MARTHA! MARTHA! MARTHA!: In other news, the roaring ‘90s ended once again on Wednesday afternoon when Martha Stewart was indicted on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, as was her former Merrill Lynch broker Peter Bacanovic (Bacanovic’s assistant Douglas Faneuil, former next-door neighbor of my friend Evan, managed to escape indictment by agreeing to testify against the domestic diva/doyenne.)
Now I’m not going to pretend that I know the case well enough to determine her innocence or guilt. But I do know that Martha’s primary defense, “how can you indict me and not indict Ken Lay?”, is really no defense at all. It’s not an either/or: every case is different, the US attorneys are different, and there’s a good chance it’ll take years to process all of the federal crimes committed in association with The Largest Bankruptcy in US History. And besides, by that rationale I could chop off someone’s head, and then use “how can you convict me if you didn’t convict OJ?” as my legal defense. Martha didn’t help herself either with this self-aggrandizing letter.
The completely insane but always entertaining James Cramer had a memorable rant on “Hardball” the other night, comparing Martha to Pete Rose: both were guilty as sin of relatively benign crimes, but were punished more severely than they would’ve been had they come clean from the start- and their lawyers inexplicably allowed them to stonewall and deny, deny deny (in Rose’s case, to this day). And the best financial journalist alive, Christopher Byron, who had the prescience to write a biography of Stewart a month before her troubles started, draws the OJ parallel as well.
Wait 'til this circus trial starts... it'll make Laci Peterson look like nothing.