Martin Shkreli, dubbed the 'Pharma bro', in 2015 after being taken into custody
Credit: Craig Ruttle /AP
A financial reporter who broke the story of one of America’s most reviled fraudsters has quit both her marriage and her job after falling in love with him.
Christie Smythe, a journalist with the Bloomberg news agency, disclosed in 2015 how Martin Shkreli — dubbed the "Pharma Bro" for manipulating the price of medicines — was under investigation for trading violations.
The brash New York hedge fund boss, who is now serving a seven-year jail sentence, was branded "a new icon of modern greed" after raising the price of one life-saving drug by 5,000 per cent.
Smythe, 38, has now made headlines herself after revealing how she fell in love with him while covering his story, despite being warned that he was a "master manipulator".
She has now divorced her partner and plans to start a family with Shkreli, despite only ever kissing him during a prison visit. He is not eligible for release for another three years.
Smythe gave details of the couple’s affair in an interview with Elle magazine, in which she says her romance was a case of falling "down the rabbit hole".
Christie Smythe
Shkreli, 37, was convicted of three of eight counts of fraud in 2017, having allegedly $11million of stock from his own firm to bail out failed hedge fund that he ran.
Ahead of his trial, his flamboyant lifestyle and unrepentant behaviour saw him become the unacceptable face of so-called "Big Pharma" corporate profiteering.
He smirked when testifying to Congress about price fixing, sparred with critics on Twitter, and was also revealed to have spent $2 million on a rare album by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.
He even became a topic in the 2016 US presidential race, with both Hillary Clinton berating his outrageous “price gouging” and Donald Trump branding him a “spoiled brat.”
Ms Smythe, who previously had what she described as a "perfect" Brooklyn life with her husband, said she first got to know Mr Shkreli before his arrest, when he gave her off-record interviews intended to demonstrate his innocence.
“You could see his earnestness,” Smythe says. “It just didn’t match this idea of a fraudster.”
The pair also bonded over stories of how they had both struggled to succeed in the Ivy League-dominated New York rat race. Both, she said, had suffered from anxiety problems as children.
She was warned early on by her husband that Shkreli was just "using her", and that she risked compromising her journalistic integrity by having too close contact with him.
But she carried on seeing him, amid plans also to write a book about his case. During a journalism course she was taking at the time at Colombia University, she even wrote “quite candidly about how he had so successfully drawn her in," according to her former tutor, who also spoke to Elle.
“Maybe I was being charmed by a master manipulator,” Smythe admitted to the magazine.
She said their romance finally began after Shkreli was jailed, when they exchanged a first kiss in a prison visiting room that stank of fried chicken wings.
The couple have never been able to consummate their relationship, but have already got as far as planning children. Ms Smythe has even had her eggs frozen, in case she is too old conceive once Shkreli leaves jail.
Ms Smythe has already left Bloomberg, who deemed her conduct unprofessional, and has sold film rights to her book proposal. Whether the story will have quite the happy ending she intends, though, remains to be seen. When Shkreli found out about her interview with Elle, he stopped communicating with her.
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