EX-HUBBY SAW FALL COMING (Martha)

New York Post ^ | 3/08/04 | JOHN LEHMANN

[BlessedBeGod]

My point is no matter what the federal sentencing guidelines mandate, it is sill to put this 60 year old woman behind bars when the government could be spending her money on foolish projects.

And just how can the government take her money and spend it?

[Miss Marple]

Oh, you are right. It is Fastow. Skilling has been indicted, hasn't he?

[PBRSTREETGANG]

EX-HUBBY SAW FALL COMING

Let me guess, he saw it coming right around September 21st.

[angkor]

Imelda Marcos

Leona Helmsley

Martha Stewart

Peas in a pod.

[dwilli]

If the guideline permitted the government to do so, fine hell out of the Martha Stewart Empire.

It's dumb that the courts do not have this option.

[Buffalo Head]

"I cannot see any gain from this woman doing prison time. The government needs money........."

Get serious! Justice was dealt to someone who lied to federal officials to cover up illegal activities. Your reasoning is similar to those who defended William Jefferson Clinton.

"It's just about sex", "It's just about money", etc. Shame on you.

[dalereed]

"I understand all that but to put her in an orange jumpsuit
is silly"

They should give her life without parole for the unkept mop on her head if for no other reason.

[BlessedBeGod]

It's dumb that the courts do not have this option.

Well, let's fine all criminals then and send nobody to jail. Just think of all the lovely money they'd have to spend, and all the money they'd save on prison expenses.

[leadpenny]

Martha would prefer you call the color of that jumpsuit "pumpkin"!

Thanks! :)

[leadpenny]

What's that old saying about meeting the same people on the way down as you met going up?

She met the jury.

[dwilli]

That's just a dumbass statement. Do you really think
the streets and neighborhoods are safer because Martha Stewart is occupying prison space?

[from occupied ga]

The government needs money more than the self-satisfaction of putting her behind bars,

The "government" is made up of people who need self satisfaction. In fact the reason they're into government work is that it's not terribly challenging, gives good job security (after all if you're in private industry and what you're doing is't popular, you go out of business. If you're in government work and what you're doing isn't popular, then you just raise taxes some more and send your JBTs to collect the cash) Generally speaking government bureaucrats are very much into self satisfaction. Going after Martha Stewart was totally an ego an publicity move.

It was a pretty sure thing too, because most New Yorkers are the among the most envious and jealous of Americans. Proof you ask? Their culture is one of envy. They relentlessly elect liberal democrats who run on the politics of envy.

[dwilli]

The Black juror who got camera fever after the decision
said the jury was sending a message with their decision,trying to make an example of her

I don't recall that being a jury's function. His statements will come into play on appeal, assuming
Stewart gets a better lawyer.

[OldFriend]

In this case the federal law mandates the maximum allowed.

The Judge has discretion up to five years on each count. He is permitted to sentence her to probation or any amount of time.

IMO, a jail cell would be appropriate.

[OldFriend]

So then you agreed that impeachment was only about sex?

[Guillermo]

This is her fault, not the government's.

Finally, some common sense.

She should get what everyone else convicted of the same thing gets. No more, no less.

[BlessedBeGod]

That's just a dumbass statement. Do you really think the streets and neighborhoods are safer because Martha Stewart is occupying prison space?

I wonn't tell you what your statements are. I'm a lady.

This sends a message that even someone like Martha Stewart has to pay the price for her crimes. And she is a criminal.

That will help cut down on crimes like this in the future. And that will make stockholders and stock buyers safer.

[leadpenny]

The judge accepted the jury's decision.

She is an arrogant liar and deserves jail time.

[dwilli]

No, I think Bill Clinton should have resigned because
he demeaned the Oval Office.

I assume you believe Oliver North should have gone to prison also?

[dennisw]

She Lied Her Way To Top - And Back Down Again [Martha Stewart]
New York Post ^ | March 7, 2004 | CHRISTOPHER BYRON


Posted on 03/07/2004 8:20:39 AM EST by John Jorsett


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.

Post business columnist Christopher Byron is the author of "Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia."