Andrea Peyser, a New York Post columnist known for her scathing and often controversial takedowns, has fired back after Martha Stewart suggested she had died, kicking off her latest article with the line, “I’m alive, b---h!”
The pair’s feud was renewed last week when Stewart, in the new tell-all documentary about her career as a lifestyle mogul and TV personality, apparently took a shot at Peyser, who covered the mogul’s 2004 securities fraud trial—which landed her in federal prison for five months.
Peyser’s reporting on the trial had been ruthless.
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She described Stewart’s outfit as “dun-colored spike heels and a shapeless smock — looking like a gardener who moonlights as a dominatrix,” and concluded that her efforts to play the victim in the trial were “like everything else in the hyper-controlled world of Martha… a carefully scripted pose.”
Reflecting on the trial in the documentary, Stewart said, “New York Post lady was there just looking so smug. She had written horrible things during the entire trial. She’s dead now, thank goodness, and nobody has to put up with that c--- she was writing all the time.”
The remark made waves on social media, with users praising Stewart for her wit.
But now 65-year-old Peyser—who is very much alive—has set the record straight.
“It’s been 20 years since Martha Stewart traded her Manolo stilettos for ballet flats, her 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton bedsheets for a lumpy, polyester blend-covered bunk bed — the bottom half, she moaned — and suffered through a diet of horrific coffee and fat- and carb-heavy grub as she became the most fabulous and furious inmate ever to grace Club Fed,” Peyser writes. “Two decades later, she’s still fantasizing about (plotting?) my grisly demise.”
After taking shots at Stewart’s reduced net worth, her friendship with the rapper Snoop Dogg, and her up-and-down relationship with her daughter, Peyser concluded the column this way: “She’s rich. She’s beautiful, creative and temperamental. I pity her.”
Speaking before the Philadelphia Conference for Women on Thursday, Stewart acknowledged the ongoing feud and speculated that it might lead to more people tuning in to the new film, the Post reported in a followup the same day.
“She wrote this very scathing article today in the New York Post—my favorite newspaper,” Stewart joked on stage before reading Peyser’s headline in full. “So, that will probably cause more people to watch my documentary.”
