Sam Bankman-Fried courtroom sketch artist navigating popularity and ‘a lot of haters’

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED FOUND GUILTY OF FRAUD: FTX FOUNDER FACING 100 YEARS IN PRISON

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Rosenberg has been a fixture on the New York City court circuit for four decades, often only getting minutes to capture the drama, and is part of a core group of about five sketch artists who compete to get their versions of headline-grabbing events to the public.

She’s sketched former President Donald Trump, Tom Brady, Bill Cosby, disgraced Hollywood agent Harvey Weinstein, who asked her to add more hair (she said no), mob boss John Gotti, and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, to name a few.

Her portrait of a brooding Trump at his April 4 New York arraignment earned her the cover of the New Yorker’s April 17 issue. It was the first time in the magazine’s 98-year history that a sketch artist’s work was given the honor.

“That was one of the greatest moments I ever had,” she told the Washington Examiner on Friday.

As for the subject himself, he was “fun to draw” and had “that hair that’s like a hat,” she said.

Her local art supply store had proudly mounted the magazine cover on the wall above the cash register but then moved it slightly out of view after people in her “blue neighborhood” started complaining.

Rosenberg spent Friday morning sketching Trump’s son, Eric Trump, and will be back in court Monday morning to draw his father in the civil suit against the family and its namesake business.

Over the past few weeks, Rosenberg has also been a force at Bankman-Fried’s federal trial.

Her drawings of the 31-year-old convicted crypto fraudster and his top lieutenants have earned her a cult-like following on social media.

In one picture, Rosenberg transformed Bankman-Fried from a rotund Romeo with frizzy hair to a chiseled sci-fi character, complete with rectangle ears, thin eyebrows, and a slightly non-human stare.

It’s a process, she explained, adding that she finds Bankman-Fried’s face “unusual.”

“I do better [painting him] in a front view rather than from the side,” she told the Guardian. “It’s taken me a while to understand what he looks like. I study his anatomy, and keep trying over and over, figuring out why it doesn’t look like him, or why it does.”

In another picture of Bankman-Fried, Rosenberg painted him as a doughy, gray man watching a video of a much healthier and seemingly happier version of himself.

In another, she made Bankman-Fried look small and meek by comparison, which Rosenberg said matched his demeanor when he was cross-examined by prosecutors and answered with some iteration of “I don’t recall” 140 times.

Rosenberg also went viral after she sketched Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s one-time girlfriend and former CEO of Alameda Research, who testified against him in court.

Sam Simmonds/Polaris via Newsco/Polaris/Newscom

Sketches of her have been compared to Edvard Munch’s The Scream, one of the most iconic but ghoulish figures in Western art, complete with a large head, wide eyes, and elongated hands. In another, Ellison is wearing a suit two sizes too big for her and her lake-brown hair is hanging limply just below her shoulders as she blows into a tissue.

Rosenberg said her subjects shouldn’t take her sketches personally and that she just draws them as she sees them.

“The photo of Ellison that went viral or whatever, I had 10 minutes to draw her,” she said.

While some of her sketches have been social media gold, others have received a lot of backlash, including one of Brady, the then-New England Patriots quarterback who had been accused of being complicit in deflating air from footballs.

Rosenberg’s unflattering yet infamous sketch got her a lot of hate from fans and led to a sarcastic apology.

“When I’m under such pressure, I tend to just grab on to certain lines and I don’t flatter people,” she said in an interview with Comcast SportsNet. “So, I have to apologize to Tom Brady and all his fans that I didn’t make him look pretty enough.”

She admitted that some of the feedback she’s gotten has been hurtful at times, but it’s “something I’m getting used to.”

“I’m getting thicker skin,” she told the Washington Examiner.

During Maxwell’s trial, the former galpal of disgraced New York financier Jeffrey Epstein was so shaken that Rosenberg was drawing her that after shooting her dirty looks, she picked up a pad and started to sketch Rosenberg back.

“I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all that she was drawing me but it was a dream come true when she turned and looked at me directly,” she said.

For the next few weeks, Rosenberg’s calendar is going to be filled with “Trump, Trump, Trump, and more Trump,” she said.

She said she’s just happy to be a working artist in New York.

Rosenberg got her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo and began her career as a portrait artist in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

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She got her start as a courtroom sketch artist in the 1980s drawing prostitutes and pimps in New York’s night court.

Her work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York as well as on permanent display in the Museum of the Constitution in Philadelphia.