Hope Hicks was 26 years previous and had no political expertise when Donald J. Trump plucked her from a job at his daughter Ivanka’s clothes enterprise and employed her for his presidential marketing campaign in 2015.
Within the years that adopted, she rose to be certainly one of his most trusted advisers, ultimately serving because the White Home communications director. However Mr. Trump has been indignant with Ms. Hicks since 2022, when textual content messages emerged throughout a Home investigation into his efforts to remain in energy after his election loss. The messages confirmed that she had been important of him after the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol by his supporters.
They haven’t spoken since.
Now, Ms. Hicks, 35, has taken the stand in Mr. Trump’s hush-money trial in a Decrease Manhattan courtroom.
Ms. Hicks, who met with prosecutors within the Manhattan district legal professional’s workplace concerning the case in March 2023, was the Trump marketing campaign’s press secretary within the closing phases of the 2016 marketing campaign, when prosecutors say Mr. Trump’s private lawyer and longtime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, purchased the silence of a porn star who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump a decade earlier.
Paperwork launched by federal prosecutors in 2019 present that Ms. Hicks participated in phone calls, textual content messages and e mail messages with Mr. Cohen and one other key witness, the then-publisher of the Nationwide Enquirer, David Pecker, within the days earlier than the $130,000 cost to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, that’s on the heart of the case.
After Mr. Pecker declined to pay Ms. Daniels, Mr. Cohen made the cost himself. Prosecutors say Mr. Trump falsified enterprise information to cowl up his reimbursement to Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Hicks’s identify has come up a number of instances in testimony from earlier witnesses, as prosecutors have sought to determine her as somebody with visibility into among the occasions in late 2016, as Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign was grappling with the aftermath of the notorious “Entry Hollywood” tape in early October.
Ms. Hicks spent most of her skilled profession close to Mr. Trump. An achieved lacrosse participant and former mannequin, Ms. Hicks began working for the Trump Group in her mid-20s earlier than being elevated to marketing campaign press secretary. Between two stints working on the White Home, she labored for Fox Information, and now’s a communications guide.
She fiercely defended Mr. Trump, together with denying simply earlier than the 2016 election that Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign knew something about one other hush-money cost: the $150,000 deal that Mr. Pecker had struck with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy mannequin who mentioned she’d had an affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Pecker testified at size about that cost, saying he had made it to guard Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign from the possibly embarrassing story.
Paul Manafort, a former Trump marketing campaign supervisor who was convicted of federal monetary and lobbying violations and later pardoned by Mr. Trump, mentioned in 2016 that Ms. Hicks knew tips on how to work with the mercurial actual property mogul. She knew, as an example, to not trouble him whereas he was watching a significant golf match.
“She completely understands him,” he mentioned.
