Prosecutors are asking the judge in Martin Shkreli’s case to quiet him down.
Martin Shkreli cannot seem to stop talking. Now, prosecutors are asking a judge to make him.
Federal prosecutors have asked the judge overseeing Shkreli’s fraud trial to issue a rule of silence, arguing that Shkreli has “embarked on a campaign of disruption” and has made “a spectacle of himself and the trial directly on the courthouse grounds.”
Shkreli, 34, is a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and former hedge fund manager whose trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on eight counts of securities and wire fraud started last week.
The fraud charges, which Shkreli denies, relate to his running of two hedge funds and a pharmaceutical company. But he is better known for steeply raising the price of the lifesaving drug Daraprim and for his attention-seeking behavior on social media. Defendants in federal cases typically clam up. Shkreli has not.
He live streams regularly after returning home from court. Learning, in 2015, that he was under investigation, he voluntarily met with federal prosecutors and investigators without a lawyer, giving the government statements that are being used against him at trial. Barred from Twitter under one account, he is believed to have interacted with journalists and the public under another, BLMBro, during the trial.
And on Friday, during a lunch break at court, he stopped by a room where several journalists were working for an on-therecord chat. He called the prosecutors “junior varsity,” argued that a woman who had testified about her investment in his hedge fund was not a “victim,” asked the journalists how they thought the trial was going and said his critics “blame me for capitalism,” according to CNBC. Only when Benjamin Brafman, his lawyer, entered and said, “Martin, can I see you a minute?” did Shkreli stop.
In papers filed this week prosecutors argued that Shkreli’s public statements risked tainting the jury. They asked Judge Kiyo Matsumoto to restrict him from public statements and to consider partial sequestration of the jury.
In response, Brafman wrote that “while I may wish that Mr. Shkreli refrain from any comments to the press,” Shkreli’s comments have not affected the trial and are not intended to affect it.