The more we hear about the upcoming documentary Martha, the more we realize how much Martha Stewart kept hidden behind her polished persona. Now we’re learning the lifestyle expert had a romantic kiss with a stranger in Italy while on a honeymoon with her now-ex-husband.
Through the trailer for Martha — a movie that hits Netflix on Wednesday, October 30 — we already knew that she had an affair while married to Andrew Stewart. But in quotes from the documentary now hitting the press, Martha reveals another extramarital encounter.
Martha tells documentarian R.J. Cutler that she and Andrew took a five-month trip through Europe for their honeymoon and that the kiss happened one night in Florence, per The Independent.
“[Andrew] didn’t have any interest in going to the Duomo with me,” she says. “Listening to that amazing music in the cathedral… It was a very romantic place, crowded with tourists, and I met this very handsome guy.”
She continues: “He didn’t know I was married. I was this waif of a girl hanging out in the cathedral on Easter Eve. He was emotional. I was emotional. It’s just because it was an emotional place. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. An expansive dome. So beautiful, and paintings all around you. It was like nothing I had ever done before. And so why not kiss a stranger?”
But the doyenne of domesticity says she was being “neither naughty nor unfaithful.”
“It was just emotional of the moment,” she explains. “That’s how I looked at it. And it was exciting because, I mean, it was a very emotional place. I wish we could all experience such an evening.”
Martha and Andrew were married from 1961 to 1990, during which time they welcomed daughter Alexis.
“If you’re married and your husband starts to cheat on you, he’s a piece of s**t,” Martha says in the documentary’s trailer. “Get out of that marriage.”
Along with revelations about Martha’s public successes and failures — including, of course, her insider trading scandal and subsequent prison sentence — the documentary promises to delve deeper into her personal life.
“What is more important, a marriage or a career? … I don’t know,” she says in the trailer. “The cookie-cutter house and the cutter-cutter life, that was not for me. … I could’ve just been a miserable has-been housewife. But I didn’t let that happen to myself, and I’m so happy I didn’t.”
Martha, Wednesday, October 30, Netflix