Her voice low, her posture tense, the girl who spent years steering Donald J. Trump by means of strife and scandal stepped to the witness stand on Friday carrying a distinct burden. She was there beneath 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 prison 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 might compose herself. She returned minutes later to proceed her testimony, sometimes dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
The putting present of emotion mirrored Ms. Hicks’s discomfort with testifying towards a person who launched her profession and entrusted her together with his repute. Every time the questioning conjured up one other reminiscence of working for Mr. Trump — at his firm, on his marketing campaign and eventually in his White Home — Ms. Hicks appeared to struggle 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, stated 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 information to cowl up a intercourse scandal involving a porn star. The case, introduced by the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace, is the primary prison prosecution of an American president.
The prosecution summoned Ms. Hicks — towards her will — to reveal 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 actual fact. “Mr. Trump’s opinion,” she stated, was that “it will 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 attorneys 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 might 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 ground 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 Publish contacted Ms. Hicks a few recording it obtained through 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 stated she was “slightly shocked,” however had a “good sense that this was going to be an enormous story and form of dominate the information cycle for the subsequent a number of days at the least.”
Mr. Trump was upset as properly, she stated, however one among 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, putting the $130,000 hush-money deal on the coronary heart of the case towards the previous president. After he made the deal, that disaster, in the meanwhile, was contained.
However within the marketing campaign’s waning days, The Wall Road 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 stated 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 might “purchase slightly further time to take care of this,” she stated. When that failed, she known as Mr. Cohen, who had a relationship with the tabloid’s writer, David Pecker.
Mr. Trump, she testified, advised her that the affair story was not true, however Ms. Hicks stated 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 jot 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 will go away.
“I don’t see it getting a lot play,” she stated, 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 prison case that sprang partially from that story, Ms. Hicks acknowledged the irony of that exact 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 stated she didn’t have data of the information Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying. These information, prosecutors say, disguised Mr. Trump’s compensation of Mr. Cohen for the hush cash.
And at instances, she appeared to assist the protection. When a prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, requested about Mr. Trump’s response to the preliminary The Wall Road Journal article, she stated that he was “involved about how it will be considered by his spouse.” That response recalled the protection’s opening assertion, through which Mr. Trump was portrayed as a household man — and helped present an alternate 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 consider I heard Mr. Trump chatting with Mr. Cohen shortly after the story was revealed,” she stated, which prosecutors may use to argue that Mr. Trump was concerned within the machinations.
And he or she delivered a memorable statement that bolstered the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Trump directed Mr. Cohen’s fee. She scoffed at a prosecution query prompting her to contemplate whether or not Mr. Cohen “would have made a $130,000 fee to Stormy Daniels out of the kindness of his coronary heart.”
That form of altruistic transfer, she stated, “could be out of character for Michael.”
The testimony marked a surprising spectacle: a former president’s confidante turned towards him.
An achieved 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 marketing consultant.
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 outdated boss in the identical breath. She remarked that the Trump Group was huge and profitable however run “like a small household enterprise,” and that due to that, “Everyone that works there, in some sense, reviews to Mr. Trump.”
That description performs into the prosecution’s portrait of Mr. Trump as a hands-on boss who should have recognized in regards to the false information and the intercourse scandal they obscured.
“He knew what he needed to say and the way he needed to say it, and we have been all simply following his lead,” Ms. Hicks stated.
Kate Christobek contributed reporting.
