NEW YORK (AP) — Martha Stewart says in a new interview that her nickname in prison was M. Diddy, that house arrest is “hideous” and that her prosecution was about bringing her down “to scare other people.”
In the interview, Stewart tells Vanity Fair magazine that she agrees with those who say her crime — lying about a personal stock sale — is far different from massive corporate scandals like Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and Tyco International Ltd.
“Of course that is what it’s all about,” the magazine quotes Stewart as saying. “Bring ’em down a notch, to scare other people. If Martha can be sent to jail, think hard before you sell that stock.”
Stewart is serving a five-month term of house arrest at her Bedford, N.Y., estate that followed the five months in a West Virginia federal prison. She is scheduled to go free early next month.
“I hate lockdown. It’s hideous,” Stewart tells the magazine.
Asked about the electronic monitoring bracelet she must wear on her ankle — she has complained repeatedly that it irritates her skin — Stewart says she knows how to remove it.
“I watched them put it on. You can figure out how to get it off,” the magazine quotes her as saying. “It’s on the Internet. I looked it up.”
Her publicist’s eyes “widened with alarm” when Stewart made the remark.
The article did not say whether Stewart said she has actually taken the bracelet off.
Still, Stewart appears in the article to take house arrest very seriously, noting that she once phoned her probation officer to apologize when she arrived home two or three minutes late from an approved outing.
Asked by a Vanity Fair interview whether she owes anyone an apology, Stewart says she is sorry for the “chaos” her prosecution caused but suggests she is not personally to blame.
“You can’t be sorry for something that — let’s see, how can I say this? I’m on appeal. You don’t appeal if you think that you should be sorry,” she says.
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