With a quiet voice and a tense posture, the woman who had guided Donald J. Trump through conflicts and scandals for years took the witness stand and carried a different burden. She was there under the fluorescent lights of a dreary Manhattan courtroom, 15 feet from the former president she once fiercely defended to testify at his criminal trial.
“I’m really nervous,” Hope Hicks, the former Trump spokeswoman, messaging master and all-around adviser, admitted to the prosecutor questioning her, explaining what was already obvious to the captive courtroom.
Ms. Hicks’ discomfort peaked hours later when Mr. Trump’s lawyer began cross-examining her – and she began to cry. As her voice broke, Mr. Trump turned his gaze to her.
The question that initially troubled Ms. Hicks related to her time at the Trump Organization, the family business, where she had fond memories of working. Ms Hicks left the witness stand and the trial was adjourned to allow her to calm down. Minutes later, she returned to continue her testimony, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
The striking display of emotion reflected Ms. Hicks’ discomfort at testifying against a man who launched her career and trusted her with his reputation. Each time the questioning brought up another memory of working for Mr. Trump — at his company, on the campaign trail and ultimately in his White House — Ms. Hicks seemed to fight back tears.
Ms. Hicks, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump when it was revealed that she had privately expressed anger over his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, said in her testimony that she had not spoken in nearly two years had spoken for years.
Mr. Trump, who faces up to four years in prison, is on trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star. The case, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, is the first criminal prosecution of an American president.
Prosecutors subpoenaed Ms. Hicks — against her will — to demonstrate Mr. Trump’s alleged outsized role in suppressing this and other scandals.
Amid many apologetic compliments, she testified that Mr. Trump was an image-obsessed micromanager. She also acknowledged that it seemed implausible that Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer, would pay hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels without the then-candidate’s consent.
And Ms. Hicks testified that Mr. Trump was not aware of this payout until years later. “Mr. Trump’s opinion,” she said, “would have been bad if this story had come out before the election.”
But it wasn’t entirely unhelpful to the defense, giving Mr. Trump’s lawyers reason to argue that their client was a family man and that his motive for suppressing damning stories may have been not just to win the election, but also to win the election in protecting his private life. That argument could undermine prosecutors’ theory that Mr. Trump approved the hush-money payment because he was desperate to get into the White House.
Ms. Hicks, who testified for several hours before a jury of 12 spellbound New Yorkers, transported the courtroom back to the site of the 2016 presidential campaign: the 25th floor of Trump Tower, 30,000 feet in the air aboard the plane nicknamed Trump Force One and being placed in the campaign car on the way to a rally.
In those moments, which Ms. Hicks described in graphic detail, she and Mr. Trump dealt with one scandal after another.
The first crisis came when The Washington Post contacted Ms. Hicks about a recording she had obtained in which Mr. Trump had bragged about grabbing women by their genitals. Tape from the set of “Access Hollywood” sent the campaign into turmoil as a cadre of advisers crowded into Trump Tower.
Ms. Hicks said she was “a little stunned” but had “a good feeling that this was going to be a huge story and dominate the news cycle for at least the next few days.”
Mr. Trump was also upset, she said, but one of his first reactions was to tell her that his comments about women “didn’t sound like something he would say.”
The fallout from the tape soon spread, prompting Ms. Daniels to seize the opportunity to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen tried to buy their silence and struck the $130,000 hush-money deal that is at the heart of the case against the former president. After he completed the deal, this crisis was contained for the time being.
But in the final days of the campaign, The Wall Street Journal contacted Ms. Hicks with more damaging messages. The newspaper was prepared to report that The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid that had close ties to Mr. Trump, had bought and buried the story of a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump years ago .
Ms. Hicks initially tried to establish the campaign’s ties to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owned the Journal, so she could “buy a little more time to look into the matter,” she said. When that failed, she called Mr. Cohen, who had a relationship with the tabloid’s editor, David Pecker.
She testified that Mr. Trump told her that the affair story was not true, but Ms. Hicks said she could not recall whether he said “verbatim” that he had no knowledge of this hush-money deal.
The Journal also planned to write about Ms. Daniels, but Ms. Hicks again “unequivocally” denied to a reporter that Mr. Trump had a relationship with the porn star.
Shortly after the story about the Playboy model was published, five days before the election, Ms. Hicks and Mr. Cohen exchanged a series of text messages wishing she would go away.
“I don’t think it will make much of a splash,” she said, adding that “the media is the worst.”
When Mr. Cohen mentioned how little attention the story received, Ms. Hicks responded, “Keep praying!! It works!” (As Ms. Hicks testified in the courtroom in a criminal case that grew in part from this story, she acknowledged the irony of this particular message.)
Mr. Trump was elected, but The Journal wasn’t done researching. In early 2018, an article was published exposing Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels. When asked about this, Ms. Hicks became confused and said she couldn’t remember the time. She became noticeably more tense, gritted her teeth and stumbled a little in her speech.
Ms. Hicks said she had no knowledge of the records Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying. Those records, prosecutors said, concealed Mr. Trump’s repayment of hush money to Mr. Cohen.
And at times she seemed to support the defense. When a prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, asked about Mr. Trump’s reaction to the first Wall Street Journal article, she said he was “concerned about how his wife would view him.” That response was reminiscent of the defense’s opening statement, which portrayed Mr. Trump as a family man – and helped provide an alternative motive for efforts to cover up damaging information that prosecutors have already linked him to.
Still, Ms. Hicks’ testimony was crucial to the prosecution’s case, even as she recalled a potentially pivotal conversation: “I believe I heard Mr. Trump talking to Mr. Cohen shortly after the story was published,” she said, which prosecutors might use to argue that Mr. Trump was involved in the scheme.
And she delivered a memorable remark that bolstered the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Trump ordered Mr. Cohen’s payment. She scoffed at a question from prosecutors that led her to ponder whether Mr. Cohen would have made a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels “out of the goodness of his heart.”
This kind of altruistic move, she said, “would be out of character for Michael.”
The statement represented a breathtaking spectacle: a confidant of a former president turned against him.
An accomplished lacrosse player and former model, Ms. Hicks began working for Trump’s daughter Ivanka and the Trump Organization in her mid-20s before being unexpectedly named campaign press secretary. Between two stints at the White House, including communications director, she worked for Fox News and is now a communications consultant.
Ms. Hicks, now 35, was cautious and self-deprecating on the stand, but added the words “I don’t remember” to her detailed account.
Her emotional testimony both helped and hurt her old boss. She noted that the Trump Organization is large and successful but is run “like a small family business,” and that because of that, “everyone who works there reports to Mr. Trump in some way.”
That description fits the prosecutor’s office’s image of Mr. Trump as a hands-on boss who must have known about the false records and the sex scandal they covered up.
“He knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, and we all just followed his lead,” Ms. Hicks said.
Kate Christobek contributed reporting.
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2024-05-04 01:35:21
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