Dueling Drawings: Ghislaine Maxwell Has Been Drawing Sketches Of The Sketch Artist Covering Her Trial

Sex trafficking suspect Ghislaine Maxwell has apparently been spending a good portion of her time in court sketching dueling images of the courtroom sketch artist.

A depiction of the 59-year-old disgraced socialite as she draws her own sketch of artist Jane Rosenberg went viral on Twitter over the past week, prompting some to ponder if Maxwell was trolling. Rosenberg, who has sketched defendants for more than three decades now, told New York Magazine’s Intelligencer that Maxwell has drawn her more than once.

“In the pretrials in that little courtroom, that’s when the sketching started,” she said. “She sketched me a few times in a row.”

The communication between them has apparently gone beyond the drawing.

“Then she started nodding at me and waving at me,” Maxwell said. “She even spoke to me once. It’s really great for me. I’m not going to wreck it. I’m going to keep it going. I need to see her face. It’s like a photographer — they wait for that moment and say someone’s name and they turn to them. That’s the same thing.”

She told Newsweek that Maxwell had told her, through her attorney, "long day, isn't it?" once.

In this courtroom sketch Ghislaine Maxwell, seated second from right, draws a courtroom artist, standing far left, during a courtroom break in her sex-abuse trial, Tuesday Dec. 7, 2021, in New York. Photo: Elizabeth Williams/AP

Rosenberg told the Intelligencer that Maxwell is much easier to draw because she engages with her, while somebody like R. Kelly, whom she also sketched in a New York courtroom during his own sex trafficking trial, did not. 

“R. Kelly sat there like a blob all the time,” she recalled to the Intelligencer. “There was a moment he put his hands on his face. The reporters were like, ‘Oh, oh, a hand motion!’ But with Ghislaine, a lot happens. When she walks in that courtroom, she’s kissing people, saying hello to people, having conversations.”

The sketch artist, who refers to herself as a “senior citizen,” said she has been unaware of the Twitter fame because she doesn’t “do Twitter.”

Maxwell is accused of recruiting and grooming teen girls as part of Jeffrey Epstein’s pyramid of sexual abuse. She faces six federal counts, including transporting minors to engage in criminal sexual activity and sex trafficking of children or by force, fraud or coercion. Epstein, who was found hanged in his jail cell in August 2019 at age 66, just one month after he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges, referred to Maxwell as his "best friend" in a 2003 Vanity Fair profile.

Maxwell has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her and has adamantly denied any wrongdoing.

For more on the case, watch Peacock’s “Epstein’s Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell.”