Martha Stewart Has Plenty of Beef—but She Also Has a Point
You might associate celeb squabbling with Taylor Swift or Drake, but the goddess of domesticity is no schlub when it comes to throwing down
Welcome to Beef Week! Over the next few days, The Ringer will continue its retrospective exploration of the past 25 years by delving into one of the quarter century’s defining features: delightfully petty feuds.
Here is an inexhaustive list of the people (and things) Martha Stewart has had beef with at some point in her decades-spanning career as a CEO and founder and felon:
- Ina Garten
- Donald Trump
- Gwyneth Paltrow (and her vagina candles)
- R.J. Cutler, the director of her documentary, Martha
- The color red
- The FBI (and specifically James Comey), whom she allegedly lied to about her insider trading activities
- Mariana Pasternak, her ex-bestie (and the mother of Stewart’s godkids!), who was a key witness in her 2004 trial
- Actually, anyone who testified against her (or wrote about her) during her trial
- Mugs
- Pandemic-era cosmopolitans
- The guy who renovated her first apartment in New York and blocked all the natural light with hedges and never returned a pie plate
- Antoni Porowski, who didn’t tag her in an Instagram picture taken on her estate
- Aprons
- Using the wrong knife on an orange
- Feelings—and, perhaps relatedly, romantic relationships
- Her ex-husband, Andy Stewart, and his new wife (who happened to be Martha’s former assistant)
- Her ex-boyfriend Charles Simonyi, who visited Martha in prison one time and then dumped her by telling her he was engaged to someone named Lisa
- Rachael Ray
- Blake Lively
- Ryan Reynolds
- Her local garden club
- Prison rules
- Barbra Streisand, for writing a “long and boring” memoir
- Miss Piggy
- This poor baking teacher
- Her probation officer, who wouldn’t let her go on Saturday Night Live
- Many of her current and former employees, presumably
- Me, probably, for trying to make a foil star ornament following a tutorial from the Martha Stewart Living magazine, having an absolute meltdown, and making my friend who’s a literal engineer finish it instead
Martha Stewart, known primarily for her domestic goddess credentials and her ’90s-nostalgia-baiting TV shows, books, and magazines, may not seem to be a prime candidate for the ranks of our century’s greatest beefers. But only the uninitiated would write Stewart off as some kind of Stepford wife who thinks of nothing but pie crusts and petunias. Sure, she is the undisputed homemaking queen, but she has always tended her hostilities just as carefully as her rose gardens. Her penchant for feuds—dating back at least to the beef she had with the publishers (looking at you, Condé Nast and Rupert Murdoch) that passed on her initial idea for Martha Stewart Living magazine in the early 1990s—has always been part of her business model. And really, you could say she paved the way for all the beef heavyweights who followed; Martha’s always spoken her mind about whatever she deems real stupid, and she’s always bounced right back into the limelight when she’s gotten flak for it.
All Things Beef Week
If you spend enough time in Martha’s world, you know that many celebrities, inanimate objects, and emotions have fallen short of her lofty (or, one could say, aspirational) standards of perfection. Every detail of her empire—the TV spinoffs on top of spinoffs, the unbelievably gorgeous matching pets, the Julia Child–humbling croquembouche, the perfectly rounded transatlantic vowels, even her CBD gummies (I tried them; they’re delicious!)—conveys the sense of a pristine and perfectly ordered universe that follows the rules of a god named Martha. And Martha’s rules are, unquestionably, the right ones, even when they might, for instance, run afoul of the FTC’s or the FBI’s or maybe common morality’s rules. Because when you’ve spent your whole career telling people how to manufacture the perfect life by planting a paradise more perfect than Eden or nestling lavender sachets in every corner so your shit never stinks—all while you’ve been crafting a multimedia empire—you can be right even when you’re wrong.
Martha began burnishing her beef bona fides during the come-up of her empire in the 1980s and ’90s, but her first targets weren’t the dilettantish celebs—Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively—she lobs her bons mots toward now. Her employees bore the brunt of her withering gaze, especially when they naively exhibited the kind of waste and inefficiency she thoroughly despises. Joan Didion’s 2000 New Yorker essay about Martha recounts legends about the domestic doyenne shrieking at her employees for running over a basket of blueberry pies or for failing to put out a fire in the smokehouse (naturally, Martha dragged a hose over and extinguished it herself). All her pretty tableaux, ruined—who could blame the noted perfectionist for melting down? In a scene from Netflix’s Martha documentary that was shot a month before her sentencing in 2004, she questions the intelligence of staff who don’t know the right knife to use on an orange or a fish, and she tells a story about a “nitwit” who was trying to put her company’s name on a teacup that was blighted with an impractical, too-tiny handle. Could Martha herself have possibly been wrong about the ideal size for a teacup handle, and also how much the size of a teacup handle matters in the real world occupied by us mere mortals? Could she have maybe gone too far by calling her well-meaning employees nitwits? Sure. But in Martha’s world, teacup handle sizes are measured by the millimeter, and there’s a knife for every purpose and occasion, including stabbing someone in the gut (metaphorically!).
Martha’s also never admitted to any insider-trading-related wrongdoing, even after she was found guilty of lying to the FBI about her (alleged) involvement in the ImClone affair—and she still has beef with everyone who lined up against her in the trial, including the crusading lead prosecutor, James Comey; her ex-bestie, Mariana Pasternak; and key witness Douglas Faneuil (a former victim of her over-the-phone bullying), for getting her shipped off to Camp Cupcake. Martha also blamed the end of her marriage to Andy Stewart on his infidelities—particularly his dalliances with her assistant, whom he eventually married (perhaps a lesson to treat your underlings well!). But in Martha, she claimed that her own affair was a meaningless little thing, and not a contributing factor in her eventual divorce (or in her husband’s infidelities).
But Martha doesn’t just have beef with the people responsible for the major traumas in her life. She also, and maybe most iconically, has feuded with pretty much any Martha-lite upstarts, even the ones, like Ina Garten or Blake Lively, whose careers she helped along the way. On Ina: “When I was sent off to Alderson prison, she stopped talking to me. I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.” On Gwyneth Paltrow: “She just needs to be quiet. She’s a movie star. If she were confident in her acting, she wouldn’t be trying to be Martha Stewart.” On Rachael Ray: “She professed that she … cannot bake. She ... just did a new cookbook, which is just a re-edit of a lot of her old recipes, ... and that’s not good enough for me.” On Blake Lively: “It’s stupid, she could be an actress! Why would you want to be me if you could be an actress?”
But look carefully at each of Martha’s devastating salvos, and you’ll see she’s just describing the world, and the people who woefully misunderstand their place in it, as surgically as she’d cut a head of cabbage. Gwyneth Paltrow and Blake Lively are actresses; Rachael Ray is an entertainer—who said herself that she can’t bake! In response, many of her rivals have brushed off the criticism with a throaty laugh, responded with fawning compliments, or made the beef seem like one big rich-person lark. Martha, in contrast to her perhaps more media-trained counterparts, has shown that being perfect has less to do with being nice and a lot to do with being brutally honest: In Martha, when she says her prosecutors should be thrown into a Cuisinart set on high or gloats about the (since debunked) death of a particularly nasty New York Post reporter, isn’t it a breath of fresh air compared to Meghan Markle’s more, uh, backhanded parries on her own show?
Martha’s said that “when you’re through changing, you’re through,” and her most recent, endlessly clickbait-y era of beef—like her odd-couple pairing with Snoop Dogg, daffy-grandma Instagram captions, and thirst trap Sports Illustrated cover—is just the latest phase of her never-ending evolution. Martha, like her new Gen Z fan base, just can’t stand a bullshitter, someone who pretends to be her friend and then testifies against her, or lies (per Martha!) about why they really stopped talking, or doesn’t tell the real story about her in the Netflix documentary bearing her name.
But come right out and just say what you think of Martha—and be funny about it, if you possibly can—and that’s most definitely a good thing. Martha’s post-prison comeback was launched, in part, by her appearance on Justin Bieber’s Comedy Central roast, where comedians made jokes about her prison sentence and the stick up her ass, and she either laughed along or arched a singular eyebrow in what her fellow roasters could only hope was approval. Despite its inglorious portrayals of her, she holds no beef with Saturday Night Live; she even lent the show her infamous prison poncho and would have hosted if it weren’t for that pesky probation officer. She also always put up with Miss Piggy’s deeply personal barbs, something not every celeb has been able to do with such poise.
The lesson is, apparently, that you can laugh about her empire all you want, but you really shouldn’t come for it, whether you’re a bumbling employee, a narc, an ex-husband, or a beautiful actress who’s starting a lifestyle brand based on nothing but her own good hair.
In Martha, Stewart’s friend Lloyd Allen says, “She is a great white shark. You could get bit. She would shake people down. You know, she was ruthless. In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But, you know, for a woman, you know, she was a bitch.” Martha’s unable to sit still, and she sure seems to enjoy taking a bite out of anything that’s in her way—that really does paint quite the pretty picture of a shark. And what are Martha’s thoughts on the roving predator? “Sharks are lovely.”
