Christie Smythe, the reporter who ditched her Bloomberg News job and husband to pursue a romance with imprisoned “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, said Monday she’s ready to date other people after Shkreli appeared to cool on their relationship.
“I’m definitely open to it,” Smythe told the New York Post. “I have been basically celibate for two years. I’m not going to sit around and wait.”
Smythe and Shkreli’s romantic bond was the subject of a bombshell article Elle published on Sunday. Smythe covered Shkreli’s 2015 arrest for hedge-fund fraud, months after the notorious pharma exec received a public flogging for price-gouging on his company’s AIDS drug.
Their nonsexual affair bloomed when Shkreli landed behind bars following his 2018 conviction, with the two exchanging “I love you’s” and Smythe quitting her job, leaving her husband and even freezing her eggs for Shkreli’s release.
But Shkreli doused her ardor by tersely wishing her “the best of luck in her future endeavors” in a statement for the Elle article. She said she was being dumped through his lawyers and called the development “heartbreaking and sad.”
Still, she remained hopeful. “I love him,” she told the Post. “I’d be interested in seeing if we can make some kind of future work, if that’s what he wants to do.”
Smythe, who sold the movie rights to a book proposal about Shkreli, defended herself and the reviled pharma bro on Twitter Monday. She praised his COVID-19 drug research and reiterated that she had not had sex with Shkreli. She added that she “did not engage in romantic interactions with him of any sort while covering him as a journalist.”
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