Former reporter who covered Shkreli had 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. Smythe left Bloomberg News in 2018 and got divorced the next year.

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. He is now in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.

In 2018, after Smythe’s editors cautioned her about her social media posts about Shkreli, she left Bloomberg News.