posted on March 1, 2005 07:42:22 AM new
What's next for Martha Stewart?
The ‘MacGyver of domesticity’ gets out of the big house next week. Awaiting the home-décor entrepreneur: house arrest, reality TV and a wobbly company with a soaring stock.
By Rick VanderKnyff
After five months in federal prison, Martha Stewart is scheduled to go home Sunday.
She still has five months of house arrest to contend with, but don't picture Stewart sitting at home and knitting doilies, waiting for the day she can once again roam free. She has plenty on her designer plate to keep her busy, both potentially good (a stab at reality TV stardom) and potentially bad (a still-looming insider trading charge from the Securities and Exchange Commission).
To recap, Stewart entered federal prison in Alderson, W. Va., in October after her conviction in July on four felony counts of lying to federal investigators looking into her suspiciously timed sale of ImClone Systems (IMCL, news, msgs) stock. (She was never charged in the criminal case with insider trading, though that was the impetus for the original investigation).Banks and insurers
check your credit.
So should you.
Stewart was free pending the outcome of an appeal, but in September she elected to serve her time -- at least in part to help her battered media company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO, news, msgs), move past the uncertainty and controversy brought by the criminal case.
So Stewart has paid her $30,000 fine and is just about to complete her prison sentence (while the official release date is Sunday, she could be let out as early as Friday). Among the things she has done while behind bars, according to a December message from Martha Stewart herself and the newest issue of Martha Stewart Living: lots of cleaning, teaching yoga to fellow prisoners, "foraging for wild greens" and making a nativity scene for her mother.
And somehow, despite that pesky incarceration, she also managed to stay in the news and go a long way toward rehabilitating her image.
The next Trump? Maybe, and with better hair
Her TV plans have been the real newsmaker for Stewart. She will hook up with Mark Burnett, the man who invented the reality TV genre with "Survivor" and went on to resuscitate Donald Trump's celebrity CEO status in "The Apprentice."
First to be formally announced was a Burnett-produced, domestically themed daytime show, similar to her old "Martha Stewart Living" program (put on hiatus last summer) but with a live audience and celebrity guests. It will debut in fall.
Then, in early February, came the announcement of "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart," a prime-time spin-off of the Trump hit "centered around Stewart's areas of expertise: media, home renovation, entertaining, design, merchandising, technology and style," according to a press statement.
Representatives of NBC and Martha Stewart Living, along with Burnett and Trump himself, have lauded the deal (apparently reached before Stewart entered prison) as a perfect match.
I dont know about you folks, but I'd still trade my life for hers anyday! -dbl
