Veteran New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who started at the tabloid in 1989, is once again going after lifestyle guru Martha Stewart following the release of the new Netflix documentary Martha . The film chronicles Stewart’s rise to billionaire homemaker icon followed by her subsequent very public fall. In 2004, she was convicted on charges of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators as part of an insider-trading scandal that caused her to spend five months in prison.
(Stewart maintains her innocence to this day.) Peyser covered the high-profile trial for the Post as a columnist, spending every day in court in order to produce a series of ruthless front-page takes about the Stewart scandal. In just one article that gives you some idea of the tenor of Peyser’s coverage, she described Stewart as “looking like a gardener who moonlights as a dominatrix” and said she was playing the “girly card” in order to win the jury’s sympathy — but concealing what a real monster she was.
“For once, I got close enough to see her for what she really is,” Peyser wrote. Peyser’s coverage of the Stewart trial earned her something of a reputation; the Washington Post described her as “the paper’s leading downward-mobility pundit,” while New York Magazine dubbed her the “Madame Defarge of the New York Post ,” a Charles Dickens villain who channels populist rage against her enemies. Evidently, Stewart also had some thoughts about Peyser.
In the documenta.