who questioned her objectivity and defended by fellow journalists who say maintaining such relationships is common practice.
Jarvaland believes such practices may be widespread, but that doesn’t mean she approves.
“I don’t think there is any free media,” she said. “I don’t think there is any independent press.”
It is this mistrust of the media that gives Jarvaland novel insight into a group of people who remain a mystery to those who avow “Never Trump,” and with whom she stands in line every day.
Jarvaland contends Trump’s Make America Great Again supporters remain loyal to him — despite criminal trials, increasingly “fascist” rhetoric and repeatedmisstatements and lies — because he delivers a truth the media won’t.
It’s a truth that also appeals to an artist: Trump publicly expresses how he feels.
“He might not be telling the truth, but you know the angles of those emotions,” Jarvaland said.
“It’s great just to hear somebody talk about who they hate and why.”
Such sincere hatred is what Jarvaland liked best about one of Trump’s most outspoken foes, Stormy Daniels.
That, and her neck.
“Everyone else has come in very polished and courtroom-ready and sat very straight in their chair,” Jarvaland said.
“But she was moving all around, willing to say exactly what she thought. I loved her.”
Daniels appeared in court the third week of the trial to testify about the sexual encounter she contends she had with Trump in 2006, one year after he married Melania Trump.
Jarvaland drew Daniels almost as a sassy and savvy swan — craning her neck as she delivers sharp retorts to Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles — but with an eerie resemblance to an unexpected foe.
“She sounds like Trump,” Jarvaland said. “She has the same rhetoric and the same honesty.”
Daniels’ sincerity stood in stark contrast to another woman who once loomed large in the Trump world and who also made headlines with her emotional courtroom testimony: former aide Hope Hicks.
Jarvaland found herself fascinated by Hicks’ loyalty and devotion to a man caught boasting that his celebrity status allowed him to touch women sexually without their consent.
But she wasn’t surprised.
“I see tons of women out here supporting Trump; they don’t seem to have an issue with his statements about grabbing women by the p-----,” Jarvaland said in reference to Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump describes how he might kiss women against their will and touch their genitals. (Trump dismissed his remarks as “locker room banter.”)
“The people around him that he pays to love him, I’m sure he treats them well,” Jarvaland said.
Jarvaland said Hicks appeared frightened to criticize Trump and daunted by the prospect of pleasing two groups of people — the defense and the prosecution — who both wanted very different things.
“She wants the appearance of things being great all the time like a Stepford Wife, that’s what broke her down,” Jarvaland said.
“That was obviously her whole job,” she added. ”I can’t imagine the stress of trying to make Donald Trump happy all the time.”
Jarvaland, however, can imagine the stress of trying to make Trump unhappy all of the time, because she’s seen Michael Cohen’s face.
It’s a face that fascinated Jarvaland more than any other in the courtroom, from his pointed nostrils to his comical frown. But mostly, she’s fascinated by his right eyebrow.
On Thursday, Jarvaland scratched away at her notepad as she took in Cohen’s measured, simple answers to increasingly hostile questions from Trump’s lead attorney.
Blanche spent an entire day quizzing Cohen about lies told both in Trump’s service and out of it, in a cross examination several legal experts described as unforgivably dull.
But Jarvaland remained fascinated by the eyebrow, and the face, which she drew over and over again as the hours passed.
Even as Cohen’s voice remained cool, Jarvaland said she saw deep emotion in the former fixer’s face.
“He’s being tight with his expressions of himself,” Jarvaland said, but said his body language showed “despair.”
Jarvaland says this is her first “perfect” trial, by which she means she has only missed a single day.
She’s not sure what will come of the work she’s doing, but it’s not foremost in her thoughts. Right now Jarvaland is focused on drawing the truth from Trump’s face.
Her verdict?
“The most important truth is that Trump is obviously a liar and has been put on the stand for lies,” Jarvaland said.
Soon, a jury of Trump’s peers will deliver the only verdict that matters: whether Trump is guilty or innocent of his alleged crimes.
If guilty, Trump faces a prison sentence or home confinement, which would make him the first president, current or former, to serve time in detention or behind bars.
