A New York journalist fell in love with the infamous “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli and turned his “perfect” life upside down for him – giving up his job and divorcing her husband, she revealed in a new report.
Former Bloomberg News reporter Christie Smythe, 38, opened up about her relationship with the convicted fraudster for the first time in an article in Elle magazine published on Sunday.
“I fell into the rabbit hole,” Smythe told the magazine about her life-changing story with 37-year-old Shkreli, who is serving a seven-year sentence for misleading investors into the hedge funds he operated.
“I am just happy to be here. I feel like I have a purpose, ”she snapped.
But their love story may not have a happy ending. Smythe has not seen her husband for more than a year due to COVID-19 security protocols in prisons.
Now working remotely for a journalism start-up from her apartment in her basement in Harlem, Smythe promised to wait for Shkreli.
“I’ll try,” she said. “I will be here.”
The Kansas City, Missouri native first crossed paths with Shkreli in 2015, when he learned he was under federal investigation for securities law violations.
At the time, Smythe was married and had “the perfect little Brooklyn life,” she said.
She described her growing involvement with Shkreli over the next few years as “incremental decisions, in which you are, like, slowly boiling to death in the tub.”
Shkreli earned the name “The Worst Man in the World” for raising the price of AIDS drug Daraprim by nearly 5,000 percent in August 2015 and was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, following a lawsuit that earned the title .
When Smythe broke up with her husband, she had been visiting Shkreli for several months, even getting a permit to see him after he was moved to a Pennsylvania prison.
In the summer of 2018, Smythe resigned from Bloomberg due to his connection with Shkreli. Soon, “I told Martin I loved him” in a prison living room that smelled of chicken wings, she remembered Elle.
“He told me he loved me too,” Smythe said, and the two kissed.
She added: “It’s hard to think of a time when I felt happier.”
The couple discussed their children’s names and first names, and Smythe said she even froze her eggs for fear she would be too old to have children until her “life partner” was released.
Now her ex-husband had warned her that Shkreli was “only using” her and that she was risking her journalistic reputation “by being too sucked in by this bad person.”
Smythe even admitted, “Maybe I was enchanted by a master manipulator.”
Public hatred for Shkreli is well documented. About 134 potential jurors were fired from his trial because they described him differently as “bad” and said “he looks like an ad-k,” The Post reported at the time.
He was also known for following journalists who covered the trial, bought URLs on behalf of two, including a Post reporter, and offered to sell the domains for $ 12,000.
The offended pharmaceutical executive even once said that if he is acquitted, he will “f – k” an independent writer who has rejected his advances.
But Smythe, hit, defended his behavior towards Elle, saying that “he trolls because he is restless … He really wants to be someone”.
In April, Shkreli requested early release from prison because of the coronavirus, and her lawyers revealed that she had a fiancée, asking her to serve the rest of her sentence at her Manhattan apartment to work on an alleged COVID-19 treatment.
Although she was described by her lawyers as Shkreli’s bride, Smythe said they were in fact “life partners.”
However, it seems that Smythe talking about the love affair may have poured cold water on their romance.
In a statement given by her wife to Elle, it was written: Shkreli wishes Mrs. Smythe good luck in her future endeavors. “
Upon hearing his detached words, Smythe – who sold the film’s rights to a book proposal about Shkreli – quietly said, “It’s cute,” the magician reported.
“He says, ‘You will live your life and we will not be together. That I’m going to take my book and that our roads will … fork, “Smythe continued, breaking.