Good morning.
Over the weekend, I watched the Martha Stewart documentary on Netflix – which she hates. I used to be shocked to listen to my voice – presumably ripped from an earlier documentary or information report – doing a part of the voiceover a couple of occasions close to the beginning. (The producers didn’t credit score me, in a lot the identical approach that the producers of The Biggest Night time in Pop paid a pittance for entry to tapes that my buddy David Breskin recorded within the studio and ended up utilizing them to basically carry the entire movie.)
However I digress. It is a column about Martha, who had her profession and her firm ripped away from her for against the law that—in my view—ought to by no means have gone to court docket. I argued on the time that the federal government was going after “America’s Homemaker” with a baseball bat as a result of she’d acted on a tip from her dealer that CEO Sam Waksul was promoting his ImClone inventory after which tried to cowl the doubtful crime in a panic. (I wrote a cowl story on Martha for BusinessWeek as she was taking her firm public.)
The one who led the investigation and introduced expenses towards Martha was James Comey, then U.S. Legal professional for the Southern District of New York. As a result of that jurisdiction covers Wall Road, whoever occupies the function basically acts because the federal authorities’s chief prosecutor of white-collar criminals. It’s been a launch pad for a lot of bold prosecutors, together with Rudy Giuliani. (Eliot Spitzer clerked there and took on Wall Road from Albany, as New York’s Legal professional Common.)
Comey, in fact, was famously fired as FBI director in 2017 by the then-President Donald Trump. He additionally impacted the course of the 2016 election by sending an open letter to Congress, implying Hillary Clinton may be indicted for sending emails from a non-public server simply days earlier than that election. (She was not.)
Martha Stewart was on the prime of her recreation with a billion-dollar model that was a task mannequin for multiplatform journalism and commerce. She was the unique influencer and a horny goal for anybody attempting to make a reputation for themselves. Did she undergo from hubris and a way of entitlement? Maybe. Did she need to go to jail for what she did—and endlessly lose the proper to run her firm? No.
There’s one other lesson, too, in seeing how an aggressive prosecutor motivated by components apart from equity can wreak havoc on the lives of the folks they go after. I take into consideration that as I look out on the selections being made by the incoming Administration – and hope we don’t see extra folks focused for who they’re, as a substitute of what they’ve accomplished.
Extra information beneath.
Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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