Is Martha Stewart truly a changed woman?

updated 1:02 a.m. ET March 7, 2005

NEW YORK - A few hours after Martha Stewart was chauffeured from prison, declaring her life fundamentally changed, Fred Shapiro studied the photos of the homemaking millionaire flooding the Internet, wondering whether to believe her.

It’s not that Shapiro is skeptical. It’s just that he’s been there.

“If you’re changed, then let’s see the action,” said Shapiro, a lawyer who served time for a locally notorious bank fraud in Philadelphia in the 1990s, then went back to prison for a separate episode of white-collar crime 10 years later. “Everyone says they’ve changed after they’ve left prison, but only time will tell.”

Plenty of precedent
Stewart, released Friday after five months in prison for lying about a stock sale, is the latest in a long line of high-profile white-collar convicts — from junk bond king Michael Milken to hotel queen Leona Helmsley — who have returned to freedom proclaiming themselves changed people.

But are they really? What to make of Stewart’s assertion, posted on her company’s web site, that prison “has been life altering and life affirming?” The spotlight and public relations campaign surrounding Stewart, if anything, seems to make those more difficult questions to answer.

“I can completely identify with her comments about prison,” said David Novak, a flight school owner who did time for mail fraud in 1997, and today acts as a sentencing consultant to other white-collar convicts.

“To this day, I look back at that time as probably the greatest blessing of my life,” says Novak, of Salt Lake City. “Not the going to prison part. But the opportunity to be still and reflect upon a lot of the poor judgments I made.”

Ellen Podgor, a professor of law at Georgia State University in Atlanta, agreed.

Stewart escaping stigma?
A prison term “is mind altering. I don’t think it’s just for the press, what’s being said,” said Podgor, an author of two books on white-collar crime.

“But the stigma, society’s stigma, that is the greatest penalty faced by white-collar criminals.... That is not happening here. This case is different,” she said, noting the surging price of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. stock and the public’s apparent interest in her products.

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