Vicki Behringer has drawn everyone, from the Unabomber to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos.
Behringer has drawn everyone, from the Unabomber to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. When Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes took the stand on Nov. 19, 2021, in her criminal trial in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, there was no doubt that it would be a newsworthy moment.
It was a role she was very used to. She had been drawing key witnesses at Bay Area trials for 30 years — everyone from murders and rapists to sobbing victims and poker-faced defendants to CEOs and moguls and rock stars.A courtroom artist is a journalist.
Not to use, but to get to know the shape of his face — those key landmarks so essential to capturing a likeness of a subject: The distance between eye and eyebrow. The length and breadth of the nose. The shape of the mouth.“When somebody is famous, you have got to get their likeness down. It can’t be just kind of close,” Behringer says.
The drawing came out fine, but when his testimony was over and she had an opportunity to see him from a different perspective, she realized that he has “really big blue eyes.”The challenges that confront courtroom artists are more than just getting a good view of the proceedings.There is plenty of drama in the courtroom, but most of it is not visual. A courtroom is not a basketball court with muscle-rippling athletes windmilling dunks from above the rim.
Sometimes Behringer will decide too soon and then see something better and have to make a fast switch to a new piece of heavy Strathmore watercolor paper and begin drawing anew. The case attracted intense media interest, and there were not enough seats in court. The court only allowed a single “pool” artist. A pool reporter or artist is one that covers an event or trial on behalf of everyone and all the other reporters use their work by agreement.
A woman, one of the “gavel groupies” that follow notorious trials, came up to Behringer later and said, “Oh, do you like Ted too?”In 1973, a federal judge was presiding over the trial of the “Gainsville Eight,” a group charged with conspiracy to disrupt the 1972 Republican convention. Behringer grew up in the Bay Area, first in Los Gatos and later Cupertino. She went to Cupertino High School in the ’70s. She liked history and French and spent a summer abroad in France. She was a 4.0 student, but she dismisses that accomplishment, saying it was an era when you could get an A in English by watching a movie and writing a report.
Thirty years later, Behringer’s face lights up when she remembers a long-ago moment when a courtroom deputy called out to the other artists, “You better watch out for her. She’s pretty good.” In order to show it all, distances are sometimes collapsed so the moving parts fit together on one canvas. A courtroom artist is one of the few people who love to see a face with wrinkles. The hardest people to draw are those people “who don’t have enough wrinkles and don’t have things like facial hair and glasses or a hairstyle that says something.”
She is also working the Scott Peterson evidentiary hearings. Peterson was a convicted murderer who succeeded in getting the California Supreme Court, 16 years after his conviction, to order a hearing into whether juror misconduct should compel a new trial.
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