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Martha Guilty on all 4 counts...

http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/05/news...ex.htm?cnn=yes

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A jury found Martha Stewart guilty on all four counts against her in her obstruction of justice trial Friday and is expected to serve prison time.

Her ex-broker Peter Bacanovic was found guilty on four of the five charges he faced.

Neither defendant appeared to show any emotion when the verdict was read, though the lead prosecutor appeared to be holding back tears of joy.

Sentencing was set for June 17.

The jury deliberated for three days after a five-week trial.

The panel of eight women and four men began deliberating Wednesday on whether Stewart and her ex-broker, Peter Bacanovic, obstructed justice and lied to the government about her sale of ImClone stock in December 2001.

Stewart, 62, was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements – charges that together carry a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

Bacanovic, 41, was convicted of making false statements, conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice – with a maximum prison term of 25 years. He was acquitted on a charge of making and using of false documents.

Both Stewart and Bacanovic left the courthouse without speaking to reporters. Eyewitnesses said Stewart's daughter Alexis was crying.

Stewart said on her Web site that she would appeal.

But the homemaker turned style setter and media executive could still do jail time.

"Unless this is somehow undone on appeal, she's a felon and she's going to prison," legal analyst Kendall Coffey said.

Prosecutors argued that Stewart sold her ImClone stock only after Bacanovic told his assistant to tip her off that ImClone founder Sam Waksal was trying to sell. Stewart and Bacanovic had told investigators they had an arrangement to sell once the stock fell to $60.

Bacanovic was broker to both Stewart and Waksal, who is serving a seven-year prison term after pleading guilty to securities fraud over his family's sale of ImClone shares.

Bacanovic's former assistant, Douglas Faneuil, the government's star witness in the case, testified that his boss ordered him to pass an inside tip about ImClone to Stewart.

Despite the intense publicity surrounding the trial – the most closely watched of the recent corporate fraud cases – the stock trade at its center involved a relatively small amount of money.

That dumb bitch... good.

Yeah, as I have said before: She couldn't just be satisfied with being mega rich, huh? She is a dumb ho, but gods know that there are other white collar criminals that deserve worse.

thank goodness the media zoo can start to move on.. of course we'll hear when she goes to jail/pays fine or whatever her punishment metes out to be. Then we'll hear about it years later, blah blah blah blah.

IMHO there's too many celebrity cases... says something about society. I don't know what just yet, but it says something.

YAY! :D

After OJ walked, I began to wonder if justice wasn't just blindfolded, but stupid, as well.

Now the long countdown to see if she ever serves a day in the can. :rolleyes:

If she had just come clean about the whole mess in the first place she'd have gotten a slap on the wrist and would be back home making brownies right now.
Now that she's a jailbird, maybe she'll market a line of Martha Stewart shanks.

I always appreciate how 12 common citizens get to level the ground beneath the feet of any other citizen, no matter to what level that ground has been raised up.

Throw her in a cell and let her serve real time.

She's a liar and a cheat and deserves the full sentence she is facing.

that's sucks for her.
i hope they convicted her because they had too much of a reason too.
and not just cuz the want to make an example outta her.
that would really suck.

Quote:

Originally posted by Karby
i hope they convicted her because they had too much of a reason too.
and not just cuz the want to make an example outta her.

She lied to the supreme court. What kind of example would they be setting if they didn't convict her?

She had it all, but got too greedy.

I can see the new colors now in the Everyday line:

Jail Cell Green
Dropped Soap Ecru
Meal Tray Silver
Cellblock Grey.

Meh, she just did what anyone else would have done if told their stock was about to loose value. I'm not saying I think she didn't do anything wrong or she is innocent, just that most of us would have done the same thing. It doesn't matter how much cash you have, you still want to make and keep as much as you can.

Her next magazine...

Martha Stewart Living...In Jail.

Placemats in the mess hall, drapes on the windows. Everyone will want to go to the big house!

Yeah...I secretly was just hoping she'd be convicted... something about her just seems evil

Hahaha got what she deserved.. liked her show though, heh.

She's guilty now, but wait for the appeals. That could take years, so she won't be cringing in the shower anytime soon. Wonder what her attorney told her after losing this round?

Quote:

Originally posted by Holo
I can see the new colors now in the Everyday line:

Jail Cell Green
Dropped Soap Ecru
Meal Tray Silver
Cellblock Grey.

He he he, good stuff there.

Martha got exactly what she deserved, and I'm glad to see that not all celebrities can get away with being greedy as hell.

Its a good thing.

Glad

If it was me or you, we'd already be in the klink.

Do I have to ask "Why is this news?" Common it might be a little funny but does it honestly affect anyone here?

BTW IM Clone is doing pretty well

Irony anyone, ANYONE?

Quote:

Attempts by ImClone founder and former Chief Executive Sam Waksal and close family members to dump ImClone shares just before the company made public the FDA rejection led to Waksal's seven-year prison sentence for insider trading.

...
That was shortly before Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE:BMY - News) agreed to a $2 billion commitment to help develop and co-market Erbitux, and about three months before the bottom dropped out with the late-December FDA rejection.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/040303/healt...e_icahn_2.html

Now, I fully admit I didn't bother to keep up on this case or anything, so maybe she's really guilty. That's besides the point I'm going to make though.

It seems to me that, while on one hand there is the "celebrities are above the law" perception, from public opinion I've seen, most celebrities are presumed guilty simply because they ARE celebrities. That's equally, if not more dangerous than the former perception IMO.

Just to prove I'm all laughs

here's another laugh

http://www.worth1000.com/cache/conte...play=photoshop

Thats funny Astro... :)

Bitch deserved it... no if we can onlt get Dr Phil and Oprah....

Quote:

Originally posted by Astrocloud
Do I have to ask "Why is this news?" Common it might be a little funny but does it honestly affect anyone here?

It sure doesn't affect me. I don't worry about what celebs are doing right or wrong. They are human and make mistakes just like we all do. Some more than others and some less.

I'm awfully glad.

I hope she gets jail time. Let it be a warning to all of the others that think it's okay to engage in this sort of behavior.

Shes 62 now + 20 years shes in a world of hurt.

Quote:

Originally posted by ladyadmin
It sure doesn't affect me. I don't worry about what celebs are doing right or wrong. They are human and make mistakes just like we all do. Some more than others and some less.

It does when the celebrities and high powered people feel that they are above the law and do as they please.

we are all equal under law, no matter how much money one has or what position of power has.

[sarcasm]
It's always a shame when bad things happen to good people. Martha Stewart is an amazing woman and should have been treated as such. It's not fair that she is the envy of so many people, and even more unfair that these jealous ingrates have the nerve to make these incredibly false accusations upon Ms. Stewart. No matter who it happens to, I will never get used to innocent people being condemned, and I shouldn't have to.
[/sarcasm]

Just for the record I was fucking around. She probably is a bitch and is most likely guilty.

I have to ask the same question as I did about Jeffery Archer and his alleged insider trading on the Anglia Television stock...

Why does someone with so much money, risk their freedom just to make some more, in such a stupid way?

Greed. She got greedy.

No sympathy here.

She is greedy and arrogant.

While those are not crimes, her arrogance led her into crime, so hasta la vista, Martha.

Quote:

Originally posted by Xiangsu
It's always a shame when bad things happen to good people. Martha Stewart is an amazing woman and should have been treated as such. It's not fair that she is the envy of so many people, and even more unfair that these jealous ingrates have the nerve to make these incredibly false accusations upon Ms. Stewart. No matter who it happens to, I will never get used to innocent people being condemned, and I shouldn't have to.

1) Have you ever met with Martha personally? Had an in-depth conversation or two? Been to her house? No? Then don't judge her personality from a television show where she has scripts and guidelines to follow.

2) "These incredibly false accusations" must not have been so incredibly false, since the jury found her guilty of every count.

3) I agree with you that you shouldn't have to be accustomed to seeing innocent people be condemned...the problem here is that she's guilty. Do you have proof of her innocence you can share with the jury before it's too late? If not, then you should probably accept the fact that she is doomed to meet the fate she should have expected in the first place: jail-time.

Edit: Glad to see you were just messin' around. I feared for the worst there for awhile.

Quote:

Originally posted by H12
1) Have you ever met with Martha personally? Had an in-depth conversation or two? Been to her house? No? Then don't judge her personality from a television show where she has scripts and guidelines to follow.

I have not, however a close friend used to run her helpdesk, and another was one of her main producers.

She was a bitch incarnate, yelling at my friend for 40 minutes because she didn't know where the space bar was, since the monitor read: press space bar to continue.

I just read this in today's NYPost.

http://nypost.com/commentary/20049.htm

Quote:

SHE LIED HER WAY TO TOP - AND BACK DOWN AGAIN

By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARTHA STEWART

Email Archives
Print Reprint

March 7, 2004 -- 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."

Martha was most likely guilty, but i don’t think that’s why she was charged or convicted. Charges were brought on her to make an example out of someone famous who people generally don’t like -- and it probably helps that she’s a successful woman. Honestly i’m somewhat surprised at the hatefulness expressed in this thread -- none of know Martha, and even if you did and your personality assessments are based on something more than conjecture being a bitch isn’t illegal. Insider trading happens everyday and while I see why the law against it exists I do not see how anyone expects it too be followed -- EVERYONE involved in the stock market is constantly looking for a “hot tip” and it is often rather difficult to see the line between that and breaking the law.

Thanks brianna - I agree. Guilty or not, it's this kind of hatred for someone based on hearsay and fame that, really, as much as we'd like to say the opposite, makes it difficult for them to get a fair trial when people are looking to find them guilty to set an example. Perhaps she was guilty, perhaps she wasn't - and she probably was - I find it disturbing that any person would be made an "example" that celebreties are not above the law. This opens the door wide open to an innocent person being found guilty.

Either way, I think 20 years is definitely too harsh a penalty for her crimes. Prison is (ideally) meant for rehabilitation not punishment, and a couple years at most I think will get the message across just fine. Hopefully the judge will see it that way as well when sentencing.

At 62, its unlikely she would get jail time isnt it? She'll probably get some sort of house curfew thing, where you have to wear the radio bracelet and report to the PO all the time. She is a criminal, but on the whole I dont think the government is in the business of locking up old ladies.