After Martha Stewart participated in a new Netflix documentary about her life and career, her ex-husband, Andy Stewart, issued a statement, saying he’s long moved on from his “painful and abusive” marriage to the lifestyle mogul, while slamming her for publicly discussing the affairs that let to their divorce, which became final 34 years ago.
“While Andy quietly moved on and forward with his life, it appears that Martha continues to publicly relitigate the marriage, including comments in a sensationalized trailer for an upcoming documentary on Netflix,” read the statement, which was written and signed by both Andy Stewart and his current wife Shyla Stewart.
The statement went up on Facebook before the documentary was released on Netflix last week, but the statement began circulating online on Thursday. The documentary is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker R.J. Cutler. In it, the 83-year-old media icon opened up about some of the dark private times in her outwardly polished and accomplished life, according to The Cut.
Stewart talked about the pain of her ex-husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce, while admitting that she cheated, too, and more than once. She also shared how much she struggled as a young mother, and she revisited her insider-training scandal in the early 2000s, which landed her in federal prison for five months.
For Stewart fans, the revelations about her long and unhappy marriage to Andy Stewart may not seem so new. According to Stewart lore, she married him in 1961 when she was 19 and he was 24, after meeting him through his sister, who was one of her classmates at Barnard. At the time, Andy Stewart was studying law at Yale, though he ultimately went into book publishing.
Some accounts say that the marriage worked well in the beginning, with the two living in Manhattan during the week, where Stewart “raised orchids in the bathtub,” People magazine reported in 1995. During the weekends, they restored a schoolhouse in the Berkshires, where they were supposedly doing the “back-to-the-land thing.”
But in her documentary, Stewart admitted that the warning signs appeared as early as their five-month honeymoon in Europe, The Cut reported. While staying in Florence, Stewart said she kissed a stranger she met at the Duomo while her groom was back at the hotel.
“It was neither naughty nor unfaithful,” Stewart said of the kiss. “It was just emotional, of the moment. That’s how I looked at it. And it was exciting. I wish we could all experience such an evening.”
In the documentary, Stewart also opened up about her struggles with being a young mother to their daughter Alexis, who was born in 1965, The Cut reported. “Turns out it’s not natural at all to be a mother,” Stewart said, explaining her discomfort with having a child while she herself was so young.
“There was not a lot of affection in our house,” Stewart also said of growing up, according to The Cut. “How could I be a really great mother, if I didn’t have the education to be a mother?”
After Stewart worked for several years on Wall Street as a stockbroker, she started a catering business, which would become the basis for her lifestyle empire. As she became more successful, her already rocky marriage reportedly got worse, according to accounts. As early as 1980, about seven years before they separated, Andy Stewart told People magazine that his perfectionist wife was “not tolerant of my negligence or my foolishness or my eccentricities.”
In 1995, one of the couple’s former friends told People that Andy Stewart was “always being belittled or berated by her.” An unauthorized 1997 biography of Stewart by Jerry Oppenheimer reported that both Martha and Andy Stewart cheated, The Cut reported.
In the documentary, Stewart suggested that the infidelity reports were true. “I don’t know how many different girlfriends he had, but I think there were quite a few,” Stewart said. She also admitted that she had “a very brief affair with a very attractive Irishman” early on in their marriage, which she waves off as “nothing.”
Stewart added, “I would have never broken up a marriage for it. It was like the kiss in that cathedral.”
The documentary producers challenged Stewart on camera by saying that Andy Stewart claims he didn’t cheat on her, until she told him about her own affair, The Cut reported. She brushed off this claim, saying, “Oh, well, that’s not true, I don’t think.”
Andy and Shyla Stewart tried to counter Stewart’s portrayal of him in their Facebook post, which described him as a “brilliant publisher, avocational naturalist and nature photographer.” Shyla Stewart also said her husband is “one of the gentlest, most soft-spoken, kind-hearted men” she’s even known. The statement furthermore said that the couple have “built a life of beauty, meaning, productivity and purpose,” which they share with “a beautiful, blended family” of five adult children and three “adorable” grandchildren.
They contrasted Andy Stewart’s “painful” life with Martha Stewart with the “joy-filled, purpose-led” existence he has now. “Every day, we openly express our gratitude for our love and for our life together,” the statement said. The couple closed their statement by wishing his ex-wife and everyone else “the experience of loving and being loved deeply and fully, and the peace that comes from such a love.”
Meanwhile, it turns out that Stewart may not have found much peace from participating in the documentary. In a phone interview with the New York Times last week, she, too, lashed into aspects of the documentary, but for different reasons than her ex-husband.
The famously exacting media personality criticized the filmmakers for choosing unflattering camera angles of her and called the film’s second half “a bit lazy.”
“Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden?” Stewart said. “Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused. I hate those last scenes. Hate them.”