Martha Stewart says Ina Garten stopped talking to her after prison sentence

Martha Stewart is ready to set the record straight about her friendship with Ina Garten.

While the two giants of the culinary world agree that their friendship deteriorated in the early ‘00s, both women have a different explanation for why they fell out of touch. In her 2024 memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens, Garten says her move to Connecticut and Stewart spending time in Bedford, N.Y., put distance between them. 

But during her Sunday night visit to Watch What Happens Live, Stewart says otherwise.

“She can write whatever she wants,” Stewart said of the memoir, after confirming that she has “read parts of” the book, including the sections about herself. When host Andy Cohen brought up the Connecticut claim, Stewart said simply, “That’s not true.”

Stewart was last night’s WWHL bartender, to celebrate the birthday of her longtime friend, Snoop Dogg. During her exchange with Cohen, Snoop didn’t hesitate to jump to his BFF’s defense, despite the memoir being news to him.

“That’s weak,” Snoop replied. “Martha, don’t fall out with people.”

Agreeing, Stewart chimed in to say that Garten stopped talking to her “after I went to jail.”

To that, Snoop joked, “See, that’s when I stepped in.”

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This isn’t the first time Stewart has addressed her take on the situation. She also offered her side of the story during a Sept. 2 New Yorker profile of Garten, saying, “When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me. I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly.”

Afterwards, Stewart’s longtime publicist clarified that Stewart is “not bitter at all and there’s no feud.” As for Garten, she denied that Stewart’s prison sentence over insider trading charges was the reason for the rift. Stewart served five months in prison before her release in March of 2005.

Garten has previously been open about her admiration for Stewart, who she dubbed a “trailblazer” in the lifestyle space during a 2017 appearance on the How to Be Amazing with Michael Ian Black podcast. Garten also opened up about crossing paths with Stewart back in the ‘90s, when she was running a food store in East Hampton.

“My desk was right in front of the cheese case and we just ended up in a conversation,” Garten said. “We ended up actually doing benefits together where it was at her house and I was the caterer and we became friends after that.”

The Martha Stewart Living host would eventually connect Garten with the Food Network editor who would help her publish her first cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa — for which Stewart also penned a forward.

Garten added, “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. 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.”

You can see Stewart discuss her relationship with Garten in the WWHL clip above.

The upcoming documentary about Stewart, titled Martha, streams on Netflix Oct. 30.