Why Martha Stewart And Ina Garten Can't Stand Each Other Now

Martha Stewart and Ina Garten are two of our best and brightest icons in the homemaking space. While they were once close friends, their bond unraveled sometime in the early 2000s. The reason for their fallout? Well ... it depends on who's telling the story. Garten's memoir "Be Ready When the Luck Happens" claims their falling out began when she moved out of New York, but Stewart firmly disagrees. She's taken a much less neutral stance, putting all the blame on her former friend and, perhaps, making another outrageous claim about her prison time in the process.

On an October 2024 episode of "Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen," Stewart was asked if she'd read Garten's book yet. "I've read parts of it," she told Cohen, adding one of her signature pithy remarks: "[Garten] can write whatever she wants." (In other words, Stewart thinks Garten's totally full of it.) According to Stewart, her friendship with Garten ended when she infamously went to prison in 2004 for a stock trading conviction. She says Garten stopped speaking to her during that difficult time. "I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly," she told The New Yorker. Garten's version of the story firmly refutes this, treading much more lightly compared to Stewart's unfiltered comments. 

It's never fun seeing two people with such history have a public falling out such as this. Martha Stewart and Ina Garten's friendship began in the 1990s Hamptons scene, and Stewart was an early champion of Garten's burgeoning writing career — even helping Garten secure her first book deal and inviting her to write a column for "Martha Stewart Living." Despite their shared history, Stewart seemed pretty nonchalant about rekindling the relationship on "Watch What Happens Live." She was also sitting side by side with her close friend Snoop Dogg, who joked that Garten's excuse was weak because "Martha [doesn't] fall out with people." (It's not the first time Snoop Dogg has gotten candid about Stewart's personal life.)

While it seems unlikely that Stewart and Garten will be burying the hatchet any time soon, especially since Stewart has taken shots at Garten before. Still, fans can rest assured that at least Stewart and Snoop Dogg's friendship continues to thrive. The same goes for other Food Network stars such as Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay, both of whom have featured Stewart on their respective shows in recent years. Here's hoping Stewart and Garten can work it out on an episode of the latter's interview-style show "Be My Guest with Ina Garten" before this gets too out of hand.