A Diddy trial courtroom artist reveals how she captures the hip-hop mogul’s ‘dark side’

Christine Cornell said, with some hyperbole, that the backpack she wears into the Sean “Diddy” Combs courtroom “weighs about 300 pounds.”

It’s full of pastels, drawing tools, and even binoculars, Cornell told BI.

For the past 50 years, Cornell has been a courtroom sketch artist in New York and the surrounding area. She’s covered some of the city’s most iconic trials — the falls of Wall Street financier Bernie Madoff and Mafia boss John Gotti, to name a few. Now, Cornell has a front row seat to the Combs sex-trafficking and racketeering trial, and talked to Business Insider about what it’s like to make sense of the case from behind her sketch pad.

“I love what I do because it’s a very human thing,” she said. “The things that I learn about people are very human with things.”

After the trial kicked-off, the first thing Cornell had to do was figure out where to sit to get a good view. She ended up on the right side of the courtroom, right in front of Combs’ family and about 30 feet from the witness stand.

“When I can see, I can draw,” Cornell said. “And then I’m really in heaven.”

Every time Cornell is in a courtroom, she said she learns something new. Despite having sat through gristly testimony for half a century — and the Diddy trial has been full of violent, disturbing details — she loves her job because it lets her fill a unique purpose.

“Court art is very different from photography, because it’s time-lapse. It’s not a snap,” she said. “You get to pick all of the most important qualities of the people and put them together in one image, so that you can tell a much bigger story than a still shot can do.”

Cornell said it always takes her a bit of time to get comfortable drawing a trial’s main characters, and that this case hasn’t been any different. It took her a few days to feel confident sketching Combs when her view is partially blocked. Even now, a couple of weeks into the trial, she’s still perfecting her depiction of the rapper.

“I started thinking that maybe I had to get a little bit more of that dark side of him into the picture. Because Cassie would talk about it,” Cornell said, referencing Cassie Ventura, Combs’ ex-girlfriend and the prosecution’s star witness. “She said that when he’d get angry, his eyes would turn black.”

When she heard that, Cornell said she thought of the mob boss Gotti, whose darkness she could “feel.”

Combs is accused of sex trafficking two women, including Ventura. He has denied the charges and all accusations of sexual abuse.

Drawing Ventura herself proved to be a challenge, Cornell said, because “she’s so damn beautiful.”

Cornell told BI it took her a few tries to get past Ventura’s external poise, but that she now has a handle on drawing the woman whose story set off Combs’ downfall.

“It’s a very human process, making these choices,” Cornell told BI about deciding what to include in her images and what to leave out.

When the courtroom was shown a photo of Combs’ home on Star Island in Miami, for example, Cornell chose to draw something else.

“It was the only time I could see Puffy’s face since he was turning to look,” Cornell said, using a nickname for Combs. “I wanted to draw him. I wanted to get that look of wistfulness on his face.”

Cornell said her job has changed drastically with the 24-hour news cycle — there are fewer courtroom artists and smaller budgets. Despite the changes, Cornell said her role is still key to helping the public understand cases like Combs’.

Cameras are not allowed inside the courthouse, but that hasn’t stopped photographers from setting up outside en masse. Artists are the only eyes the outside public has in the room during the trial.

“There’s a million cameras here, but there’s not a million artists here,” she said.

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