Good morning.
Over the weekend, I watched the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix – which she hates. I was surprised to hear my voice – presumably ripped from an earlier documentary or news report – doing part of the voiceover a few times near the start. (The producers didn’t credit me, in much the same way that the producers of The Greatest Night in Pop paid a pittance for access to tapes that my friend David Breskin recorded in the studio and ended up using them to essentially carry the whole film.)
But I digress. This is a column about Martha, who had her career and her company ripped away from her for a crime that—in my opinion—should never have gone to court. I argued at the time that the government was going after “America’s Homemaker” with a baseball bat because she’d acted on a tip from her broker that CEO Sam Waksul was selling his ImClone stock and then tried to hide the dubious crime in a panic. (I wrote a cover story on Martha for BusinessWeek as she was taking her company public.)
The person who led the investigation and brought charges against Martha was James Comey, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Because that jurisdiction covers Wall Street, whoever occupies the role essentially acts as the federal government’s chief prosecutor of white-collar criminals. It’s been a launch pad for many ambitious prosecutors, including Rudy Giuliani. (Eliot Spitzer clerked there and took on Wall Street from Albany, as New York’s Attorney General.)
Comey, of course, was famously fired as FBI director in 2017 by the then-President Donald Trump. He also impacted the course of the 2016 election by sending an open letter to Congress, implying Hillary Clinton might be indicted for sending emails from a private server just days before that election. (She was not.)
Martha Stewart was at the top of her game with a billion-dollar brand that was a role model for multiplatform journalism and commerce. She was the original influencer and an attractive target for anyone trying to make a name for themselves. Did she suffer from hubris and a sense of entitlement? Perhaps. Did she deserve to go to jail for what she did—and forever lose the right to run her company? No.
There’s another lesson, too, in seeing how an aggressive prosecutor motivated by factors other than fairness can wreak havoc on the lives of the people they go after. I think about that as I look out at the choices being made by the incoming Administration – and hope we don’t see more people targeted for who they are, instead of what they’ve done.
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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