Her voice low, her posture tense, the lady who spent years steering Donald J. Trump by strife and scandal stepped to the witness stand on Friday carrying a special burden. She was there underneath the fluorescent lights of a dreary Manhattan courtroom, seated 15 toes from the previous president she as soon as fiercely defended, to testify at his legal trial.
“I’m actually nervous,” Hope Hicks, the onetime Trump spokeswoman, messaging maestro and all-around adviser, acknowledged to the prosecutor questioning her, declaring what was already apparent to the riveted courtroom.
Ms. Hicks’s unease got here to a head hours later as Mr. Trump’s lawyer started to cross-examine her — and he or she started to cry. As her voice cracked, Mr. Trump locked his eyes on her.
The query that originally unnerved Ms. Hicks was about her time on the Trump Group, the household’s enterprise, the place she had fond reminiscences of working. Ms. Hicks left the stand, and the trial paused in order that she may compose herself. She returned minutes later to proceed her testimony, sometimes dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
The placing present of emotion mirrored Ms. Hicks’s discomfort with testifying in opposition to a person who launched her profession and entrusted her together with his fame. Every time the questioning conjured up one other reminiscence of working for Mr. Trump — at his firm, on his marketing campaign and at last in his White Home — Ms. Hicks appeared to battle again tears.
Ms. Hicks, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump as soon as it emerged that she had privately voiced anger on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, mentioned in her testimony that they’d not spoken in practically two years.
Mr. Trump, who faces as much as 4 years in jail, is on trial for 34 felony fees of falsifying data to cowl up a intercourse scandal involving a porn star. The case, introduced by the Manhattan district legal professional’s workplace, is the primary legal prosecution of an American president.
The prosecution summoned Ms. Hicks — in opposition to her will — to exhibit what it says was Mr. Trump’s outsize position within the suppression of that scandal and others.
She testified, interspersing loads of apologetic compliments, that Mr. Trump was an image-obsessed micromanager. She additionally acknowledged that it appeared implausible that Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer, would pay hush cash to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, with out the then-candidate’s say-so.
And Ms. Hicks testified that Mr. Trump had proven consciousness of that payoff years after the very fact. “Mr. Trump’s opinion,” she mentioned, was that “it might have been unhealthy to have that story come out earlier than the election.”
However she was not completely unhelpful to the protection, offering Mr. Trump’s legal professionals grist to argue that their shopper was a household man, and that his motive for suppressing damning tales won’t have been solely to win election but in addition to guard his residence life. That argument may undercut the prosecution’s idea that Mr. Trump licensed the hush-money fee as a result of he was bent on attaining the White Home.
Ms. Hicks, who delivered a number of hours of testimony to a jury of 12 transfixed New Yorkers, transported the courtroom again to the scenes of the 2016 presidential marketing campaign: the twenty fifth flooring of Trump Tower, 30,000 toes within the air aboard the airplane nicknamed Trump Power One and inserting them contained in the marketing campaign automotive on the best way to a rally.
It was in these moments, which Ms. Hicks painted in vivid element, that she and Mr. Trump managed one scandal after one other.
The primary disaster arose when The Washington Submit contacted Ms. Hicks a couple of recording it obtained by which Mr. Trump had boasted about grabbing ladies by the genitals. The tape, from the set of “Entry Hollywood,” despatched the marketing campaign right into a frenzy, as a cadre of advisers huddled inside Trump Tower.
Ms. Hicks mentioned she was “slightly shocked,” however had a “good sense that this was going to be a large story and kind of dominate the information cycle for the following a number of days at the least.”
Mr. Trump was upset as nicely, she mentioned, however considered one of his early reactions was to inform her that his feedback about ladies “didn’t sound like one thing he would say.”
The fallout from the tape quickly unfold, prompting Ms. Daniels to grab the chance to promote her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen raced to purchase her silence, placing the $130,000 hush-money deal on the coronary heart of the case in opposition to the previous president. After he made the deal, that disaster, in the intervening time, was contained.
However within the marketing campaign’s waning days, The Wall Avenue Journal contacted Ms. Hicks with extra damaging information. The newspaper was ready to report that The Nationwide Enquirer, a grocery store tabloid that had shut ties to Mr. Trump, had purchased and buried the story of a former Playboy mannequin who mentioned she had an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier.
Ms. Hicks first tried to work the marketing campaign’s connections to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owned The Journal, so she may “purchase slightly further time to cope with this,” she mentioned. When that failed, she known as Mr. Cohen, who had a relationship with the tabloid’s writer, David Pecker.
Mr. Trump, she testified, instructed her that the affair story was not true, however Ms. Hicks mentioned she didn’t keep in mind whether or not he “verbatim” said that he had no data of that hush-money deal.
The Journal additionally deliberate to write down about Ms. Daniels, however Ms. Hicks once more denied “unequivocally” to a reporter that Mr. Trump had a relationship with the porn star.
Shortly after the story in regards to the Playboy mannequin ran, 5 days earlier than the election, Ms. Hicks and Mr. Cohen exchanged a sequence of textual content messages wishing that it might go away.
“I don’t see it getting a lot play,” she mentioned, including that “the media is the worst.”
When Mr. Cohen talked about how little protection the story was getting, Ms. Hicks replied: “Preserve praying!! It’s working!” (Within the courtroom, testifying in a legal case that sprang partly from that story, Ms. Hicks acknowledged the irony of that individual message.)
Mr. Trump was elected, however The Journal was not completed digging. In early 2018, it revealed an article exposing Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 fee to Ms. Daniels. When requested about that, Ms. Hicks turned fuzzy, saying she couldn’t recall the interval. She grew significantly extra tense, clenching her jaw and stumbling a bit in her speech.
Ms. Hicks mentioned she didn’t have data of the data Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying. These data, prosecutors say, disguised Mr. Trump’s reimbursement of Mr. Cohen for the hush cash.
And at occasions, she appeared to assist the protection. When a prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, requested about Mr. Trump’s response to the preliminary The Wall Avenue Journal article, she mentioned that he was “involved about how it might be seen by his spouse.” That response recalled the protection’s opening assertion, by which Mr. Trump was portrayed as a household man — and helped present another motive for efforts to cowl up damaging data to which prosecutors have already linked him.
Nonetheless, Ms. Hicks’s testimony was key to the prosecution’s case, together with when she recalled a doubtlessly essential dialog: “I imagine I heard Mr. Trump talking to Mr. Cohen shortly after the story was revealed,” she mentioned, which prosecutors would possibly use to argue that Mr. Trump was concerned within the machinations.
And he or she delivered a memorable commentary that bolstered the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Trump directed Mr. Cohen’s fee. She scoffed at a prosecution query prompting her to think about whether or not Mr. Cohen “would have made a $130,000 fee to Stormy Daniels out of the kindness of his coronary heart.”
That kind of altruistic transfer, she mentioned, “can be out of character for Michael.”
The testimony marked a surprising spectacle: a former president’s confidante turned in opposition to him.
An completed lacrosse participant and former mannequin, Ms. Hicks began working in her mid-20s for Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and the Trump Group, earlier than unexpectedly being elevated to marketing campaign press secretary. Between two stints working on the White Home, together with the lofty position of communications director, she labored for Fox Information, and now’s a communications advisor.
Ms. Hicks, now 35, was cautious and self-deprecating on the stand, however sprinkled her detailed recounting with the phrases “I don’t recall.”
Her emotional testimony helped and harmed her previous boss in the identical breath. She remarked that the Trump Group was massive and profitable however run “like a small household enterprise,” and that due to that, “All people that works there, in some sense, experiences to Mr. Trump.”
That description performs into the prosecution’s portrait of Mr. Trump as a hands-on boss who should have identified in regards to the false data and the intercourse scandal they obscured.
“He knew what he wished to say and the way he wished to say it, and we have been all simply following his lead,” Ms. Hicks mentioned.
Kate Christobek contributed reporting.
