In the age where we are all increasingly stuck to our phone screens, social media influencers are all the rage – telling us what to cook, what to wear and what to buy. But, before all that the ‘original influencer’, Martha Stewart, made a name for herself as the perfect housewife and America’s “mother”.
The brand of the TV personality, writer, chef and businesswoman was so engrained into American culture she became a household name not only in the States but around the world.
In the 1990s her fame and success looked like it would never end as she started a whole range of businesses and became a best-selling author, making bags of cash in the process, and giving her the crown as America’s first made self-made female billionaire.
Although in a dark twist that nobody saw coming, the ‘perfect housewife’ image was far from reality and there was a head-on run-in with the law to come.
Martha came from relatively humble beginnings: her mother was a teacher and her father a businessman who would float between jobs.
When her dad lost his job but there was still income needed in the family, Martha began a career modelling and acted in some TV commercials while still keeping up the gardening and cooking with her mum at home.
However, the traditional life wasn’t something that appealed to the soon-to-be star: “I thought it was pretty fantastic she could do all that, but the cookie-cutter house and the cookie-cutter life was not for me,” Martha once said.
With big ambitions, Martha headed to Barnard College, a part of Columbia University in New York where she went on to meet her first husband, Andrew Stewart.
Having graduated, she moved to Wall Street to become a stockbroker, becoming the only woman in her entire office. Her life in finance wouldn’t last too long, though — after travelling on her honeymoon she fell in love with the world’s cuisine and chose to ditch the banks to start up her own catering company.
And from that day, Martha Stewart grew and grew, writing hundreds of cookbooks and reaching millions around the world selling the cookie-cutter life she never really wanted. She was declared a billionaire by Forbes in 2000, though that has fallen since (Forbes valued her wealth at around $220m in 2015 and more recent reports say it’s around $400m).
But she was thrust into a very different kind of spotlight in 2004 when she came embroiled in a federal case involving insider trading.
The personality was an investor in her friend Sam Waksal’s company ImClone. She recalls that her broker told her to sell her stock in the business to save her losing tens of thousands of dollars.
But six months later Waksal was accused of insider trading, having told members of his family to sell before the stock plummeted. It also looked as though he told some close friends the same thing, bringing Martha into the equation.
She went to trial in 2004 and was found guilty of felony charges of conspiracy to obstruct, of obstruction of an agency proceeding, and of making false statements to federal investigators.
She served five months in prison, two years of supervised release and five months on a tag at home: “I had to do all that cr*p that you see in the movies — you can’t even believe that’s what you’re going through,” she said.
Since being released, her persona has developed, striking up a friendship with rapper Snoop Dogg which has even led to them having their own food show together.