Her voice low, her posture tense, the woman who spent years steering Donald J. Trump through strife and scandal stepped to the witness stand on Friday carrying a different burden. She was there under the fluorescent lights of a dreary Manhattan courtroom, seated 15 feet from the former president she once fiercely defended, to testify at his criminal trial.
“I’m really nervous,” Hope Hicks, the onetime Trump spokeswoman, messaging maestro and all-around adviser, acknowledged to the prosecutor questioning her, declaring what was already obvious to the riveted courtroom.
Ms. Hicks’s unease came to a head hours later as Mr. Trump’s lawyer began to cross-examine her — and she began to cry As her voice cracked, Mr. Trump locked his eyes on her.
The question that initially unnerved Ms. Hicks was about her time at the Trump Organization, the family’s business, where she had fond memories of working. Ms. Hicks left the stand, and the trial paused so that she could compose herself. She returned minutes later to continue her testimony, occasionally dabbing her eyes with a tissue.
The striking show of emotion reflected Ms. Hicks’s discomfort with testifying against a man who launched her career and entrusted her with his reputation. Each time the questioning conjured up another memory of working for Mr. Trump — at his company, on his campaign and finally in his White House — Ms. Hicks appeared to fight back tears.
Ms. Hicks, who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump once it emerged that she had privately voiced anger at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters, said in her testimony that they had not spoken in nearly two years.
Mr. Trump, who faces up to four years in prison, is on trial for 34 felony charges of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star. The case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, is the first criminal prosecution of an American president.
The prosecution summoned Ms. Hicks — against her will — to demonstrate what it says was Mr. Trump’s outsize role in the suppression of that scandal and others.
She testified, interspersing plenty of apologetic compliments, 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 the porn star, Stormy Daniels, without the then-candidate’s say-so.
And Ms. Hicks testified that Mr. Trump had shown awareness of that payoff years after the fact. “Mr. Trump’s opinion,” she said, was that “it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”
But she was not totally unhelpful to the defense, providing Mr. Trump’s lawyers grist to argue that their client was a family man, and that his motive for suppressing damning stories might not have been solely to win election but also to protect his home life. That argument could undercut the prosecution’s theory that Mr. Trump authorized the hush-money payment because he was bent on attaining the White House.
Ms. Hicks, who delivered several hours of testimony to a jury of 12 transfixed New Yorkers, transported the courtroom back to the scenes 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 placing them inside the campaign car on the way to a rally.
It was in these moments, which Ms. Hicks painted in vivid detail, that she and Mr. Trump managed one scandal after another.
The first crisis arose when The Washington Post contacted Ms. Hicks about a recording it obtained in which Mr. Trump had boasted about grabbing women by the genitals. The tape, from the set of “Access Hollywood,” sent the campaign into a frenzy, as a cadre of advisers huddled inside Trump Tower.
Ms. Hicks said she was “a little stunned,” but had a “good sense that this was going to be a massive story and sort of dominate the news cycle for the next several days at…
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