On the heels of Donald Trump incomprehensibly being elected president, two documentaries about very distinctly different women (who’ve both endured the same kind of misogyny in their respective industries) are getting a lot of attention. Incidentally, each doc was released the week just before the election, with R.J. Cutler’s Martha coming out on October 30 and Nneka Onuorah’s Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words coming out on October 31. If only any of the men (and, sadly, women) who voted for Trump might have 1) seen either of these films before the election and 2) as a result, actually been moved enough to understand the toxicity of misogyny in the culture. Particularly in American culture. Which is so deep-seated that even a gardener as adept as Martha Stewart would have trouble uprooting it.
While Stewart might have ultimately slammed the final product that is Martha (despite participating in it), Cutler is keen on making some very salient points—many of them political (but then, what else would one expect from someone who produced 1993’s The War Room?). Chief among them being that Stewart’s “downfall” (which she picked herself right back up from) after being accused of insider trading in the early 00s was a direct result of misogyny. The alleged “tip” she got pertained to the biopharmaceutical company ImClone, and would have been given to her by her then broker, Peter Bacanovic, at the end of 2001. Which meant that, for roughly the next three years, after which Stewart was finally tried and found guilty for, among other counts, “obstruction of justice,” she would be dealing with the fallout of what she presumed was an innocuous phone call.
The timing of the U.S. government and SEC “coming for” Stewart didn’t feel like a coincidence. After all, Stewart had transmogrified from “little housewife” into the first self-made female billionaire in America, and had just taken her juggernaut of a company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to new heights of profitability by going public on the New York Stock Exchange in October of 1999. As far as “women riding high” were concerned, there was no one higher than Stewart at the end of the nineties and very beginning of the 2000s.
Which is exactly why a man like James Comey (a.k.a. the narc-like creature who also came for Hillary during the 2016 election while serving as the director of the FBI) would seem to have an especial hard-on about making an example out of Stewart. Something he proceeded to do despite the fact that Bacanovic himself explicitly stated he gave no insider information to Stewart regarding ImClone—even though they (read: Comey) were trying to cajole him to say this very untruth for the sake of “landing” Martha, their proverbial white whale. This is exactly why Stewart asserts in the documentary that she was, for all intents and purposes, “a trophy” for Comey and his cohorts to put on their proverbial mantel.
Sort of like Megan Thee Stallion became a trophy for internet trolls to lambast in the wake of her finally coming out and saying what happened between her and Tory Lanez. A.k.a. that he shot her in the foot after the two left a party (or “intimate gathering,” depending on who you ask) at Kylie Jenner’s house (the Kardashian-Jenners being the source of all pain). In the aftermath of her announcement, the somewhat shocking reaction was a major backlash. Accusations that Thee Stallion was making it up were fueled by the fact that she didn’t immediately report Lanez to the police when they were found. Thee Stallion would explain that the George Floyd-related tensions in the air were still thick, and that she didn’t want to risk reporting him right then only to have the police kill him. She didn’t want to see another Black man dead—even one who hurt her so badly, both physically and emotionally.
In each film, both Megan and Martha have a best friend that similarly betrays them on the witness stand. In Stewart’s case, it was Mariana Pasternak (who would later have the gall to release a memoir in 2011 called The Best of Friends: Martha and Me). Indeed, her testimony would be the clincher for ensuring that Stewart got the maximum five-month prison sentence. Even so, “She made me a witness,” Pasternak insists in the documentary. This by telling Pasternak about how she sold the stock while they were on vacation in Mexico. And yet, Pasternak really didn’t need to make her erstwhile best friend sound like she was so devious by testifying that Stewart said, per Pasternak’s recollection, “Isn’t it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?” Which was probably just an offhanded, meaningless comment on Stewart’s part—one that she never imagined would be used by Pasternak as the shovel to dig her corporate grave.
For Thee Stallion, the “Et tu, Brute?”-like betrayal was similar, too. And it came from her assistant/best friend, Kelsey Harris. Like Stewart, Thee Stallion recounts just how good of friends they were in the documentary, which made the courtroom backstabbing feel all the more profoundly painful. In Harris’ scenario, she chose to claim she “didn’t remember” who shot Megan that night—despite having previously named Lanez in a statement and sending a text to Thee Stallion’s bodyguard on the night in question that read, “Tory shot meg.” But, with the revelation that Thee Stallion had slept with Lanez, Harris—who was also in a sexual relationship with him—seemed to let the green-eyed monster get the better of her and suddenly backpedaled when it mattered most to tell the truth about what happened.
Luckily for Thee Stallion’s confidence level after that horrible summer of 2020, “WAP” with Cardi B was released—to great fanfare. As Thee Stallion says in her documentary, “I feel like when women come together, we just get so powerful,” adding, “It gets the men shaking.” She had no idea how prescient that statement would be for this year’s election, with bros and incels uniting to set feminism back possibly centuries. And now, many are saying that Thee Stallion’s support of Kamala Harris and according performance at a rally for the presidential hopeful in Atlanta was a detriment rather than a help as it exhibited the worst kind of “pandering” to Black women.
As for the boon of “WAP” to the election campaign of 2020, Cardi and Megan’s raunchy lyrics had every conservative man up in arms—and even some theoretically “liberal” ones as well. This included Stewart’s later-in-life bestie, Snoop Dogg, who is shown in the Megan documentary (via “archival footage”) commenting, “That should be a possession that no one gets to know about until they know about it.” How telling that he should use the word “possession” to describe a pussy, as though it’s something to be owned. And something that men are, now more than ever, still trying to “own” by legislating women’s bodies.
Perhaps Snoop Dogg’s pearl-clutching sensibilities are more in line with the Connecticut and Hamptons set like Stewart, and the pairing is more natural than it appears. After all, it’s Snoop himself who says in Martha, “When me and Martha got a chance to hang out, we discovered that we love the same things and we have the same beliefs in life.” The two met in 2015, at the Comedy Central Roast of Justin Bieber. Oddly, this was the unexpected event that gave Stewart’s “has-been” career the shot of adrenaline it needed to revive. For, in the wake of the TV special’s airing, it was as though she had been reembraced by a new generation who could get on board with an image of Martha that was slightly less “polished” and “perfect” than it had been before. Though, make no mistake, Stewart’s sense of perfectionism is still what drives her. Even if it simply drives others crazy. And yet, as it is pointed out often in Martha, the “annoying” traits she exhibits as a successful woman in business would never be thought twice about if she were a man (successful or otherwise). And if that’s a cliché, well, it bears underscoring that clichés exist for a reason—they’re often accurate.
Which is exactly why The Man tried to pin Stewart in a “gotcha!” moment once she ascended “too high” on the ladder. This even though she committed no crime. Regardless, the District Attorney’s office went with “lying” as the lead for why they were prosecuting her. Even though no one understood how you could lie about a crime you didn’t even commit. Here, too, Comey was adamant that Stewart still seemed like she wasn’t being truthful, like she was hiding something. Not exactly an “ironclad” case, and yet, the jury convicted her. Let us pause here to remind that Bill Clinton, who was impeached for “lying” and “obstruction of justice” in 1998—the same things Martha was on trial for—was acquitted in spite of his blatant guilt. The double standard there is obvious.
As for the notion of “believing women” in any regard, it also extends to the same kind of backlash Megan Thee Stallion received, with both genders coming to Lanez’s defense and saying that Thee Stallion was just a woman scorned trying to tarnish his name. It’s the kind of story we hear over and over when it comes to women. A girl pulls herself up by her bootstraps, becomes “too” successful and then needs to be “shown her place” again by the patriarchy at large.
Stewart’s aforementioned criticisms of the documentary boiled down to something that was typically Martha: she didn’t like the way it made her “look”—literally and figuratively. In particular, she said the final scenes of her walking alone in her garden seemed designed to make her come across as a “lonely old lady” and that Cutler only chose the most unflattering of angles when filming the talking head portion of the tale. Perhaps what Stewart needed, then, was a woman’s touch on these matters, even if Cutler is known, of late, for his “celebrity docs,” including Listen to Me Marlon, Belushi, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry and Elton John: Never Too Late.
Granted, the subjects of those documentaries were either dead, men, dead men or a girl still too young and naïve to fight back much on the things she might have disliked. Perhaps Stewart would have been happier if, like Thee Stallion, she had her story told through a female gaze. Then again, Stewart is “feministic” to have given a male director a chance to tell her story. Either way, both docs use animation to retell traumatic events (sort of like the Paris documentary of 2020). And oh, how there are so many to tell in a woman’s life, let alone a successful one operating in a male-dominated domain (because, yes, Martha might have been the Queen of Homemaking, but it made her the Queen of Corporate).
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