Martha Stewart doesn’t mince words when asked about her felony conviction in Martha, a new Netflix documentary that began streaming today—but she does make it clear she’d like to mince the FBI officials who pursued the case.
“Those prosecutors should have been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high,” Stewart says firmly, when asked about her 2004 court case. You get the sense this isn’t the first time she’s uttered that particular sentence.
Directed by R.J. Cutler, Martha walks viewers through the life and career of the 83-year-old businesswoman, from her childhood, to her successful homemaking guides, to her to billion-dollar company, and, finally, to her infamous incarceration. In the early 2000s, Stewart and other employees of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia were in investigated by the FBI for insider trading. Though Stewart was not personally charged with insider trading, in 2004 she was found guilty on four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. Former FBI director James Comey led the charge on the prosecution. (Comey was fired from the bureau by former president Donald Trump in 2017.)
According to Stewart, Comey unfairly pursued her because of her fame, in order to make the FBI look as though it was doing something about white-collar crime.
“It was so horrifying to me that I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Stewart says in the documentary. “I was a trophy. A prominent woman, the first billionaire woman in America: ‘We got her.’”
Last month, Stewart blasted director R.J. Cutler for including a talking head interview with Comey in his documentary. “Comey says, ‘Oh, she’s going to jail because she lied, not because she committed a crime’—some crap,” Stewart told The Daily Beast. “And [Cutler doesn’t put] underneath, ‘Comey was fired for lying.’”
No interview with Comey appears in the final cut of the documentary, so perhaps Stewart got her wish. That said, Cutler does include archived footage of Comey announcing Stewart’s indictment—so perhaps that’s the moment Stewart was referring to.
After her conviction, Stewart was sentenced to five months in federal prison, and a two years period of supervised release, including five months with an ankle bracelet. The last third of the documentary is mostly dedicated to Stewart’s time behind bars, including excerpts from the diary she kept while there. She even, at one point, was taken to solitary confinement for touching an officer.
“I was dragged to solitary for touching an officer. No food or water for a day,” Stewart says. “This was Camp Cupcake, remember? That was the nickname. Camp Cupcake. It was not a cupcake.”
