BREAKING: Martin Shkreli Had To Ghost His Jail Pen Pal Slash Girlfriend Because She Was Obsessed With Him
Drew Angerer. Getty Images.HOOOOOLLYYYYYY SHIT. Talk about a fucking MORTIFYING breakup. Before we get into that, let's set up the facts.
Elle Magazine went to publish this long article about how Christie Smythe (sounds like a fake name tbh) went ahead to have a STEAMY affair with Martin Shkreli, after being the reporter to break the news of his arrest and cover his story in its entirety.
It was a scoop that ignited the Internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli: the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million. Shkreli, convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison.
“I fell down the rabbit hole,” Smythe tells me, sitting in her bright basement apartment in Harlem, speaking publicly about her romance with Shkreli for the first time. The relationship has made her completely rethink her earlier work covering the courts, and as she looks back on all of the little decisions she made that caused this giant break in her life, she says she has no regrets: “I’m happy here. I feel like I have purpose.”
She had the "perfect Brooklyn life" with her finance husband, her hot shot "white collar crime" reporter job, and their dog. Nothing could make her veer off course - wait, what's this? The man who threw down a hot Two Milli without blinking an eye for his beloved Wu-Tang Clan?
FUCK OFF! SHE'S IN LOVE AND SHE DOESN'T CARE WHO KNOWS IT! MARTIN IS HER #1 FUCKING MAN AND SHE EARNED THIS (jail-infused) LIFE WITH HIM!!! Ride or die till the motherfucking end, ever heard of it???
More than five years earlier, in January 2016, Smythe stood outside the Bryant Park skyscraper where Martin Shkreli’s company Turing Pharmaceuticals had its offices, clutching a camera, about to meet the man himself for the first time. She was so anxious that she hadn’t eaten all morning. Shkreli had been charged the month before with defrauding investors at hedge funds he’d run earlier in his career, and he made a habit of regularly taunting journalists like her. How do I manage the situation, she remembers wondering.
Look at this romantic bitch. She had butterflies!!! She knew what kind of love it would be. That can't eat, can't sleep, reach for the stars, over the fence, world series kind of love. She could already sense the effect he was going to have on her. He exudes power. Oozes sex. Exhales raw, masculine energy. WHAT'S A GIRL TO DO???
But wait, what's THIS NOW? Our girl Christie is… ALSO A FUCKING BAD BITCH??? A RULE BREAKER? Someone with little to no regard for LAW and ORDER?
Smythe had a defiant streak, railing in her Catholic-girls’-school newspaper about fines for wearing uniforms improperly. When her parents asked her to take her brothers to church, “she would defiantly take us to McDonald’s" instead, her brother Michael Smythe says.
Goodness gracious!!! My pearls!!! I am CLUTCHING THEM!!! But, in typical Obsessed Girl fashion, she figured out a way to get her love to notice her.
At that point, Smythe had no idea who he was—few people did—but she did some research and learned he was a brash, self-taught young executive who’d started hedge funds in his twenties, then moved on to found pharmaceutical companies Retrophin and Turing. When Smythe phoned Shkreli, she was expecting a standard “No comment”; instead, he argued she “had no idea what I was talking about.”
Typical guy, leading a girl on like this. Negging at its finest. He could've ignored her completely, but he went out of his way to put her down. UMMMM, READ THE ROOM GUYS. He's obviously EQUALLY obsessed with her.
Here's where what we call a hook, line and sinker occurs:
After that, “he kept toying with me for a while,” Smythe says. He would dangle an on-the-record interview and then grant one to one of her competitors. Smythe had to remain cordial; Shkreli kept making news—he bought the Wu-Tang album, he smirked when testifying before Congress about drug pricing—and coverage of him at Bloomberg fell to her.
One evening when Smythe called him for comment, a tiny shift occurred. Shkreli was looking for a new lawyer and asked her for advice. She felt “flattered,” she says, and offered her opinion. “It really felt like he didn’t have anybody to talk to that he could bounce ideas off of,” Smythe says. “I was like, ‘All right. I guess I can do that.’ ” He sounded “ragged and fragile, and I got concerned he would commit suicide because all this stuff was all happening at once.” Still, her job came first: She pre-wrote an obituary for Shkreli in case he did, in fact, kill himself.
There it is. Just the right amount of give and take, peacocking and vulnerability. Even rounding it out with light threats of suicide. She had to pre-accept the death of her lover, long enough to write his obituary, so she could be the first person on earth to announce that he was no longer with us. He deserved his fake obituary, written by someone who really loved him.
Christie goes on to explain more of his "troll" antics. All the stuff we got to see in the media. The bitchy testimonies, the weird online streams of his cat, etc etc. My personal favorite, however:
When Emily Saul, then a New York Post court reporter, was covering the trial, Shkreli or one of his fans created a fake Facebook page for her and boasted that he and Saul were in a relationship, Saul tells me.
Relax, Christie!!! It was just a JOKE FACEBOOK PAGE!!! We weren't even really in a relationship!!!! Lmfaoooo it was a jokeeeeee.
Smythe’s take on this is, “He trolls because he’s anxious,” she tells me, and “he really, really wants to be somebody.” She began defending him publicly as she emphasized her access to him to publishers in an attempt to sell her book. During the trial, she visited his apartment and listened to the Wu-Tang album—“for research,” she says. Afterward, Smythe tweeted a photo of her holding the album, tagging a female journalist whom Shkreli had harassed online and writing: “I don’t think he would hurt a woman, even a journalist. Behold: me and the #wutang album.”
Ummmm, okay Christie. Now we're getting a little out of hand. We get it, you want people to know Martin is your man. You sure he's going to like you passive aggressively posting from his apartment? Holding up all of his possessions and tagging your friends? Defending his anxiety? Bragging about all of the "research" you were "doing" on the Wu-Tang album?
Smythe pressed Shkreli to let her visit him in jail, and he agreed to a November date. In the visitors’ room, unsure of what Shkreli liked, Smythe spent $30 on vending-machine snacks. When he was brought in, she hugged him, and they sat down to talk, struggling to hear each other over the other visitors. She microwaved a hamburger for him, and they talked about jail. When the hour-long visit ended, she hightailed it to the first counseling session with her husband. He had refused to move the appointment, and she wouldn’t reschedule with Shkreli. She arrived at the hour-long session 52 minutes late.
Alright. Now it's getting pathetic, Christie. He's not that into you. He's barely giving you anything at this point. He's burrowed into your brain and he's controlling your mind with his arrogant nerd shit. Now you've lost your husband, you look like a crazy bitch, and you're microwaving hamburgers for a man in jail who wasn't even excited to see you.
She took a 6 a.m. prison van from Manhattan to see him when he moved to a New Jersey prison. When he was transferred to a prison in Pennsylvania, Smythe, who used to get panic attacks when driving, got a license so she could still see him. They talked about Picasso, about philosophy, about her dog and his cat, their conversation flowing “like water.”
That's it. I can't go on any more. It gets even more pathetic than that, if you can believe it. But, ladies and gentleman, let me offer you this piece of advice: if you have to take a prison van ANYWHERE to see your mans, you should just get a new one. You know why? Because when it comes time to come clean, to put your money where your mouth is, to live up to this pedestal they've put themselves on (which you allowed) - they're gonna do you like this:
BEST OF LUCK IN YOUR FUTURE ENDEAVORS!!!!!! OH MY GOOOOODDDDDDD
Oh Christie. Sometimes you fall in love with the bad guy. Sometimes you get spun so far into their web that you don't realize you're slowly being suffocated within an inch of your life. And just as you gaze out over the chemical plants and the Budweiser factory in Elizabeth, NJ on your way to have pre-approved, timed, 3-pump sex with a narcissist, you'll think for a brief moment: do I deserve more? But you'll never find out. By then, it'll be too late.
Tough to go up from reassuring the public that your boyfriend "doesn't kick dogs."