Martha Stewart and Ina Garten's friendship wasn't always limited to chocolate chip cookies and coconut cupcakes.
The domestic titans' friendship was strained when Stewart, 83, was sent to prison in 2004 on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
“When I was sent to Alderson prison, he stopped talking to me,” Stewart said. the new Yorker In a Sept. 2 profile on Garton, 76.
“I found it extremely painful and extremely unpleasant,” he said.
Stewart was sent to Alderson Federal Prison Camp after pleading guilty to two counts of conspiracy, obstruction and lying to federal investigators. He was also charged with securities fraud, although the jury found him not guilty of this more serious charge.
The judge sentenced the domestic icon to five months in prison, five months of house arrest and two years of supervised release. She was also fined $30,000.
Stewart has always maintained he is innocent.
Garten rejected Stewart's accounts of what happened between them in 2004 and “strongly” denied that the incident occurred, which The New Yorker described as “the end of their friendship”.
Stewart's publicist, Susan Magrino, also told the outlet that her client is “not upset at all” about the controversy with Garten.
“There's no feud,” Magrino insisted.
Stewart and Garten met in the early '90s thanks to a Lemon Square emergency.
One day while driving in a huge black Suburban around East Hampton, New York, Stewart suddenly “almost crashed into the curb and said, ‘I’ve got to pick up lemon slices,’” Chip Gibson — then the head of Crown Publishing — recalled to The New Yorker.
This led Stewart to Garten’s now-shuttered Barefoot Contessa shop.
“My desk was right in front of the cheese case, and we started talking,” Garton recalled of the 2017 meeting. Time interview. “We actually did a benefit concert together, where it was at his house and I was the caterer, and we became friends after that.”
Stewart helped Garten's career in a number of ways. Stewart featured Garten on an episode of her show “Martha Stewart Living” in 1999, introduced her to an editor who later worked with her on her first cookbook, “The Barefoot Contessa” (a name that has become synonymous with the Food Network star), and wrote that book's foreword.
Stewart wrote, “It took a while, but eventually I understood what motivated Ina, and I realized that this was a true kindred spirit with truly similar but unique talents.”
Despite the reported animosity between the stars, Garten has publicly praised Stewart.
“I think he did something really important, which is that he took something that had no value, which is domestic art, and elevated it to a level that people felt proud to do it and it completely changed the landscape,” she said in a 2017 Time profile of her.
“Then I took it my way, which is I'm not a trained professional chef, it's really hard for me to cook – I've been in the food business for 40 years, it's still hard for me.”
