Martha Stewart Bounces Back From Arrest and Dishes Marriage Advice in Documentary Trailer

Martha Stewart‘s recipe for success is outlined in the first trailer for Martha, the forthcoming Netflix documentary premiering on Oct. 30. Two key ingredients are the mottos she has followed for years: “Learn something new every day and when you’re through changing, you’re through.” Mix these in with resilience and defiance in male-dominated spaces, as well as a detachment from assigning more value to a marriage than a career, and you get Martha.

“I’m strict and I’m demanding and I’m all those good things that make a successful person,” Stewart says in the trailer. Another voice in the clip adds, “In the business world, that’s a great trait for a man. But for a woman, you know, she was a bitch.” Stewart took it in stride, even going so far as to say it inspired her to continue on the path that led to her becoming the “first self-made female billionaire” in America, or the “original influencer,” as proclaimed in the documentary.

There are a few ingredients that Stewart wouldn’t recommend including when attempting to replicate her recipe. The most important, perhaps, is being indicted on criminal charges and serving five months in federal prison at the height of your success. And particularly if you’re a young woman, she says, it would be wise to not stay in a marriage with any man who begins cheating on you. Stewart had an affair herself, during her first and only marriage, but brushes it off in the clip: “I don’t think Andy ever knew about that.”

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Martha was directed by R.J. Cutler, best known for the documentaries Elton John: Never Too Late and Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. “I started reading about Martha and the more I did, the more it became clear to me that she was a complex person filled with so many conflicts and contradictions,” he told Netflix. “And the more I learned about her, the more excited I became about the possibility of digging deeper into her story.”

The film follows Stewart from her start as a teen model through her decades-long career, including the development of her friendship with Snoop Dogg and the comeback that followed her release from prison in 2005. “I could’ve just been a miserable, has-been housewife,” Stewart says in the trailer. “But I didn’t let that happen to myself.”