Pop Culture Mondays/12.21.20
By: Brooke Hammerling
Tags: Elle Magazine, Bee Gees, Newsletter, Pop Culture, Tom Cruise

Love and Chicken Wings

SHE’S JUST A GIRL, STANDING IN FRONT OF A BOY, ASKING HIM TO LOVE HER:

The problem is THAT boy is in prison and seemingly has no interest in her and she has blown up her entire life for him and allowed Elle Magazine in and tell HER story and we are watching mental illness unfold and then they put her in a dress by one of my favorite brand’s “The Vampire’s Wife” (do not let this dissuade you from this brand it’s absolutely brilliant and go check it and the designer is SUSIE CAVE WHO IS THE WIFE OF NICK CAVE) and it’s all too on the nose and frankly IT IS ALL NUTS.

OK, so let me backup here. This bomb of a story dropped Sunday evening and media twitter lost their collective shit and frankly it was a LOT for a Sunday night news drop. Though I will say this is one of THOSE stories that has just taken off and is being shared around the world and maybe it’s because it makes us all feel better about ourselves somehow? The writer, the tremendous Stephanie Clifford, had sat next to Christie Smythe. the subject of this story, in court while this dude was on trial — as they both covered the trial — and she clearly sensed more was going on. She was able to bring this story to life in a way I cannot imagine many others would.

OK..Some of you MIGHT need a brief Cliffs Notes version of who the main character in this story is, Martin Shkreli (and let’s be clear he is the main character here not her..)

THIS GUY:

This guy is MAYBE one of the more loathsome characters we have come across in recent times. He would have been a perfect “Game of Thrones” character to be honest…like he would have fit right in there…a mix of whiny, batshit crazy, narcissistic and for good measure, lets throw in the fact that he’s a sociopath. HELLO KINGS LANDING.

Every ONE of these characters would have welcomes Martin with open arms:

Except he is ours. LUCKY US. He is known as “Pharma Boy” and I don’t want to give this guy any more attention so you can read about him here for all the gory details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

BUT in a nutshell, he was the guy that jacked up the prices to meds he had control over by thousands of dollars leaving people unable to get their needed prescriptions. And bragged about it. He’s the guy that bought the ONE COPY of the Wu Tang album for $2 million on the Paddle 8 Auction site (incidentally Paddle 8 was founded by the lovely and charming Alexander Gilkes who is now engaged to be married to Maria Sharapova…congrats kids!) ANYWAY, I digress…Martin ended up getting busted for securities fraud (SHOCKER) and dragged off to prison for 7 years. YAY! END OF STORY….Well, not quite.

AND THEN ENTER CHRISTIE SMYTHE, the now FORMER Bloomberg reporter who was covering him and the arrest and everything that followed. Just doing her job…then going home to her husband in Brooklyn Heights and that would have been just fine.

BUT NOW…thanks to Clifford’s piece in Elle, we learn this was not at all what was happened and girlfriend fell for the crazy Martin guy and blew up her life and her career and racked up a whole host of ethics violations along the way. She got too close to her source (no sexy time only kissing though) and she became like a little girl in love…with a narcissistic sociopath using her for his own needs. Christie’s unnamed now ex-husband is a part of the story with the voice of reason trying to get her to understand that Pharma Boy was using her. She remained undeterred, The marriage ended and in maybe my favorite tweet of all time or at least this week was this one:

So while ex-husband will LITERALLY be flooded with hot single ladies looking to date, his ex is standing by her new “man”. They are LIFE PARTNERS she says from her “well lit basement apartment in Harlem,” Only the thing is, Pharma Boy is not speaking to her. So there’s that.

But before he stopped talking to her, he made her his girlfriend and of all the crazy parts of this story (there are too many tbh) this is what got me:

“At first he’s like, ‘Can I call you my girlfriend?’ ” she says, and “this led very naturally into thinking about a future together.” Soon they were discussing their kids’ names and prenups. After Smythe worried about being too old to have children when Shkreli got out of prison, he suggested she freeze her eggs. She did so last spring.

I have a history of making bad choices in the love department…I will admit that. Give me a scoundrel, throw in a some musical talent or an accent or some sort of damaged as a child became genius creative storyline and I WILL FALL MADLY IN LOVE. It’s like my super power. But HANDS DOWN I bow to Christie for she really is the winner of this whole BAD CHOICES club for reals. Like she wins ALL the blue ribbons and all the gold trophies. I cannot compete here.

But the thing here is, it’s slightly more complicated than that…it all feels a little exploitive now..not the story itself, but all that has happened since and we are talking less than 24 hours ago…Christie was on the app CLUBHOUSE last night where people can connect and listen into a conversation/interview but some of the people on there listening to her felt it was exploitive and I couldn't bring myself to go listen.

And the photos. A fashion spread She is all dressed up in these photos pleading for him to notice her, to love her, to talk to her, to give her the FIX she is so clearly in need of.

The thing is…she gets her book and her movie and frankly I imagine more is to come with Stephanie Clifford’s story which deserves its own story arch (NETFLIX SERIES PERHAPS??)…and yay for that…though I hope above everything else, Christie gets a really good shrink.