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Back in 2002, Martha Stewart made headlines for aggressively chopping a cabbage in an effort to avoid speaking of insider-trading allegations. “I want to focus on my salad,” she said through tight lips. Fast-forward more than a decade later and Stewart is still trying to change the focus to more flattering aspects of her life. Or in other words, focus on her salad.
In an interview with the New York Times, Stewart apparently spent around 30 minutes complaining about Martha, the Netflix documentary made about her. Calling the second part of the movie “a bit lazy,” Stewart took issue with the way director R.J. Cutler portrayed her.
“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused. I hate those last scenes. Hate them,” she told the Times, adding that she was limping because she had just had an operation on her Achilles tendon, a detail that the director omitted to her chagrin.
Indeed, Stewart might have the titular role in said Martha, but that doesn’t mean she’s finding herself in all that flattering of a biopic. She said that despite her having three cameras on her, the director would choose “to use the ugliest angle” and ignore her protests to use other ones.
The soundtrack was not spared criticism, as Stewart called out the usage of “some lousy classical score,” instead of using mostly rap, which she had deemed an “essential part of the film.” She had suggested that her friend Snoop Dogg or Dr. Dre score the film.
Expressing dismay that some of her more exciting stories were cut, her grandchildren weren’t mentioned, and the allure of her magazines wasn’t touched upon, Stewart expressed her annoyance that her prison sentence got so much attention.
Stewart spent five months, from October 2004 to March 2005, in a minimum-security prison for charges related to insider trading. “I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” she said in the Netflix documentary, claiming that she was a target because of her title as the first self-made billionaire woman in America.
She said of prison that it was “not a good experience and it doesn’t make you stronger” to Katie Couric in 2017. Stewart has since made her comeback, and it appears she doesn’t want to linger on that dip too much.
“It was not that important,” she told the Times. “The trial and the actual incarceration was less than two years out of an 83-year life. I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth,” she said, adding that the trial was so dull that the judge fell asleep.
Indeed, it seems as if over time, Stewart has changed her take on her sentence a bit. In Martha, she calls her daytime show a venture that “missed the point of Martha Stewart. A live audience, crummy music, that was more like prison than being at Alderson.”
That being said, Stewart praised the first part of the documentary to the Times. She noted that young women have told her that watching the film “gave them a strength they didn’t know they had.” And that was the point of the project.
“That’s what I wanted the documentary to be. It shouldn’t be me boasting about inner strength and any of that crap. It should be about showing that you can get through life and still be yourself,” she concluded.
