Martha Stewart is making headlines again, and not just for reasons like her claim that Ryan Reynolds is "not so funny in real life" or even Hugh Jackman's cheeky response. The documentary about her life, called Martha, has debuted as one of the 2024 Netflix movie And TV show releases. In the section of the doc about the trial that sent Stewart to federal prison for fraud, she claimed that a journalist who'd covered her trial was "dead." The very-much-alive reporter fired back to clarify that reports of her death were greatly exaggerated.
In the Martha documentary (available streaming now with a Netflix subscription), Martha Stewart went on a slight tangent while recounting when the guilty verdict was read back in 2004. She said:
New York Post lady was there, just looking so smug. She had written horrible things during the entire trial. She's dead now, thank goodness, and nobody has to put up with that crap that she was writing all the time.
Well, "New York Post lady" – a.k.a. longtime NYP columnist Andrea Peyser – is definitely not dead, and it's not clear where Martha Stewart got her information or why the mistake wasn't caught before the documentary went live on Netflix. In a New York Post column about the doc's claim of her demise, Peyser wrote that "Two decades later, she’s still fantasizing about (plotting?) my grisly demise," and "News of my passing came as a shock."
That's far from all that she said after finding out about the comments from Martha Stewart in her Netflix production. Peyser summed up the situation in her own words, opining:
Long after she and her insider tip-giving stockbroker Peter Bacanovic were convicted of securities fraud and other crimes, then lying about it to federal investigators, her thoughts are not with her family, her pink-slipped employees, her mini-menagerie of animals, or even her own miserable self. She’s focused her fury at me.
The journalist went on to sum up the movie with her own take, describing it as "about the life and crimes, hissy fits, grudges, vendettas and remorseless misbehavior of the New Jersey-born model-turned-stockbroker, then internationally celebrated purveyor of homemaker porn."
Considering that Martha Stewart is best known in recent years for developments ranging from her friendship with Snoop Dogg to posing wearing nothing but an apron for a viral video, the Martha documentary will likely make her trial and conviction from two decades ago relevant again.
At the time of writing, Martha is ranking at #3 on Netflix's Top 10 movies. Something tells me that Andrea Peyser would be unimpressed by the doc's popularity, as she also included this extra hot take in her column:
Instead, Martha — who has compared her plight to that of the late South African freedom fighter-turned-statesman Nelson Mandela — today is playing the innocent victim. She has spent the years stewing over her persecution by a sexist justice system that she says was hellbent on taking down a woman who’s rich, or something that rhymes with it. And she remains dangerously preoccupied with little, insignificant me.
Despite the journalist's fiery response to the claim that she was dead in Martha, the movie is clearly doing well to rank at #3 on Netflix's Top 10 more than a week after its release on October 30. After all, with the sheer amount of content available on the streamer, the popularity of a given project can rise and then fall very quickly. The doc also isn't entirely about Martha Stewart's trial and conviction, but her life and career overall before and after that period in her life. Check out the trailer:
You can check out Martha streaming on Netflix now, along with plenty of other movie and TV options on the platform. If you want a look at how she and Snoop Dogg work together after becoming friends, their Halloween food special is available streaming with a Peacock subscription now.
