Save Martha!

Our Mission

Welcome to the SaveMartha! website, for news and discussion of the Martha Stewart insider trading scandal. This site's purpose is to provide a forum to air all sides of the debate in a balanced manner, and to explore ways to help Martha and her brand weather the storm. SaveMartha.com lets you directly tell both the media and Martha's business partners what your feelings are.

The Issue

If the latest news headlines prove anything, they reveal that the idea of the female executive in America is under attack. From Martha Stewart to Jill Barad at Mattel and Carly Fiorina at HP, there is a growing hostility among some towards powerful women in business.

The current media assault on Martha Stewart is potentially harmful to all women in the business world. Martha Stewart is a successful female entrepreneur, who has turned the things that most women are ashamed to say they do into a billion dollar empire. She literally built her empire from scratch.

Now she is being attacked by some in the media with a level of attention and viciousness that is better reserved for the truly venal, the pedophiles, the Enron execs, the corporate titans who scam their companies for millions, leaving investors and employees in the dust.

The same commentators that lectured the Taliban for not making women an equal partner in Afghan society have not even hesitated to get out the pointy-toed boots when one of their own is down.

Chris Byron: Fair or Foul?

Chris Byron has made a cottage industry out of covering Martha Stewart. Here is a list of his recent coverage, as well as a link to his recent unauthorized Martha tome. Is he being fair or not? read up, and take our instant poll.

Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia
by Christopher M. Byron

IMAGINE NO MARTHA
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
July 8, 2002 -- NO one knows what the future holds for Martha Stewart in the ImClone mess. But the sheer uncertainty of the situation gives rise to an obvious question: Can Martha Stewart's company survive without her?

MARTHA SPINS A WEB
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
July 3, 2002 -- As more names pop up in the Martha Stewart insider trading scandal, America's queen of hearth and home is undergoing a surprising makeover.

Martha Stewart in a real stew
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON

June 25 —  Anyone for an update on the ImClone scandal? For Martha Stewart at least, the situation ain’t great. She’s got problems on both the legal and public image fronts, and they keep getting worse.  

Transcript of Chris Byron on Crossfire
Martha in the hot seat

The price of friendship for Martha Stewart 

 
OPINION
By Christopher Byron
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR 
June 14 —  Choose your friends carefully. That’s the most obvious lesson to be drawn from the pickle in which lifestyle authority Martha Stewart now finds herself thanks to her long-time friendship with Manhattan social climber and cancer-cure businessman, Sam Waksal. For Martha Stewart, the price of that friendship is suddenly proving to be high indeed.

You've read the opinion pieces, now take the poll:

What Really Happened?

Did Martha do it? We're not sure, nobody yet knows what happened--and that's the point. She has already been tried and convicted in the press.

Lets assume that Martha did do it, and sold stock on the recommendation of her broker Peter Bacanovic, which seems the most likely scenario.

Put yourself in her shoes--your broker calls and says its time to sell your stock, that the price is going down. What do you do? Refuse? Lose money against his advice? Isn't it your brokers job to tell you when to buy or sell? He's your broker, and you trust him. So you sell. Later, it turns out your broker had insider information. And you're in big trouble.

If this scenario proves to be true, then who will be safe in the future selling on the advice of their own broker? If the broker has inside info, then tells you to sell, how can you be expected to know whether the information is privileged?

Proportionality

Lets assume for a moment that Martha somehow knew the information was privileged and this was an insider trade. She sells. The next day, the FDA announcement is made and the stock falls $5.

Martha has now saved $20,000 on an investment of $300,000. $20,000. That's it. For a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In a market where executives s at Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, Adelphia, Andersen have pocketed millions and lost billions of shareholder dollars.

So why is this front page news day after day? The obvious reason is because nobody knows or cares about Ken Lay, Dennis Koslowski, Gary Winnick, David Duncan, or any of the other execs in the other scandals. After all, they don't have sheets and croc pots with their names on them at K-Mart. Their names don't sell newspapers.

So Martha's fame is a great source of the attention.

But so is the fact that she's a woman. Most men don't like it when women make more money than they do. This is their chance to get back.

The Facts:

We don't yet know all of the details of what happened, and yet several journalists have already tried and convicted Martha in the press.

Christopher Byron has made a career out of attacking Stewart, then going on talk shows and soft pedaling his book on Martha as an "honest" and objective look atMartha, despite pages of rumors and some very nasty stories used as a PR tool to boost his books sales.

The NY POST has also taken the lead in this attack, with front page headlines, unflattering pictures, photographers hounding MArtha and staking out her home...haven't they learned anything from the tragedy of Princess Diana?

Here's what we do know

Based on what we know today, nobody lost any money, their job, their life savings, or their home as a result of this single sale of stock. Contrast that with Worldcom, Enron, Verox or Global Crossing. Billions lost, tens of thousands of jobs gone.

If Martha had sold her stock the day after the announcement, she would have made just 10% or $20,000 less than she made by selling the day before. Enron cost investors a total of $65 billion dollars --that's 3 million times more than Martha's transaction, not to mention the tens of thousands of jobs lost in that scandal.

What did other recent scandals cost Americans?

Worldcom: $150 Billion

Tyco: $125 Billion

Adelphia: $20 Billion

Xerox: $6 Billion

So where is the proportionality? Why is there so much noise about a single transaction?

It's simple: nobody knew or cared who Ken Lay was, he didn't have sheets with his name in K Mart, or TV and radio shows, or a national magazine, much less a personality. Yet Ken Lay has not said a word to anyone about what went on, and nobody is asking him any questions as he hides behind lawyers and the Fifth Amendment. His former employees are broke, and one even tragically committed suicide.

Yet Martha is not the first woman the media has criticized--here are some others:

Jill Barad, former CEO Mattel: after successfully turning Mattel around and restoring the Barbie franchise to record sales and market share, the media and her board decided they'd had enough and she was cast in the press as conniving, manipulative, and not strategic enough to lead Mattel. She was forced to leave in disgrace.

Carly Fiorina, CEO Hewlett-Packard: After getting into a nasty and very public battle with Walter Hewlett, the slightly-less- successful-than-his-father son who suddenly thought he had all the answers to lead HP into the future, Fiorinas ability and motives were questioned by the media, yet Walter walked away unscathed.

So it's time to start taking a stand, to tell America and the media to get focussed on fixing our broken system and to stop picking on people like Martha.

How do you do it? Go to our Action Plan and find out...

J. Small
Editor
SaveMartha.com