Do we like Martha Stewart?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of warm, practical support for LGBTQ+ people and a public stance on immigrants, against one real criminal conviction and a few tone-deaf moments.
Martha Kostyra grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, the second of six kids, started modelling at 13 and graduated from Barnard College in 1962. She worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street until 1972, then turned her taste for cooking and homes into books, a magazine, a TV show and an empire.
The big stain is ImClone. She was indicted in 2003 over her sale of ImClone shares; a judge tossed the securities fraud count, but a jury convicted her in 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements. She got five months in prison and a $30,000 fine, did her time at Alderson in West Virginia and finished on house arrest. She had denied wrongdoing, and an appeals court upheld the convictions in January 2006.
Now the harm check, and it's a good one. For decades her magazine and shows showed gay people just getting on with their work, and Martha Stewart Weddings ran a same-sex wedding in 2009. In a 2017 interview she said she doesn't differentiate a gay wedding from a straight one. We found nothing on trans issues either way, so that's honestly a gap, but nothing harmful turned up.
On the wider world, in January 2026 she wrote that she was “disheartened and sad each and every day” over immigrants being treated as unwelcome in the US. On the planet side, she copped a pile-on in 2023 for a Greenland cruise post about a cocktail made with iceberg ice. Critics called it tone deaf. She answered with a glaciologist's defence. It's a bit much, not a harm.
The recent bit is small beer. Talking up her pals in the lifestyle game, she said of Meghan Markle “I hope she knows what she’s talking about.” She later said she barely talked to Markle at a dinner party. It's a cheap shot from a woman who has had plenty of her own public pasting, though it's hardly a crime.
The good stuff is the long game. She came back from prison to rebuild her business and her place on TV, and generations of gay fans have claimed her as their own. A 2024 PinkNews piece says that's partly because she treated gay colleagues and weddings as ordinary, which at the time was far from ordinary.