So a journalist, who was covering Martin Shkreli’s situation a few years ago, fell in love with him, divorced her husband, quit her job at Bloomberg News, and became “life partners” with Martin “Punch-Face” Shkreli, who sits in a jail cell. She even froze her eggs so they could have babies once he gets out.
Then she went public with their love in an article in Elle magazine, and Punch-Face is like “nah.”
When Shkreli found out about this article, though, he stopped communicating with her. He didn’t want her telling her story, she says. Smythe thinks it’s because he’s worried about fallout for her. While she waits to hear from him, she monitors Google Alerts for his name, posts in support groups for loved ones of inmates, and—because inmates must place outgoing calls and can’t accept incoming ones—hopes one day he will call or reply to one of her emails.
Smythe has only one photo of the two of them, propped next to her bed. Shkreli, his arm around Smythe, has a wide-open smile. “Doesn’t he look human there?” Smythe says, laughing…I tell Smythe I’ll need to ask Shkreli for comment. “Maybe this will be a reason for him to reach out to me,” she says. Later, when I relay Shkreli’s statement—“Mr. Shkreli wishes Ms. Smythe the best of luck in her future endeavors”—to Smythe via video chat, she says, “That’s sweet,” quietly, not convincingly.
