Across the Great Divide
Class
Martha Guilty? Surely You Jest
O n a chilly morning in late January, twenty-odd members of the media clutched their press passes outside the federal courthouse on the first day of the most exclusive business hearing in recent history — the Martha Stewart trial. Six weeks later, Stewart, who assembled a billion-dollar media empire, would be convicted on all counts: conspiring, obstructing justice, and two counts of making false statements.
I never would have guessed it at the time. Standing on the courthouse steps, I’d already determined each charge a sham. My coverage would appear on the Web site of Reason magazine, the libertarian journal enjoyed mainly by political zealots and intellectual reprobates, many as radically anti-authoritarian as myself. Martha Stewart’s indictment, I thought, was an egregious example of government overreach. Since the U.S. attorney’s office failed to impeach Stewart for insider trading, I believed they’d detained her for being, in a large sense, an insider.
I didn’t expect other reporters to agree.
But as I squeezed into the second row of the press box, past some of journalism’s marquee players — Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, NBC’s Anne Thomson, and New York magazine’s Michael Wolff, to name a few — I recognized sympathies unmistakably concordant with my own. She’s a sacrificial lamb, I heard, a hand-picked deterrent. The government’s front-page story.
I met Henry Blodget the morning that Douglas Faneuil — the young Merrill Lynch turncoat who triggered Stewart’s indictment — took the stand. Wiry and blond, with wide-set, world-weary eyes, Blodget sat to my right, his knees bouncing with nervous energy. I knew who he was: a disgraced securities analyst turned Slate reporter. Accused of misleading middle-class investors with faulty research, Blodget had been fined $4 million and thrown out of the industry a year before. A bizarre résumé for a job in journalism, but he spoke to my beliefs.
“So how many tax dollars will the government waste on their latest witch hunt?” I asked my benchmate.
Henry smiled.
I liked the guy. He was articulate and specific. His theories seemed insightful and compelling. But more than anything, they resonated. Reporters scanned his blog on a nightly basis. Dominick Dunne spent morning breaks reading his dispatches. Michael Wolff cited Blodget’s analyses in a New York Metro piece. Even the Wall Street Journal’s Bids and Offers section, which delivers the market’s latest gossip, mentioned him in its weekly column: it linked the stock price of Stewart’s public company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to Blodget’s “Martha Meter,” which rated the likelihood of her conviction. The former analyst kept the lever beneath the 50 percent mark every day but one: after the prosecution’s closing arguments. Once the defense attorney Robert Morvillo, delivered his Confederacy of Dunces speech, the lever lurched safely back into the black. I could see how Henry had reached guru status. He gave us what we wanted.
And what the trial reporters wanted, it appears, was to keep their circle closed. Out of laziness or conceit — or both — many of us failed to step outside the courthouse and talk to everyday people, to balance our opinions and write more reflective stories. We spent the lunch hour huddled around a single cafeteria table, enriching the day’s events with colorful observations: Martha’s facial ticks, the swirl of her cowlick, the gusto of her green tea swigs. Dunne and I debated which juror loved Martha more — his pick was number six (the lovely ex-publisher and apparent cashmere sweater collector), mine number four (the Prada-toting wind-swept blond known among court reporters as “the sailor”). Between our cribbed notes and sorry courtroom psychology, we missed the story: that average Americans believe lying is wrong, even if the culprit is a feminist icon and homemaking pioneer. Even — especially — if she’s rich.
As the trial unfolded, the press split between those who thought her a liar and a cheat, but believed the jury would acquit, and the loyalists. Some, like Toobin, did a 180. With her possible impeachment in mind, Saint Martha had seduced the normally fair-minded New Yorker journalist into writing a puff piece that insinuated, as he later put it, that she was “getting a raw deal.” By the end, it was clear Toobin got the raw deal. On the day of the verdict, with the benefit of hindsight, he was incensed enough to complain bitterly on the Paula Zahn show: “Martha Stewart lied in my face, the way she lied to those FBI agents and SEC lawyers,” he said.
The apologists played down Stewart’s nastiness and conceit, because, as Blodget implied in his dispatches, who cared? Hadn’t Martha — not to mention her shareholders — already paid for her petty crimes? Didn’t anyone who succeeded in the magazine world, as Wolff put it in his October 21 column, “deserve a type of immunity?”
Most of the jet set agreed. I recently asked Dunne about the word on the dinner party scene, the pre-conviction opinions of Martha’s yacht-riding, chaise-lounging magnificent inner sanctum.
“People thought that she lied, but should get off anyway,” Dunne said, then added after a pause, “that the punishment should not exceed the crime.”
Interesting.
Contrast that with something another journalist told me, an Italian American with a boxer’s physique who grew up in a working-class family outside the confines of New York City, someone you’re not likely to see tooling around in a white Jaguar looking for crystal-studded wall-sockets. Charles Gasparino, the Wall Street Journal reporter who broke both the story of Fanueil’s confession and news of the subpoena of Mariana Pasternak — the friend who ratted Martha out — spent his free time during the trial bar-hopping in Brooklyn, interviewing regulars about their perception of Stewart. “They thought she was guilty as sin, but would get off scot-free,” he told me.
Why?
“For one, the general public thinks rich people get away with everything. For two, you Martha supporters gave them no reason to think otherwise. Who do you write for again? Unreasonable magazine?”
Charles was right. The courthouse press had identified so closely with Martha — as a celebrity, media magnate, and fallen star — that we’d failed to connect with the jurors. She was part of the elite we write about, a member of the same clique as many of our sources. We’d seen her lifestyle firsthand; we’d interviewed the idols, attended the swanky parties, and told “the little guys” what to think. How telling that the media elite failed to consider that the jury, which varied in age, race, background, and class, had little in common with Martha.
When Judge Cedarbaum finally read the jury’s verdict, which found Martha Stewart and Peter Bacanovic guilty on eight out of nine counts, a gasp ripped through the courtroom, as though no one could believe what now seems obvious: that average Americans might take offense at Stewart’s predilections — billing Omnimedia stockholders for ten-dollar lattés and exotic birthday trips; calling other people’s assistants “little shits.” Or that Morvillo’s defense, by means of rhetorical tricks rather than evidence, might insult the jury’s intelligence. Or that no matter how you slice it, to most people fifty thousand dollars will never be “pennies.”
Contrast the jury spokesman Chappell Hartridge’s now famous press statement — “Maybe this is a victory for the little guys. Maybe now the bigwigs will think twice before executing these kinds of trades” — with the sentiment expressed by Wolff in his February 16 column: “We are not that far from being in this with Martha.”
The evidence was clear, the truth rather simple. Martha lied and thought she’d get away with it. We’ll never know whether the jury based its decision on something more than just facts, but that’s not the point. The moral of this story is our own bias, the press’s failure to turn the mirror away from our own faces and reflect the setting’s true scenery. Because in the federal courthouse, what mattered were the opinions of twelve randomly selected members of the U.S. populace who, right or wrong, had a diva to convict.
As for the original crime, that of abusing one’s insider status, the press is as guilty as Martha.
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