Martha Stewart Threatened to Burn Down Her Home, Hoped Her Plane Would Crash After Learning of Husband’s Infidelity

Martha Stewart‘s new Netflix documentary Martha reveals previously undisclosed details about her emotional response to her ex-husband Andy Stewart’s affair in 1987, which led to their separation and eventual divorce in 1990. The lifestyle mogul shares deeply personal letters written during the dissolution of her marriage, including raw expressions of anger.

“Again, I feel betrayed and all alone,” Stewart wrote in one particularly revealing letter via Entertainment Weekly. “When you tell me that this is no longer your home, after all we did here together, why shouldn’t I say I’m going to burn it down? I am to go to San Francisco to talk about weddings and my wonderful life. I hope you’re enjoying your freedom, and I hope my plane crashes.”

The betrayal occurred at the couple’s iconic Turkey Hill Road residence in Westport, Connecticut, where Stewart discovered Andy’s relationship with a woman named Robin, who lived on their property. “Robin worked for me, and she had lost her apartment or something, and I said, ‘You can move into the barn on the lower two acres,’” Stewart recounts in the film. “We had a little apartment down there. When I was traveling, Andy started up with her. It was like I put out a snack for Andy.”

Stewart’s immediate response was decisive: she remembers “[kicking] her out immediately, like ‘What the hell are you doing?’” after discovering the affair. “Andy betrayed me right on our property. Not nice,” she states in the documentary.

The revelation came when Stewart, at age 40, was reaching new heights in her career trajectory. Having evolved from her early work as a model and stockbroker in New York, she had established a successful catering business in the mid-1970s, which led to White House events, corporate functions, book deals, Martha Stewart Living magazine, and eventually her media empire.

Despite their growing success, the marriage deteriorated. “He’s the one who wanted the divorce, not I,” Stewart maintains. “He was throwing me away. I was 40 years old; I was gorgeous. I was a desirous woman, but he was treating me like a castaway. He treated me really badly, and in turn, I guess I treated him badly. I always said I was a swan, and like all swans, I was monogamous. And I thought monogamy was admirable; I did. But it turns out it didn’t save a marriage.” Following this emotional revelation, Stewart pointedly asks, “Can we get onto a happier subject?”

While revealing these personal details, the documentary has received mixed reactions from Stewart. In an interview with the New York Times, she spent “roughly 30 almost uninterrupted minutes” critiquing various aspects of the film. She called the use of classical music over rap “lousy,” described the entire second half as “a bit lazy,” found the amount of footage that made the final cut “just shocking,” and labeled the emphasis on her trial and prison time both “extremely boring” and “not that important.”

Director R.J. Cutler defended his work, telling the Times, “I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it. I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.” He added, “It’s a movie, not a Wikipedia page. It’s the story of an incredibly interesting human being who is complicated and visionary and brilliant.”

Despite her criticisms of the documentary, Stewart acknowledges its positive impact in the interview: “So many girls have already told me — young women — that watching it gave them a strength that they didn’t know they had. And that’s the thing I like most about the documentary. It really shows a strong woman standing up for herself and living through horror as well as some huge success.”

Stewart now offers pointed advice in her documentary to young women based on her experience: “If you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you — he’s the piece of s—, and look at him as a piece of s— and get out of it. Get out of that marriage.”