‘Pharma Bro’ Shkreli won’t stop talking, except to jury in trial
Steps up trolling of prosecutors, but won’t testify LEGAL
NEW YOR K • “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli has kept up his trademark trolling on social media during his securities fraud trial — calling the case “bogus” — but the jury won’t hear him defend himself in court.
The government’s l ast witness testified on Tuesday, a day after a lawyer for the former biotech CEO told the court that his client had chosen not to take the witness stand. Closing arguments are set for Thursday, with deliberations expected to begin as early as Friday.
Shkreli, 34, is best known for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 per cent and targeting his critics with online rants so nasty that it got him kicked off of Twitter for harassment. He was arrested in 2015 on unrelated federal charges accusing him of lying to invest- ors in a pair of failed hedge funds.
Though not part of the case, the price-gouging scandal has hung over the trial and burdened Shkreli with a likability deficit that made it even more of a long-shot that he would testify. But that hasn’t stopped him from using the internet to vent after spending long days sitting at the defence table.
In one of a flurry of recent Facebook posts, he wrote: “This was a bogus case from day one.”
He also has taken aim at news coverage of the trial, à la President Donald Trump, writing, “More trash from the NY Times. Is there an intelligent writer-editor pair at this company? Who would read this ‘news’?”
Even prosecutors aren’t off limits: This month, he taunted them as “the cowardly government,” while he griped about their trial tactics. “This is not North Korea,” he wrote.
Though they won’t hear from him in court and are under orders to avoid anyt hing about him in t he cyber realm, jurors in recent days have gotten a taste of Shkreli’s disdain for invest- ors and mercurial demeanour.
Government evidence introduced this week included emails in which Shkreli snapped at a lawyer charged with conspiring with him in a scheme to hide hedge fund client losses and pay them back against their wishes with stock in a new drug company called Retrophin.
“I am really starting to think you are inept,” Shkreli told the lawyer in one email. When the lawyer asked for guidance on how to divvy up shares, he replied, “Take from anyone. I don’t care. Do the math.”
In other testimony, a former business partner described how Shkreli sent his wife a threatening letter.
“Your husband has stolen $ 1.6 million from me,” it read. “I hope to see you and your four children homeless. I will do whatever I can to assure this.”