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Very few ex-cons get sentenced to house arrest in a $16 million, 153-acre estate or receive a standing ovation when they return to work. But then again, very few convicted criminals manage to convince the public that their crimes were worth applauding.
Home decorating maven Martha Stewart appears to be the exception to this rule. Despite having served a five-month prison sentence for her conviction of obstructing justice and lying to the government about an insider-trading stock scandal, the 63-year-old Stewart has reappeared on the nation’s television screens looking better than ever and poised to restart her march towards winning the hearts and emptying the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.
Which raises the question: When it comes to celebrity trials, why do we even bother? After all, whenever there’s a celebrity crime—and truth be known, there are enough of them these days—the end result invariably seems not to be punishment but simply be more wealth, adulation and fawning media coverage for the convicted celebrity than ever before. Not to mention the fattening of someone’s bottom line.
In Martha’s case, the story goes like this: In March of 2004, Stewart, one of the most successful women in American business, was convicted of lying about the insider sale of 4,000 shares of ImClone, a biotechnology company run by longtime friend that was working on a drug for cancer. After two unsuccessful attempts to secure a new trial to overturn her conviction, she took a calculated gamble that by choosing to go to prison, the damage to her name and the share price of the company she founded, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, could be minimized.
By all accounts, it was a gamble that has paid off. Looking tanned, rested and ready, Stewart emerged last week from her stay in a minimum-security prison with her time served, a company that was worth more than double its value from the day she went in and no less than two television shows and a book deal in her future. Her employees, many of whom watched their colleagues be laid off in the wake of Stewart’s conviction, applauded her happily. Luckily for her, she will also get to spend the rest of her sentence in her country estate while she goes back to work.
In fact, if you put aside the fact that she had committed a crime, you could be forgiven for thinking she had simply executed a brilliant marketing plan, replete with all of the ingredients necessary to drive consumers to action and generate iron-clad brand loyalty.
While you won’t find it the syllabus of any Advertising 101 classes in business school, the plan—go to prison, say all the right things when you get out, and then play on the sympathies of average Americans who hate to see their heroes imprisoned by government agents—is almost guaranteed to boost corporate profits while elevating the status of the celebrity to heights never before dreamed. In fact, considering that before her prison sentence many consumers were beginning to grow tired of the many products under her name and now her products are expected to see a strong increase in sales, going to prison just might be the best thing that ever happened for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s shareholders.
The problem is, beyond a simple tale of misdeeds and redemption, there’s a much darker side to Stewart’s story. After all, the crime she was convicted of—lying to the government about selling a stock that was about to tank—came about as a result of her speculating in the shares of a company working on a cancer drug, hardly a noble or generous act. Even worse, when confronted about it, she lied about it in an effort to boost the fortunes of her own company, regardless of the ethical implications.
And then there’s the way Stewart’s release from prison and subsequent profit-making points out the two-tiered class system this country has when it comes to criminal rehabilitation. While Stewart was able to secure a comfortable parole and a return to $900,000-a-year salary, most Americans convicted of a felony like she was have a hard enough time simply finding a place to live and job to pay for it. In Illinois, for example, nearly three-fifths of prison parolees are without work, while the number is higher in the predominately African-American South and West sides. Nationwide, the numbers are much the same, with as many as two-thirds of employers saying they would not consider hiring an ex-offender.
During the speech to her employees, Stewart made it a point to say that she had had the “tremendous privilege” of meeting a cross-section of people in prison and that she had “learned a great deal about our country” as a result of her incarceration. But a recent poll conducted by the Gallup Organization found that 59 percent of Americans are either “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the moral and ethical climate in this country, with only 7 percent rated themselves as “very satisfied.”
Perhaps if Martha Stewart had spent more time in prison instead of being allowed to chase her company’s bottom line at the expense of everything else, those numbers might have changed a little bit for the better. And the lessons Stewart and many of her fellow Americans need to learn—about greed and lying and ethical considerations—might not have been lost in our current rush to embrace her and forgive her for crimes we say we’re not happy about.
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Mark W. Anderson is an independent journalist and writer based in Chicago. Visit him at http://thesentimentalist.com.
Home decorating maven Martha Stewart appears to be the exception to this rule. Despite having served a five-month prison sentence for her conviction of obstructing justice and lying to the government about an insider-trading stock scandal, the 63-year-old Stewart has reappeared on the nation’s television screens looking better than ever and poised to restart her march towards winning the hearts and emptying the pocketbooks of millions of Americans.
Which raises the question: When it comes to celebrity trials, why do we even bother? After all, whenever there’s a celebrity crime—and truth be known, there are enough of them these days—the end result invariably seems not to be punishment but simply be more wealth, adulation and fawning media coverage for the convicted celebrity than ever before. Not to mention the fattening of someone’s bottom line.
In Martha’s case, the story goes like this: In March of 2004, Stewart, one of the most successful women in American business, was convicted of lying about the insider sale of 4,000 shares of ImClone, a biotechnology company run by longtime friend that was working on a drug for cancer. After two unsuccessful attempts to secure a new trial to overturn her conviction, she took a calculated gamble that by choosing to go to prison, the damage to her name and the share price of the company she founded, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, could be minimized.
By all accounts, it was a gamble that has paid off. Looking tanned, rested and ready, Stewart emerged last week from her stay in a minimum-security prison with her time served, a company that was worth more than double its value from the day she went in and no less than two television shows and a book deal in her future. Her employees, many of whom watched their colleagues be laid off in the wake of Stewart’s conviction, applauded her happily. Luckily for her, she will also get to spend the rest of her sentence in her country estate while she goes back to work.
In fact, if you put aside the fact that she had committed a crime, you could be forgiven for thinking she had simply executed a brilliant marketing plan, replete with all of the ingredients necessary to drive consumers to action and generate iron-clad brand loyalty.
While you won’t find it the syllabus of any Advertising 101 classes in business school, the plan—go to prison, say all the right things when you get out, and then play on the sympathies of average Americans who hate to see their heroes imprisoned by government agents—is almost guaranteed to boost corporate profits while elevating the status of the celebrity to heights never before dreamed. In fact, considering that before her prison sentence many consumers were beginning to grow tired of the many products under her name and now her products are expected to see a strong increase in sales, going to prison just might be the best thing that ever happened for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s shareholders.
The problem is, beyond a simple tale of misdeeds and redemption, there’s a much darker side to Stewart’s story. After all, the crime she was convicted of—lying to the government about selling a stock that was about to tank—came about as a result of her speculating in the shares of a company working on a cancer drug, hardly a noble or generous act. Even worse, when confronted about it, she lied about it in an effort to boost the fortunes of her own company, regardless of the ethical implications.
And then there’s the way Stewart’s release from prison and subsequent profit-making points out the two-tiered class system this country has when it comes to criminal rehabilitation. While Stewart was able to secure a comfortable parole and a return to $900,000-a-year salary, most Americans convicted of a felony like she was have a hard enough time simply finding a place to live and job to pay for it. In Illinois, for example, nearly three-fifths of prison parolees are without work, while the number is higher in the predominately African-American South and West sides. Nationwide, the numbers are much the same, with as many as two-thirds of employers saying they would not consider hiring an ex-offender.
During the speech to her employees, Stewart made it a point to say that she had had the “tremendous privilege” of meeting a cross-section of people in prison and that she had “learned a great deal about our country” as a result of her incarceration. But a recent poll conducted by the Gallup Organization found that 59 percent of Americans are either “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the moral and ethical climate in this country, with only 7 percent rated themselves as “very satisfied.”
Perhaps if Martha Stewart had spent more time in prison instead of being allowed to chase her company’s bottom line at the expense of everything else, those numbers might have changed a little bit for the better. And the lessons Stewart and many of her fellow Americans need to learn—about greed and lying and ethical considerations—might not have been lost in our current rush to embrace her and forgive her for crimes we say we’re not happy about.
--
Mark W. Anderson is an independent journalist and writer based in Chicago. Visit him at http://thesentimentalist.com.