The courtroom sketch artist who drew Taylor Swift during her recent groping trial defended his viral work in a new interview.
“A person like Taylor Swift — who is very pretty, has perfectly proportioned dimensions on the face — is actually much harder [to sketch],” Jeff Kandyba told FOX31 Denver in an interview published on Monday, August 14. “Everybody’s got little idiosyncrasies about them that you want to pick up on.”
Throughout the trial, the artist’s sketches of the Grammy winner, 27, were derided on social media for not perfectly resembling her famous face. “I think the artist’s name is Katheryn Hudson,” one Twitter user quipped, using the birth name of Swift’s on-off rival Katy Perry.
“It’s hard. Some people are just much easier to draw than others,” said Kandyba, who has been sketching in Colorado courtrooms since the mid-1980s. “If you give me somebody with a beard and glasses — bingo, got it.”
To prepare for Swift’s trial, the Boulder native spent weeks doing his homework. “It made me very nervous going into it,” he admitted. “That’s why I did practice sketches ahead of time.”
The “Shake It Off” singer spent a week in Denver federal court as she faced off against former radio DJ David Mueller. He filed a lawsuit against her, claiming that he lost his job after her security team accused him of groping her butt during a backstage meet-and-greet in June 2013. Swift countersued Mueller, who denied the allegations, for a symbolic $1.
After the jury ruled in her favor on Monday, August 14, Swift vowed to make donations to help other victims of sexual assault. “I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this. My hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard,” she said in a statement to Us Weekly. Therefore, I will be making donations in the near future to multiple organizations that help sexual assault victims defend themselves.”
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