MarthaTalks.com

» see marthatalks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 4 June 2003 Martha Stewart was indicted over her sale of ImClone stock, and before the day was out she had a website of her own, which was pointedly not her company's. Every page of it carried the same line at the bottom: this is a personal statement from Martha Stewart, and it is not issued by or on behalf of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. The lawyers clearly wrote that sentence, and it is the most interesting thing on the page, because it means somebody had already worked out that the brand and the woman now needed separate mailing addresses.

The site itself was almost nothing. A letter and a mailbox to write to her. The legal section held the actual court filings, and a notes page and a trial update turned up beside it later. There was no design on it at all beyond a green wordmark and a photograph. For 2003 that restraint reads as a decision rather than a budget.

It ran through the conviction in March 2004 and the sentencing that summer, and then through the five months she served at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia, from October 2004. Then it stopped.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first day ~

The numbers come from her own second letter, posted that week and still in the archive. In its first day, she wrote, the site had logged more than two million hits, and more than 20,000 visitors had sent messages of support. She said she was trying to read all of them. Whatever you make of the case, two million hits in a day in 2003 is a real crowd, and it arrived at a domain that had not existed on Tuesday.

The site was addressed to Americans, and in particular to the ones who already liked her. I was nineteen that June, in Turkey, where the whole case was a wire paragraph on a business page if it ran at all. What crosses the distance is not the trial. It is the shape of the thing: one person, one domain, talking past the press to the people who would read her directly.

~ the letter it stopped on ~

The last update is a letter from Alderson at Christmas 2004. She writes about being locked up with 1,200 other women and asks readers to push for reform of sentencing for nonviolent first offenders. Her prison job, she notes, was cleaning. She says the food is bad and that she is fine, really. It ends "Happy holidays, Martha Stewart" and a postscript pointing at the brief her lawyers had filed with the court that afternoon.

She came home on 4 March 2005 and the page never changed again. The Internet Archive kept crawling it almost every day through the spring, collecting the same 2.4 kilobytes of Christmas letter, and the last copy it took is dated 27 June 2005. After that there is nothing at all until June 2007, when the crawler came back and found a Network Solutions renewal notice where the site had been. The exact day it went off is not recorded anywhere, which is why this grave is filed to the year.

~ the inheritance ~

Everything a famous person in trouble does now was prototyped here. The statement published direct instead of handed to a reporter, and the court documents put up in full so supporters can read them without a journalist in the middle. MarthaTalks did both in 2003 with a wordmark and five pages of static HTML, and the domain today answers with a 114-byte parking stub that redirects to a search page somebody else monetizes.

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