Martha Stewart and Ina Garten’s friendship hasn’t always been chocolate chip cookies and coconut cupcakes.
The domestic doyens’ friendship appears to have become strained when Stewart, 83, went away to prison in 2004 for charges related to conspiracy and obstruction of justice.
“When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me,” Stewart told The New Yorker in a Sept. 2 profile on Garten, 76.
“I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly,” she added.
Stewart was sent to Alderson Federal Prison Camp after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction and two counts of lying to federal investigators. She was also accused of securities fraud, though a jury found her not guilty on that more serious charge.
A judge sentenced the homemaking icon to five months in prison, five months of home confinement and two years of supervised probation. She was also hit with a $30,000 fine.
Stewart has always maintained she was innocent.
Garten disputes and “firmly” denies Stewart’s recollection of what happened between them in 2004, a period The New Yorker described as “the end of their friendship.”
Stewart’s publicist, Susan Magrino, also told the outlet that her client is “not bitter at all” about the fallout with Garten.
“There’s no feud,” Magrino insisted.
Stewart and Garten met in the early ’90s thanks to a lemon square emergency.
While driving around East Hampton, New York, in a giant black suburban one day, Stewart all of a sudden “veered almost crashingly to the curb and said, ‘I’ve got to get lemon squares,’” Chip Gibson – the head of Crown Publishing at the time – recalled to The New Yorker.
That led Stewart to Garten’s since-shuttered Barefoot Contessa shop.
“My desk was right in front of the cheese case and we just ended up in a conversation,” Garten recalled of the meeting in a 2017 TIME interview. “We ended up actually doing benefits together where it was at her house and I was the caterer, and we became friends after that.”
Stewart went on to help Garten’s career in many ways. Stewart featured Garten on a 1999 episode of her show “Martha Stewart Living,” introduced her to an editor who later collaborated with her on her debut cookbook, “The Barefoot Contessa” (a name that has become synonymous with the Food Network star), and wrote the foreword for that book.
“It took a while, but I finally understood what motivated Ina, realizing that here was a true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents,” Stewart wrote.
Despite the rumored animosity between the stars, Garten has praised Stewart publicly.
“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,” she said in her 2017 TIME profile.
“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.”
