Christe Smythe: a sad tale

If you've heard of Martin Shkreli, odds are you've heard of Christie Smythe.

If not, let me regale you with this pickme story.

Martin Shkreli was a successful hedge fund manager who made the wrong move of raising the price of the drug Daraprim by 5,455% and going to prison for a couple years. He has a large following on the internet for his use of memes and general sense of humor. He livestreamed his 33rd birthday online, alone.

Christie Smythe is a journalist. In 2016, she was working for Bloomberg where she started covering stories about Shkreli.

Lets follow this trail of intrigue through the Elle magazine interview that caused Smythe to divorce her husband and quit her job for Shkreli:

“You could see his earnestness,” Smythe says. “It just didn’t match this idea of a fraudster.”

“he kept toying with me for a while,”

Shkreli was looking for a new lawyer and asked her for advice. She felt flattered

He sounded “ragged and fragile, and I got concerned he would commit suicide

Through the summer, Shkreli kept up his game of cat and mouse, offering Smythe tantalizing hints about evidence, then ghosting her for weeks over some perceived offense.

But the judge jailed Shkreli... The minute she left the courtroom, Smythe texted and emailed Shkreli’s friends, asking if he had his medications and arranging for someone to retrieve his cat.

He's just using you,"Smythe’s husband had told her early on

Hartley, who was a bridesmaid at Smythe’s wedding... figured Smythe just had a little crush.

“He trolls because he’s anxious,” she tells me, and “he really, really wants to be somebody.” She began defending him publicly

Smythe wasn’t covering the trial for Bloomberg, but she was there in the courtroom every day, sometimes sitting with Shkreli’s supporters

That spring, she wrote about Shkreli for a class, “describing how manipulative he was to reporters,” says her professor, Michael Shapiro. She wrote “quite candidly about how he had so successfully drawn her in.

The ending paragraph from the Elle magazine interview of Smythe:

She wants Shkreli, and hopes putting their love on the record might at last give her some power in the relationship. “He bounces between this delight in having a future life together and this fatalism about how it will never work,” Smythe says. “It’s definitely in the latter category now.” Sitting in her basement apartment, her eyes wet, her voice quavering, she says she will continue to wait for him while he serves the remaining years of his sentence: “I’m gonna try,” she says. “I’ll be here.”

In a Reddit AMA Shkreli was asked:

What happend to Christie Smythe? Anything from that story you think we ought to know or be clarified?

He answered:

not really, i think the only thing was my enthusiasm was pretty mild. i had a lot of 'girlfriends' in prison. what's a girlfriend when you can't fk?

An addition:

Gigachad. Watch out tho I think she really fell in love with you she seems kind of obsessed ngl. Could end up badly.

He answered:

i have a ton of girls like that, it sucks.

They are both fairly active on Reddit, and I wonder if she constantly checks his current comments to see if there are any hints that he still cares for her.