Martha Stewart’s career hit bottom after she was found guilty of obstruction and conspiracy charges related to a stock sale and sent to prison.
The new Netflix documentary Martha (out now) looks at the 2004 trial that was referred to by some as a “bitch hunt.”
“Everything she was going to do was going to be perfectly perfect,” friend Kathy Tatlock says in the film. “And I think in a way, it ruined her life.”
Stewart had a rocky marriage with her now ex-husband, publisher Andy Stewart. They divorced in 1990 after 29 years of marriage. But “after Andy left, I really lost myself in work,” Martha says in the doc. She launched a lifestyle empire that was valued at $1.2 billion by 1999. “She was like a superstar,” says attorney Allen Grubman.
Martha Stewart when her stock IPOd.
Martha Stewart/Courtesy of Netflix
It all started to come crashing down in 2001. Martha recalls taking a call during a fuel stop on a flight to Cabo, Mexico, about a friend’s biotech stock. She sold the stock and was later convicted for lying to the FBI during an insider-trading investigation in 2004.
“Guilty, guilty, guilty on all these counts of whatever,” she says in Martha. “My daughter, she fainted when they read the verdict. Poor child.”
“It was so horrifying and incomprehensible,” adds Alexis. “And then I woke up and was, unfortunately, still there.”
“Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,” Martha jibes. “I was a trophy for those idiots.”
Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart/Courtesy of Netflix
The stock for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia plummeted and Martha resigned from the board. She reported to Alderson Federal Prison Camp for a five-month sentencing. She estimates that she lost more than a $1 billion as a result of the scandal.
— When you’re through changing, you’re through
Martha, of course, staged the ultimate comeback. Eleven years after her prison time, Justin Bieber helped kick-start her reinvention. She shocked the audience at the Comedy Central roast of Bieber in 2015 by directing sharp jabs at fellow roasters and herself.
“It catapulted her into a younger audience,” says friend Charlotte Beers.
Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart at the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber in 2015. Christopher Polk/Getty
She sat next to Snoop Dogg, and next thing she knew they were making Bic lighter ads and shooting a cooking show.
“She had lived before that, being worried about what people thought of her and then the worst thing that could possible happen happened. And she survived it,” says Martha Stewart Living founding editor Isolde Motley. “She had been set free by going to prison.”
Martha is now streaming on Netflix.
