Martha Stewart – Martha Stewart Living
The perfectionist homemaker was imperfect with the truth. Then she became a 'trophy' for prosecutors.
Martha Stewart is still extending her middle finger at the prosecutors who sent her to prison in 2003 for lying about her alleged insider stock trades.
“It was so horrifying to me that I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the US Attorney’s office,” she said in the 2024 Netflix documentary “Martha.”
Amid enormous scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other massive corporations, Stewart was targeted for a relatively small infraction – avoiding a loss of nearly $46,000 on an illegal stock trade. And she paid a steep price.
Many counted the news as a death knell for Martha Stewart Living OmniMedia, the publicly traded empire she built over her lifetime. Shares of her company went into a tailspin, crushing her shareholders, but Stewart mounted a comeback campaign in 2005, and the stock recovered over time. So did her reputation.
To this day, many observers white-wash the debacle, saying Stewart was unfairly targeted as a woman by overzealous prosecutors who were under pressure to score white-collar convictions amid an epidemic of corporate fraud.
Some of this is true. But Stewart, who savagely pursued perfection, made key mistakes.
In fact, she settled insider trading charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006, agreeing to a five-year ban on serving as director of a publicly traded company. She was also criminally convicted in 2004 of obstruction and lying to investigators about her stock trades, landing her in prison for five months.
She was in many ways the victim of bad legal advice. Her shoddy defense counsel even allowed her to meet with investigators unprepared. She might have been able to settle the charges with the SEC without admitting nor denying guilt, and that might have been the end of it. But no. She had to get wise with investigators.
Things also might have turned out differently if she had never met ImClone Systems CEO Samuel Waksal, a family friend who dated Stewart’s daughter.
Waksal went to prison for nearly seven years after advising family and friends to dump ImClone shares ahead of a public announcement that the Food and Drug Administration had just rejected its cancer-fighting drug.
Stewart did her time with dignity, reinvented herself following her incarceration and even built up enviable street cred with a younger generation by hanging out with Snoop Dogg. She also became the oldest woman to pose for the Sports Illustrated swim suit edition at age 81.
She remains viciously unrepentant.
“Those prosecutors should have been put a Cuisinart and turned on high,” she said in the Netflix documentary.