Trump Trial: Hope Hicks Delivers Emotionally Gripping Testimony Before Trial Adjourns for Weekend (2024)

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Here are 5 takeaways from the trial and Hope Hicks’s testimony.

Taking the stand under a subpoena, Ms. Hicks said she was nervous, and at one point, early in the cross-examination, she broke down in tears.

The Manhattan district attorney has charged Mr. Trump, 77, with falsifying 34 business records to hide a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, a p*rn star who says she and Mr. Trump had a tryst in 2006 while he was married. Mr. Trump, the first American president to face criminal prosecution, has denied the charges and says he did not have sex with Ms. Daniels. If convicted, he could face probation or prison time.

Here are five takeaways from Mr. Trump’s 11th day, and third week, on trial:

A scandalous recording resurfaces.

Ms. Hicks, now a communications consultant, testified to her fast rise in the Trump family orbit, going from working for his daughter Ivanka to press secretary for Mr. Trump’s campaign. It was in that role that, in October 2016, she had to confront what she called the “intense” fallout from the revelation of the “Access Hollywood” tape.

The judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, has said the tape itself cannot be played, but jurors saw a transcript of it on Friday in an email sent to Ms. Hicks by a reporter from The Post.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Mr. Trump said in the tape about groping women. “You can do anything.”

“Deny, deny, deny.”

The need for damage control did not abate, however, as Ms. Hicks was confronted with the story of Karen McDougal and a mention of Ms. Daniels in an article by The Wall Street Journal just days before the 2016 election. The story reported that Ms. McDougal, a former Playboy model, had been paid $150,000 in August 2016 by the parent company of The National Enquirer, which then suppressed her story of an affair with Mr. Trump which he has denied.

Ms. Hicks recalled consulting with Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who eventually paid Ms. Daniels to keep quiet. Mr. Cohen denied the stories, drafting a proposed response calling them “completely untrue,” and Ms. Hicks told The Journal the same thing.

Indeed, even as the “Access Hollywood” tape was coming out, Ms. Hicks said one strategy — which she documented in an email to other senior Trump aides — was simple: “Deny, deny, deny.”

Election pressures were huge.

Earlier in the week, Keith Davidson, a Los Angeles lawyer, testified about deals he negotiated for Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal during the closing months of the 2016 campaign, when Mr. Trump was battling Hillary Clinton.

The election was a constant topic, with Mr. Davidson pressuring Mr. Cohen for payment as Election Day loomed and Ms. Daniels threatening to blow up the deal as days ticked down.

On Friday, prosecutors introduced online postings and a video statement by Mr. Trump in which he acknowledged saying “foolish things” on the “Access Hollywood” tape, but also attacking Ms. Clinton. The jury also saw posts made in the weeks before the election in which Mr. Trump blasted women who had accused him of misconduct, calling their accounts phony.

“Nobody has more respect for women than me,” he wrote.

Trump’s voice was heard in court, and outside, too.

Prosecutors on Tuesday played video clips of Mr. Trump’s denials of sexual assault while on the campaign trail, as well as part of a deposition Mr. Trump gave in a lawsuit in which he was found liable for sexual abuse.

And on Wednesday, Mr. Trump blasted the criminal case while campaigning, calling Justice Merchan “crooked” and “conflicted.”

Back in court on Thursday, jurors heard a conversation Mr. Cohen had recorded with Mr. Trump about how to reimburse the publisher of The Enquirer for the purchase of Ms. McDougal’s story.

Trump, fined once, faces another gag-order ruling.

After hearing prosecutors’ arguments last week over violations of a gag order barring attacks on trial participants, Justice Merchan on Tuesday fined Mr. Trump $9,000 and threatened him with jail if they continue.

On Thursday, prosecutors presented four more incidents and called Mr. Trump’s statements “corrosive.” Mr. Trump’s legal team argued that he was merely responding to political attacks.

Justice Merchan has not yet ruled, but a decision could come soon, perhaps next week. The trial continues on Monday.

Trump and Hope Hicks meet again, this time in a 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 p*rn 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 p*rn 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 least.”

Mr. Trump was upset as well, she said, but one of his early 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 raced to buy her silence, striking the $130,000 hush-money deal at the heart of the case against the former president. After he made the deal, that crisis, for the time being, was contained.

But in the campaign’s waning days, The Wall Street Journal contacted Ms. Hicks with more damaging news. 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 earlier.

Ms. Hicks first tried to work the campaign’s connections to Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owned The Journal, so she could “buy a little extra time to deal with this,” she said. When that failed, she called Mr. Cohen, who had a relationship with the tabloid’s publisher, David Pecker.

Mr. Trump, she testified, told her that the affair story was not true, but Ms. Hicks said she did not remember whether he “verbatim” stated that he had no knowledge of that hush-money deal.

The Journal also planned to write about Ms. Daniels, but Ms. Hicks again denied “unequivocally” to a reporter that Mr. Trump had a relationship with the p*rn star.

Shortly after the story about the Playboy model ran, five days before the election, Ms. Hicks and Mr. Cohen exchanged a series of text messages wishing that it would go away.

“I don’t see it getting much play,” she said, adding that “the media is the worst.”

When Mr. Cohen mentioned how little coverage the story was getting, Ms. Hicks replied: “Keep praying!! It’s working!” (In the courtroom, testifying in a criminal case that sprang in part from that story, Ms. Hicks acknowledged the irony of that particular message.)

Mr. Trump was elected, but The Journal was not done digging. In early 2018, it published an article exposing Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels. When asked about that, Ms. Hicks became fuzzy, saying she could not recall the period. She grew considerably more tense, clenching her jaw and stumbling a bit in her speech.

Ms. Hicks said she did not have knowledge of the records Mr. Trump is accused of falsifying. Those records, prosecutors say, disguised Mr. Trump’s repayment of Mr. Cohen for the hush money.

And at times, she seemed to aid the defense. When a prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, asked about Mr. Trump’s reaction to the initial The Wall Street Journal article, she said that he was “concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife.” That response recalled the defense’s opening statement, in which Mr. Trump was portrayed as a family man — and helped provide an alternative motive for efforts to cover up damaging information to which prosecutors have already linked him.

Still, Ms. Hicks’s testimony was key to the prosecution’s case, including when she recalled a potentially crucial conversation: “I believe I heard Mr. Trump speaking to Mr. Cohen shortly after the story was published,” she said, which prosecutors might use to argue that Mr. Trump was involved in the machinations.

And she delivered a memorable observation that bolstered the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Trump directed Mr. Cohen’s payment. She scoffed at a prosecution question prompting her to consider whether Mr. Cohen “would have made a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels out of the kindness of his heart.”

That sort of altruistic move, she said, “would be out of character for Michael.”

The testimony marked a stunning spectacle: a former president’s confidante turned against him.

An accomplished lacrosse player and former model, Ms. Hicks started working in her mid-20s for Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and the Trump Organization, before unexpectedly being elevated to campaign press secretary. Between two stints working at the White House, including the lofty role of communications director, she worked for Fox Corporation, and now is a communications consultant.

Ms. Hicks, now 35, was cautious and self-deprecating on the stand, but sprinkled her detailed recounting with the words “I don’t recall.”

Her emotional testimony helped and harmed her old boss in the same breath. She remarked that the Trump Organization was big and successful but run “like a small family business,” and that because of that, “Everybody that works there, in some sense, reports to Mr. Trump.”

That description plays into the prosecution’s portrait of Mr. Trump as a hands-on boss who must have known about the false records and the sex scandal they obscured.

“He knew what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it, and we were all just following his lead,” Ms. Hicks said.

Kate Christobek contributed reporting.

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Blanche slips and calls Trump “Mr. Trump,” before correcting himself and using Trump's preferred label: “President Trump.”

Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor, responds, saying that the findings from the judge that Trump violated his gag order are directly relevant to Trump’s credibility if he takes the stand. He contradicts Blanche's stance, saying that there is case law supporting his argument. Previously, we’ve seen Justice Merchan respond positively to the presentation of case law — older cases in which judges discuss the matters in question —and express frustration with the defense when they don’t cite any.

But Merchan says he agrees with the defense, saying it would be too prejudicial for a jury to hear that the judge presiding over the trial at hand had found against the defendant. That’s a win for Blanche. Merchan’s ruling doubles as an acknowledgment of his own sway over the jury.

As much as the defense lawyers — and Trump — complain about Merchan, he has been bending over backward to try to seem fair to Trump.

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Trump looked at Hicks as she left and smiled tightly at her. She did not look at him.

And again, this could aid the defense’s “family man” argument.

Hicks further makes the defense lawyers’ point for them, saying of Cohen, “He liked to call himself a fixer, or Mr. Fix-it, and it was only because he first broke it.”

Bove, who can be a real pitbull in cross-examinations, is being studiously gentle here with Hicks.

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This line of questioning from the defense is clearly designed to create distance between Trump and Cohen and to minimize Cohen’s role.

The comment echoes something David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, said of Cohen, that he would try to “inject” himself into the campaign.

Distancing Cohen from the campaign also supports the argument that the hush-money payment he made to Stormy Daniels was not a campaign-finance violation.

Hicks suddenly broke down a little bit when she was asked about her time at the Trump Organization, and we’re taking a break.

Trump, who has largely avoided looking at Hicks during her testimony, locks his eyes on her as she starts to cry.

Bove has a tough job here. His client is furious with Hicks. And Bove will have to impeach her credibility or otherwise disrupt her testimony without coming off as too aggressive and alienating sympathetic jurors. The prosecutors are now leaving the room hastily, looking somewhat concerned.

Hicks’s emotion seemingly came quickly, as Emil Bove, the defense lawyer, had just begun with a few basic questions. Before that, she had been remarkably composed in the face of an intense moment.

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The defense twice tried to object to the prosecutor asking Hicks whether it would have been in character for Cohen to have paid the hush money without telling Trump. The judge twice overruled the objections, and Hicks said it would have been out of character for him to do so.

This testimony bolsters the prosecution’s story that Trump was behind the payment to Daniels. Moments later, Hicks bolsters another part of the state’s case, saying that it would have been bad if the scandal came out before the election.

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Hicks just handed a real gift to the defense. As Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor, asked about Trump’s reaction to the Wall Street Journal article, she responds: “He was concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife.” This is something the defense touched upon in its opening statement when it sought to portray Trump as a family man. It provides an alternative motive for covering up damaging information, a believable one that is unrelated to his electoral chances.

Colangelo sought to get another, more helpful response, asking if Trump was concerned about the campaign. Hicks acknowledged that Trump was concerned about how the story was playing — but her answer about his family was far more specific, and definitive. We will not be surprised if we see that in the defense’s closing argument.

Listening to the testimony about the timing of all of this underscores the duality of Trump’s life at that moment. On the one hand, he was on the cusp of becoming the president of the United States. On the other, he was still wading in the muck of the tabloid New York City life he had lived for decades.

In these text messages, Cohen is closely monitoring how many other outlets are picking up on the WSJ story about the alleged hush-money payments. When Cohen mentions how little coverage the story was getting, Hope replies to Cohen, “Keep praying!! It’s working!”

Hicks acknowledges the irony as she reads these messages, in which Cohen fretted about the story becoming more public than it already was. The story, of course, became a criminal case — the one you’re reading about right now.

One text from Cohen to Hicks is particularly damaging to the defendant: Cohen says he’s got a denial from Stormy Daniels, whom he calls “Storm,” but is holding it in reserve. Cohen communicating with the campaign about Daniels's denial, and working with her on it, underscores the connections here.

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Outside court, high-volume debate and a paper crown.

“The people of New York City want this man held liable for his criminal acts,” one of the demonstrators, Jay W. Walker, shouted. “All of them.”

A clutch of Mr. Trump’s supporters in Collect Pond Park, across the street from the courthouse, intercepted Rise and Resist as the police escorted the group to Lafayette Street. With them was a woman in a Burger King crown and an New York Police Department T-shirt who carried a Bible, a shofar and a bullhorn.

“Liars!” she shouted through her bullhorn. “Witchcraft!”

A community affairs police officer told her that no bullhorns were allowed, a rule that has been enforced uniformly all week.

“It’s hard to turn down royalty,” one officer said. “You can have it your way at Burger King, but not here.”

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Here’s what you need to know about the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.

“You can do anything,” Mr. Trump said on the recording, which was captured on the set of “Access Hollywood.”

On the stand Friday, Ms. Hicks was shown an email she forwarded to senior campaign staff after The Post asked for comment about the tape. Ms. Hicks wrote: “deny, deny, deny.”

Prosecutors in Manhattan say the emergence of the tape led Mr. Trump to agree to pay off Stormy Daniels, a p*rn star, who at the time had been shopping her story of a 2006 sexual encounter with the candidate.

Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000. The payment is at the heart of the 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump, who is accused of falsifying business records to cover it up.

The judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, had ruled in March that prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office could question witnesses about the tape, but found that it would be prejudicial to play the actual video. He reaffirmed that ruling on April 15.

“You can bring out what was said in the tape,” Justice Merchan said, adding that he didn’t want jurors “to hear Mr. Trump’s voice and his gestures.”

In a victory for the defense, the judge also ruled that day that the prosecution could not introduce evidence about sexual assault allegations against Mr. Trump that arose after the tape became public, calling them “complete hearsay.”

However, Justice Merchan said that prosecutors could introduce emails that followed the tape’s disclosure, showing frantic efforts by Trump advisers to contain the fallout. The correspondence, he said, “bolsters the people’s claim that this was a crucial event.”

Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, had called on Justice Merchan to reconsider admitting “this extremely salacious evidence,” which he described as “very prejudicial.”

Mr. Trump, who is again the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has denied any wrongdoing and has cast the case against him as politically motivated.

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