“Your Honor, finding love with Martin was a great joy for me.”In April the journalist Christie Smythe wrote those words to a federal judge about Martin Shkreli, the widely vilified former pharmaceutical executive who is serving a seven-year sentence on a fraud conviction. Ms. Smythe, 37, wrote to Judge Kiyo Matsumoto of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on April 14 as part of an emergency motion filed by Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers requesting a compassionate release. They argued that Mr. Shkreli, who gained infamy for raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent, would be able to work on a cure for Covid-19 and could avoid contracting the virus himself if he were released from prison. In the letter, an unredacted copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Smythe laid out the story of how she, a former Bloomberg News reporter who helped break the story of Mr. Shkreli’s arrest in 2015, had fallen in love with a man the BBC had called “the most hated man in America.” She asked the judge to allow Mr. Shkreli to continue serving his sentence in home confinement, at her Manhattan apartment. “It has been a long emotional journey for me from when I first came into your courtroom as a journalist covering Martin Shkreli’s case in 2015 to the present moment, as I submit this letter to you as his girlfriend and would-be life partner,” she wrote.

Source: New York Times December 21, 2020 20:37 UTC