Martha Stewart Claims Ina Garten Was "Unfriendly" Amid Prison Sentence

Details are defrosting on Martha Stewart and Ina Garten's storied friendship.

While the pair's relationship goes back over three decades, Martha recently revealed that they had a bump in the road about 20 years ago when she went to prison for charges connected to insider trading.

"When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me," the Martha Stewart Living creator told The New Yorker for a Sept. 6 story, referencing her five-month prison stint that began in 2004. "I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly."

However, Ina "firmly" denied her version of events to the magazine, maintaining that the pair simply lost touch after Martha began spending less time at her Hamptons home nearby and more time at her new property upstate in Bedford, New York.

Regardless of the true reasoning for their temporary rift, Martha's publicist told The New Yorker that she is "not bitter at all and there’s no feud" between the cooking icons.

In fact, both Martha and Ina have been effusive about one another in recent years.

"I think she did something really important, which is that she took something that wasn’t valued, which is home arts, and raised it to a level that people were proud to do it and that completely changed the landscape,” Ina told TIME of Martha in 2017. “I then took it in my own direction, which is that I’m not a trained professional chef, cooking is really hard for me — here I am 40 years in the food business, it’s still hard for me."

It was Martha who gave the Food Network star her first big break, too. The same year she purchased a home near Ina's in the Hamptons, she included a writeup of Ina's popular local food store, The Barefoot Contessa. She would later connect her to Chip Gibson, who published Ina's first cookbook of the same name.

Chip recalled Martha's obsession with Ina's cooking at the time, saying she was "overcome" by her desire to stop into the East Hampton store to satisfy her sweet tooth.

"We were in a gigantic black Suburban,” he told The New Yorker. "And suddenly she veered almost crashingly to the curb and said, ‘I’ve got to get lemon squares.’"

Her apparent rift with Martha isn't the only bombshell to come out about Ina's past recently. In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens—to be released on Oct. 1—the cookbook author revealed that she nearly divorced her husband, Jeffrey Garten, in their decades-long marriage.

"When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles—­took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces," she wrote. "While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing at the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not a wife. My responsibilities made it impossible for me to even think about anything else. There was no expectation about who got home from work first and what they should do, because I never got home from work!"

Ina added, "I thought about it a lot, and at my lowest point, I wondered if the only answer would be to get a divorce. I loved Jeffrey and didn’t want to shock—­or hurt—­him, so I’d start by suggesting we pause for a separation."

Ultimately, Jeffrey agreed to go to therapy and the couple learned some tools to help them navigate through tough times.

"Six weeks passed. We talked, we listened, and more important, we heard each other when we aired our concerns,” she continued. “Moving forward, we could be equals who took care of each other. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if we worked toward the same goal, we could change things together."

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