SHE lied to her family, and she lied to her friends and business partners.
She lied to the FBI and to the SEC. She lied to Congress, to the
prosecutors, to the judge, and even to her own lawyers. In time, she wound
up lying to the whole of America and ultimately to the entire world.
For more than 40 years, lying had been a way of life for Martha Stewart.
But
in the end, she lied to 12 people too many, and Friday, shortly after 3
p.m., a jury of her peers brought Martha Stewart's lifetime of lying to an
end.
Now, her image lies in ruins, her career has been destroyed, and her
580-employee company faces almost certain collapse.
All this happened because Martha Stewart never learned - in anything more
than an abstract and theoretical way - the difference between the truth
and
a lie. Instead, she learned early in life that b.s. sells, and she peddled
her con-job spiel wherever it fetched the highest price.
Martha Stewart grew up the second of six children in a dysfunctional,
tension-filled family of working class Polish-Americans. Her entire
childhood was spent teetering on poverty's edge in a cramped row house in
the Newark suburb of Nutley, N.J.
Martha's father, Eddie Kostyra, was a nasty-tempered and narcissistic
boozer
who couldn't hold a job, and who blamed the world for his own
shortcomings.
Martha's mother, also named Martha, went through her days in a cloud of
sullen resentment over what her husband had turned out to be, and spent a
lot of her time in a house dress and curlers at the kitchen table,
smoking,
drinking beer and playing cards with her girlfriends.
Martha yearned desperately for something better than this for herself.
So, in adulthood, she reinvented her past into an "I Remember Mama"
fantasy
powerful enough that it mesmerized the world. This fantasy became the
foundation of her entire business empire, repackaged as "truth" in the
pages
of her books and magazines.
AS a young career woman in New York in the bull-market '60s, Martha
gravitated to Wall Street, where she landed a job as a broker. The
fly-by-night firm where she worked became heavily involved in a stock
promotion that triggered a probe by New York State Attorney General Louis
Lefkowitz.
In the course of the stock promotion, Martha put her friends into the
shares. Then when the market crashed at the start of the '70s, she
reassured
her clients that everything would work out fine and to stay fully
invested.
Meanwhile, she herself secretly bailed out and quit the firm (which soon
went bankrupt, anyway). Thereafter, she fled with her husband to the
Connecticut suburbs.
In celebrity-filled Westport, Conn., Martha started a catering service.
Her
business partner, a high-fashion model named Norma Collier, subsequently
claimed Martha lied to her about the business, stole clients behind her
back, and ultimately drove her from the business entirely.
Martha's career in business is festooned with similar complaints. After
she
became a success, she bought a second home for herself in Westport. She
then
misled her business partner, Kmart, into thinking she didn't yet own the
house, and that Kmart would get a lot of valuable publicity if the
retailer
gave her the money to buy it, which Kmart agreed to do. Propelled by such
deceptions, Martha Stewart began to market a false version of her life as
America's "perfect woman" - the hyper-competent, ultra-organized,
perfectly
at ease doyenne of gracious living.
THE message resonated with harried housewives who dreamed of living their
own lives the same way. Some read her books and magazines as "how to"
guides; others just leafed their pages as escapist entertainment. Either
way, the demand for Martha's messages proved insatiable, spawning an
entire
media conglomerate based on celebrating the Perfect American Woman, as
performed by Martha Stewart.
In the process, Martha began to mistake the gracious and super-competent
woman she was pretending to be with the disorganized, short-tempered and
hassled businesswoman she actually was.
When New York state tax examiners sent her a bill for back taxes in 1994,
she claimed she didn't owe the money because she hadn't been in New York
on
the days in question.
In fact, she couldn't convincingly prove where she had been at all because
her personal travel records were in chaos, and she had not even bothered
to
keep a day-planner of her activities. Her own testimony in the case, based
on nothing more than scraps of paper and travel vouchers from limousine
services, wound up being impeached by articles and photographs in her own
magazines, which showed she had indeed been in New York on the very days
she
had insisted the opposite. A Tax Court judge pronounced her testimony in
the
case "non-credible" and all but called her a liar.
AFTER fighting with Martha for six years, the New York Division of
Taxation
won a final appeal in the State Tax Court of Appeals, which ruled against
her in 2000, and hit her with a bill of $221,677.
Seeking to keep the private reality of her life hidden from public view,
Martha Stewart grew increasingly challenging and defiant toward anyone who
dared peek behind the curtain of her false public persona. In this way she
was able to deflect more than isolated criticism of her behavior in the
press.
But when federal investigators in the ImClone affair asked her on Feb. 4,
2002, for some simple and straight answers about her fishy-looking sale of
even a relative handful of ImClone shares on Dec. 27, 2001, she had
already
convinced herself that she'd done nothing wrong because she was, after
all,
Martha Stewart, the perfect woman, who by definition is incapable of doing
wrong.
So she simply showed the feds the other face of Janus, and told them a
lie.
And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks became months, it became
easier and easier for her to believe she was telling the truth - and
easier
and easier for the feds to see she was lying. And in that way she sealed
her
fate. And now she's going to prison, with her sentencing set for June 17.
And though she will probably keep insisting on her innocence until the
door
slams behind her, only the diminishing and teary-eyed members of her cult
will be waving her goodbye, wailing at the "injustice" and the "outrage"
of
jailing the criminal liar who betrayed them. SHE lied to her family, and
she
lied to her friends and business partners. She lied to the FBI and to the
SEC. She lied to Congress, to the prosecutors, to the judge, and even to
her
own lawyers. In time, she wound up lying to the whole of America and
ultimately to the entire world.
For more than 40 years, lying had been a way of life for Martha Stewart.
But
in the end, she lied to 12 people too many, and Friday, shortly after 3
p.m., a jury of her peers brought Martha Stewart's lifetime of lying to an
end.
Now, her image lies in ruins, her career has been destroyed, and her
580-employee company faces almost certain collapse.
All this happened because Martha Stewart never learned - in anything more
than an abstract and theoretical way - the difference between the truth
and
a lie. Instead, she learned early in life that b.s. sells, and she peddled
her con-job spiel wherever it fetched the highest price.
Martha Stewart grew up the second of six children in a dysfunctional,
tension-filled family of working class Polish-Americans. Her entire
childhood was spent teetering on poverty's edge in a cramped row house in
the Newark suburb of Nutley, N.J.
Martha's father, Eddie Kostyra, was a nasty-tempered and narcissistic
boozer
who couldn't hold a job, and who blamed the world for his own
shortcomings.
Martha's mother, also named Martha, went through her days in a cloud of
sullen resentment over what her husband had turned out to be, and spent a
lot of her time in a house dress and curlers at the kitchen table,
smoking,
drinking beer and playing cards with her girlfriends.
Martha yearned desperately for something better than this for herself.
So, in adulthood, she reinvented her past into an "I Remember Mama"
fantasy
powerful enough that it mesmerized the world. This fantasy became the
foundation of her entire business empire, repackaged as "truth" in the
pages
of her books and magazines.
AS a young career woman in New York in the bull-market '60s, Martha
gravitated to Wall Street, where she landed a job as a broker. The
fly-by-night firm where she worked became heavily involved in a stock
promotion that triggered a probe by New York State Attorney General Louis
Lefkowitz.
In the course of the stock promotion, Martha put her friends into the
shares. Then when the market crashed at the start of the '70s, she
reassured
her clients that everything would work out fine and to stay fully
invested.
Meanwhile, she herself secretly bailed out and quit the firm (which soon
went bankrupt, anyway). Thereafter, she fled with her husband to the
Connecticut suburbs.
In celebrity-filled Westport, Conn., Martha started a catering service.
Her
business partner, a high-fashion model named Norma Collier, subsequently
claimed Martha lied to her about the business, stole clients behind her
back, and ultimately drove her from the business entirely.
Martha's career in business is festooned with similar complaints. After
she
became a success, she bought a second home for herself in Westport. She
then
misled her business partner, Kmart, into thinking she didn't yet own the
house, and that Kmart would get a lot of valuable publicity if the
retailer
gave her the money to buy it, which Kmart agreed to do. Propelled by such
deceptions, Martha Stewart began to market a false version of her life as
America's "perfect woman" - the hyper-competent, ultra-organized,
perfectly
at ease doyenne of gracious living.
THE message resonated with harried housewives who dreamed of living their
own lives the same way. Some read her books and magazines as "how to"
guides; others just leafed their pages as escapist entertainment. Either
way, the demand for Martha's messages proved insatiable, spawning an
entire
media conglomerate based on celebrating the Perfect American Woman, as
performed by Martha Stewart.
In the process, Martha began to mistake the gracious and super-competent
woman she was pretending to be with the disorganized, short-tempered and
hassled businesswoman she actually was.
When New York state tax examiners sent her a bill for back taxes in 1994,
she claimed she didn't owe the money because she hadn't been in New York
on
the days in question.
In fact, she couldn't convincingly prove where she had been at all because
her personal travel records were in chaos, and she had not even bothered
to
keep a day-planner of her activities. Her own testimony in the case, based
on nothing more than scraps of paper and travel vouchers from limousine
services, wound up being impeached by articles and photographs in her own
magazines, which showed she had indeed been in New York on the very days
she
had insisted the opposite. A Tax Court judge pronounced her testimony in
the
case "non-credible" and all but called her a liar.
AFTER fighting with Martha for six years, the New York Division of
Taxation
won a final appeal in the State Tax Court of Appeals, which ruled against
her in 2000, and hit her with a bill of $221,677.
Seeking to keep the private reality of her life hidden from public view,
Martha Stewart grew increasingly challenging and defiant toward anyone who
dared peek behind the curtain of her false public persona. In this way she
was able to deflect more than isolated criticism of her behavior in the
press.
But when federal investigators in the ImClone affair asked her on Feb. 4,
2002, for some simple and straight answers about her fishy-looking sale of
even a relative handful of ImClone shares on Dec. 27, 2001, she had
already
convinced herself that she'd done nothing wrong because she was, after
all,
Martha Stewart, the perfect woman, who by definition is incapable of doing
wrong.
So she simply showed the feds the other face of Janus, and told them a
lie.
And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks became months, it became
easier and easier for her to believe she was telling the truth - and
easier
and easier for the feds to see she was lying. And in that way she sealed
her
fate. And now she's going to prison, with her sentencing set for June 17.
And though she will probably keep insisting on her innocence until the
door
slams behind her, only the diminishing and teary-eyed members of her cult
will be waving her goodbye, wailing at the "injustice" and the "outrage"
of
jailing the criminal liar who betrayed them.
|
