The Complicated Way Martha Stewart Feels About The Me Too Movement

Once upon a time, the self-made billionaire, Martha Stewart, was just a model trying to get a job (via Insider). Stewart told People that she walked into an advertisement agency at just 16 years old, where a group of men asked her to undress. She left. "I think women just have to understand that you can say no," Stewart told the publication, "You can walk out of a room." Like most powerful women, she's also faced her share of derogatory, sexist, condescending press coverage. 

The New York Post slammed her as a "divorcée desperately looking to hook up with the wealthy gentleman." Vulture got on her case for bragging too much. Forbes scolded Stewart's business acumen, calling her a "control freak who makes her employees cry, lives like a Bourbon monarch and fires anyone who disagrees with her." But through it all, Stewart has kept on, keeping on. 

Now, all of a sudden, she's simultaneously queen of the kitchen, idol to housewives, and BFFs with Snoop Dogg. Suffice to say Stewart has survived a long, convoluted career in an industry that hasn't always been kind to her, and during times when neither Twitter, nor its #MeToo hashtag was a reality. So it's hardly surprising that M. Diddy's (as they called her in prison, per The Daily Meal) feelings about the movement aren't black and white. 

Stewart climbed her way to the top of the ladder during a time when women in the industry, by and large, turned the other cheek. "It has been really painful for me," she reflected to Harper's Bazaar of the Me Too movement. "I've known almost every single one of the famous guys that has been accused and set aside." Stewart doesn't think all of them were rightly accused. "But some were—it's just their awful personalities," she told the magazine, "I am not going to mention their names, but I know those people very, very well, and you know the man just talks about sex during dinner. That doesn't mean anything to me."

Her experience with sexual harassment in the modeling industry was certainly not her only one. Stewart told Harper's Bazaar that when she worked as a stockbroker, "I mean, every man on Wall Street was trying to get you. Every man was trying to touch you in the cab. We had martinis for lunch." Of course the home decorator's Me Too comments have made national headlines. They're plastered all over HuffPost, USA Today, and Fox News. But before we all get onto our internet soapboxes, too, perhaps it's worth letting a 79-year-old woman have the feelings she wants to have?