Story of the journalist who threw everything away for Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli

quote:

---

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro

Why did Christie Smythe upend her life and stability for Martin Shkreli, one of the least-liked men in the world?

---

quote:

---

Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she not only covered, but broke the news of his arrest. 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.”

---

quote:

---

When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails. “It’s completely out of her control,” Haak says; all she can do is “sit around and wait and hope.”

Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing. Cushenberry made a blanket for Smythe with the photo on it, with a caption that reads, “All my better days are the ones spent with you.” I tell Smythe I’ll need to ask Shkreli for comment. “Maybe this will be a reason for him to reach out to me,” she says. Later, when I relay Shkreli’s statement—“Mr. Shkreli wishes Ms. Smythe the best of luck in her future endeavors”—to Smythe via video chat, she says, “That’s sweet,” quietly, not convincingly.

I can’t gauge Shkreli’s motive, and ask Smythe what she thinks. “That’s him saying, You’re going to live your life and we’re just gonna not be together. That I’m going to maybe get my book and that our paths will”—she sighs—“will fork.” She tears up, and I think about what her journalism professor said, about everyone having an agenda. Watching Smythe, I finally realize her motive for telling her story. She wants Shkreli, and hopes putting their love on the record might at last give her some power in the relationship. “He bounces between this delight in having a future life together and this fatalism about how it will never work,” Smythe says. “It’s definitely in the latter category now.” Sitting in her basement apartment, her eyes wet, her voice quavering, she says she will continue to wait for him while he serves the remaining years of his sentence: “I’m gonna try,” she says. “I’ll be here.”

---