Why did Martha Stewart go to prison? What did she say?

Martha Stewart has been known as the queen of home decor, crafts, and cooking for decades, and she recently expanded her following thanks to her unlikely friendship with Snoop Dogg and her selfie in a thirst trap.

In the early 2000s, however, Stewart made headlines for something completely different — an insider trading scandal that landed her in federal prison for five months.

83-year-old Stewart did not mince words about her time in prison in the trailer for her upcoming documentary Martha, which will be released on Netflix on October 30.

“It was so horrible for me to have to go through this — to be a trophy for these idiots in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” she said. She later said, “These prosecutors should have been put in Cuisinart and burned.”

Stewart said she had to “climb out of the hole” after her time in prison.

There is no doubt that after being released she hit the ground running, going back to my journalThe Martha Stewart Life and the launch of The Martha Stewart Show and The Apprentice: Martha Stewart in 2005.

Over the past two decades, she has worked on a dizzying number of projects.

She has produced several cookbooks and television shows, including “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party” on VH1 and “Martha Knows Best” on HGTV, and has been involved in many entrepreneurial endeavors, including launching a line of products at Macy’s, and recently introduced her own brand of CBD health gummies. She recently said on TODAY with Hoda and Jenna that her 100th book will be an autobiography.

Stewart said in the documentary that she is grateful that her life did not follow a traditional path.

“The cookie cutter house and the cookie cutter life were not for me,” she said in the trailer.

“I could have just been an unhappy housewife,” she also said. “But I didn’t let that happen to me and I’m so happy it didn’t.”

Keep reading to learn more about one chapter of Stewart’s life, her time in prison following an insider trading scandal.

Why did Martha Stewart go to prison?

In June 2003, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Stewart and her broker, Peter Bakanovich.

The SEC alleged that Stewart engaged in illegal insider trading two years ago when she sold all of her stock in the biopharmaceutical company ImClone.

According to the complaint, Bakanowicz told Stewart when ImClone CEO Sam Waksal and his daughter, Aliza Waksal, placed sell orders on their shares of ImClone, indicating that the company’s stock price was about to drop. According to the SEC complaint, the Vaksals’ decision to sell the shares was not public information.

By calling Stewart to tell her about the Vaksals’ sale, Bakanovich violated his employer Merrill Lynch’s insider trading policy and the Securities Fraud and Insider Trading Act of 1988, according to the SEC complaint.

Acting on that information, Stewart sold all of her nearly 4,000 ImClone shares and thus avoided a loss of about $45,000, according to the SEC.

The complaint also alleged that Stewart and Bakanovych “repeatedly” lied to authorities about what they had done and tried to cover up their illegal activities.

“Stewart lied when she said she didn’t remember Bakanovich telling her that any of the Vaksals were selling their ImClone stock, and Bakanovich lied when he said he didn’t tell Stewart that Vaksal was selling his ImClone stock,” the filing said. complaints

According to the SEC, Stewart tampered with a piece of evidence by redacting the content of an incriminating message about her ImClone insider trading.

Stewart and Bakanovych pleaded not guilty.

After a six-week trial, Stewart was found guilty in March 2004 of four counts of conspiracy, obstruction and two counts of making false statements, according to Associated Press.

In September, she was sentenced to five months at the federal Alderson Camp, a minimum-security women’s prison in West Virginia that housed about 1,000 inmates at the time, according to a release from Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Bakanovich was also found guilty of those four counts, as well as perjury for lying under oath to the SEC. He was also sentenced to five months in prison.

Stewart found herself in prison in October 2004 and was released in March 2005. She then spent two years on supervised release, five months of which were spent on house arrest, according to a release from Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Under the terms of his house arrest, Stewart was allowed to leave his Westchester County home for 48 hours a week to work. NBC News. She also had to wear an ankle bracelet.

In April 2005, a judge denied Stewart’s request to end her five months of house arrest early or to increase the time she was allowed to leave the house for work to 80 hours a week.

“House arrest is established as an alternative to imprisonment. It is intended to be restrictive,” Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum wrote Associated Press. “I see no reason to change the sentence.

Stewart and Bakanovich later appealed to have their convictions overturned, but in January 2006 a federal appeals court upheld their convictions. NBC News.

What did Stewart say about her time in prison? Stewart talked about her time behind bars in Interview of 2017 on Katie Couric’s podcast, calling being in prison a “very, very horrible thing.”

“It was horrible, and no one — no one — should have to go through that kind of abuse, really, except for murderers and a few other categories,” Stewart told the former TODAY host.

“What can you make lemons out of lemonade? Does what hurts you make you stronger? No. None of these proverbs fit at all. It’s a terrible experience,” she continued.

This does not mean that Stewart has erased all traces of her time in prison. She once admitted that she kept a memento of her imprisonment, a poncho that a cellmate had crocheted for her.

she wore a poncho on the day she was released from prison, and later showed off a knitted item on her first day back at work at Martha Stewart Living in 2005.

“A friend of mine made this, a wonderful woman,” she said, showing her workers the poncho, according to reports New York Times. “The yarn came from the commissary. The night before I left she gave it to me—unwrapped because there was no wrapping paper—and said, “Wear it for good health.”

Stuart said People in 2020 she still has a poncho in the attic.

The lifestyle guru also got her time in prison when she launched a nasty product in 2021. TikTok videoshe said she was selling an exact replica of a nativity scene she made in a pottery class while “at camp.”

“If you want to give a really nice and special gift this Christmas with a little street cred, these are all inspired by — guess what — a set I made when I was incarcerated,” she said in the video.

For additional authenticity, she noted that her prisoner number is displayed on the bottom of the nativity scene.