At that point, Smythe had no idea who he was-few people did-but she did some research and learned he was a brash, self-taught young executive who’d started hedge funds in his twenties, then moved on to found pharmaceutical companies Retrophin and Turing. “Maybe I was being charmed by a master manipulator."īy early 2015, Smythe learned from a source that Shkreli was under federal investigation for securities law violations. Her personal life was going well, too in 2014, she married her boyfriend of five years, who worked in investment management. It was a high-pressure job-Bloomberg tracked how many seconds its reporters filed stories ahead of their competitors-but she was well regarded at the company and churned out reliable stories over the years. After working for a legal news company, she started covering Brooklyn federal court for Bloomberg News in 2012. Smythe attended the journalism school at the University of Missouri and worked for two small newspapers before moving to New York in 2008. When her parents asked her to take her brothers to church, “she would defiantly take us to McDonald’s" instead, her brother Michael Smythe says. Smythe had a stubborn streak, railing in her Catholic-girls’-school newspaper about fines for wearing uniforms improperly. In high school, however, her passion for reporting helped her finally overcome her shyness. Growing up outside Kansas City, Missouri, Smythe “was terrified of the sound of my voice,” she says. How do I manage the situation? she remembers wondering. One month prior, Shkreli had been charged with defrauding investors at hedge funds he’d run earlier in his career, and he made a habit of regularly taunting journalists like her.
She was so anxious that she hadn’t eaten all morning. More than four years earlier, in January 2016, Smythe stood outside the Bryant Park skyscraper where Martin Shkreli’s company Turing Pharmaceuticals had its offices, clutching a camera, about to meet the man himself for the first time. The relationship has made her completely rethink her earlier work covering the courts, and as she looks back on all of the little decisions she made that caused this giant break in her life, she says she has no regrets: “I’m happy here. “I fell down the rabbit hole,” Smythe tells me, sitting in her bright basement apartment in Harlem, speaking publicly about her romance with Shkreli for the first time.
Shkreli, who was convicted of fraud in 2017, is now serving seven years in prison. It was a scoop that ignited the internet, because her love interest, now life partner, is not just any defendant, but Martin Shkreli, the so-called “Pharma Bro” and online provocateur, who increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight and made headlines for buying a one-off Wu-Tang Clan album for a reported $2 million.
In fact, she broke the news of his arrest. What could cause the sensible Smythe to turn her life upside down? She fell in love with a defendant whose case she covered. Over the course of nine months, beginning in July 2018, Smythe quit her job, moved out of the apartment, and divorced her husband.
“We had the perfect little Brooklyn life,” Smythe says.
#CHRISTINA HAAK NEW BOYFRIEND FREE#
She and her husband, who worked in finance, spent their free time cooking, walking Smythe’s rescue dog, and going on literary pub crawls. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped makeup. Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar.
0 kommentar(er)
