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Now that Martha Stewart is out of prison and under house arrest, it’s worth taking a look (perhaps another look) at her PR strategy. As PR NEWS contributing editor and legal PR guru Richard Levick makes clear, Martha Stewart is not so soon off the vine that she was not around to learn the lesson taught so painfully by Richard Nixon and repeated many times over the past three decades: It's not the crime, it's the cover- up.
For $55,000, she has sabotaged her remarkable career, endangered her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., and created a story that, like the Exxon Valdez before it, will live on for years in the annals of public relations as an example of what not to do when faced with a corporate legal and media challenge.
Lawyers who think that saying nothing or saying very little preserves all of a client's options need look no further than the Martha Stewart case for the fatal flaws in this approach. The media can do as much harm - or more - than a judge or jury.
The list of her self-defeating actions - or inactions - doesn't quite make a baker's dozen, but the logic behind them can certainly serve as a primer for what not to do when you've been charged with financial chicanery.
Cooperate, cooperate, cooperate.
You are not an ostrich - and ignoring them won't make them go away.
Did Martha really think that by dismissing them with a regal flip of the hand, the investigators would slink off, never to return?
Don't put off until tomorrow that which will make you look bad for life.
In a style more reminiscent of Freddy Kruger than America's Homemaker, Martha angrily chopped cabbage on CBS' "The Early Show," apparently taken by surprise by questions about the charges. If Scarlet O'Hara didn't get away with "I'll think about that tomorrow," Martha's "Can't we just talk about the salad?" was even more implausible. Suddenly, she publicly confirmed that she was a mean person.
Apparently you can pick your family....
Martha's family portrait claims a close relationship with Sam Waksal of ImClone, but she later referred to her relationship with him as "no closer than the family pet."
I am an island (not).
Martha headed a publicly traded company for several years and had a seat on the NYSE for several months, but wanted America to believe that she had no inside relationships.
Make sure that your own house is in order.
She built a hugely successful magazine empire, but was slow to develop her own communications strategy, falling so far behind the news curve as to never catch up.
Who says that there's never too much of a good thing?
When she finally got the right PR firms on her side, Martha had so many of them (four by one count) that it must have been difficult to keep them straight.
Don't forget the little people.
Martha wanted to be "one of us" but wore carried a $6,000 Hermes purse to court. That screamed, "I don't care, I play by different rules."
Use tools appropriately.
She developed her marthatalks.com web Web site to some acclaim, but then failed to use it for much more than groveling testimonials from shocked fans. Note that several hours after her statement about the verdict was posted on her site, the phrase, "I did nothing wrong" disappeared from the statement.
OJ's strategy may not work for you.
Martha claimed to be the victim of an overreaching SEC, yet never organized others in a grassroots effort to communicate the danger posed to everyone by "Big Government."
"We are not amused" is an ineffective strategy.
She claimed to be a target (she was) but never considered this therefused to take the SEC's most powerful weapon seriously when they first came to her, when she failedfailing to reach any agreement over $55,000 in trading.
Don't offer juries options you don't want them to take.
Martha claimed to be innocent, but failed to testify at trial, leaving only only two possible conclusions for the jury - either she couldn't imagine that the jury would dare to cross her or she could not honestly testify. Federal rules do make testifying an increased challenge, but the PR rule of celebrity defendants is that juries expect them to testify.
Sticking to your guns is a good thing. Shooting yourself in the foot, however, is not.
Even upon conviction, she stuck to her half-pregnant media strategy, so determined to preserve her right of appeal that she refused to say a convincing "I'm sorry" in any form.
For lawyers On June 5th, of 2003, the New York Times wrote, "In maintaining her innocence and standing for trial, Stewart is subjecting herself and her company... to even more relentlessly negative news media than it has had in the last year and a half."
Maybe, absent all best media practices, Martha Stewart should have taken another media cue from the redoubtable Richard Nixon. Just stand up in front of the world and say, "I am not a cook!"
Well, maybe not.
By Richard S. Levick, Esq., president of Levick Strategic Communications. He can be reached at rlevick@levick.com. Levick has handled the media for more than 150 law firms and the highest profile crisis matters from the Catholic Church to the Rosie O'Donnell Rosie magazine litigation.
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