Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Reporter who covered Shkreli had a relationship with him
“Your Honor, finding love with Martin was a great joy for me.”
In April, journalist Christie Smythe wrote those words to a federal judge about Martin Shkreli, the widely vilified former pharmaceutical executive who is serving a seven-year sentence on a fraud conviction.
Smythe, 37, wrote to Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on April 14 as part of an emergency motion filed by Shkreli’s lawyers requesting a compassionate release. They argued that Shkreli, who gained infamy for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000%, would be able to work on a cure for COVID-19 and could avoid contracting the virus himself if he were released from prison.
In the letter, an unredacted copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Smythe laid out the story of how she, a former Bloomberg News reporter who helped break the story of Shkreli’s arrest in 2015, had fallen in love with a man the BBC had called “the most hated man in America.” She asked the judge to allow Shkreli to continue serving his sentence at her Manhattan apartment.
The relationship between Smythe, who joined Bloomberg News as a legal reporter in 2012, and Shkreli was revealed in an Elle magazine article Sunday.
“I started to fall for him, I think, after he got thrown in prison,” Smythe said in an interview with The Times, referring to when Shkreli’s bail was revoked and he was jailed in September 2017. “I definitely felt emotionally compromised then, but I didn’t quite know what to do about that.” Smythe left Bloomberg News in 2018 and got divorced the next year.
Shkreli’s lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said in an interview Monday that he was surprised by the Elle article, only to add: “Nothing about Martin or the case surprises me.”
In September 2015, Shkreli — then 32 and the chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals — hiked the price overnight of Daraprim, a drug that treats a rare, potentially fatal parasitic infection, from $13.50 to $750 a tablet. He was accused of price-gouging, and his combative, sneering responses to the criticism earned him the moniker Pharma Bro.
His arrest in December 2015, related to his time as a hedge fund manager and as the chief executive of the biopharmaceutical company Retrophin. Shkreli was charged with securities fraud and conspiracy for lying to investors and mismanaging money.
Smythe and a Bloomberg News colleague, Keri Geiger, broke the news of the arrest in an article that described Shkreli as a “boastful pharmaceutical executive.” Smythe continued on the story, covering Shkreli as he was convicted in 2017 and sentenced in 2018. He is now in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
In 2018, after Smythe’s editors cautioned her about her social media posts about Shkreli — one included a snapshot of her personal correspondence with him — she decided to leave Bloomberg News.