Martha Stewart claims Ina Garten ‘stopped talking’ to her and was ‘unfriendly’ after she went to prison

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Martha Stewart and Ina Garten are both household names in the world of cooking and lifestyle, shaping how generations of people view home entertaining.

But while the two icons have shared the spotlight and even a friendship, their relationship hasn’t always been smooth.

Martha Stewart reveals rift with Ina Garten began after prison sentence

The New Yorker published a profile on Ina Garten earlier this month, both Garten and Martha Stewart opened about about why they stopped talking to each other.

According to Garten, their friendship faded after Stewart purchased a new property in Bedford, New York, and the two simply "lost touch." However, Stewart’s recollection of their falling out paints a very different picture.

"When I was sent off to Alderson Prison, she stopped talking to me," Stewart revealed according to OK Magazine. "I found that extremely distressing and extremely unfriendly."

For context, Stewart spent five months in prison in 2004 after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction, and lying to investigators during an insider trading scandal.

Following her release, she endured five more months of home confinement and two years of supervised probation. But it seems the real punishment for Stewart was the apparent loss of her friendship with Garten.

Garten, however, "firmly denied" Stewart’s version of events. In fact, despite Stewart’s suggestion of lingering hostility, her longtime publicist and friend Susan Magrino emphasized that there’s "no feud" between the two.

According to Magrino, Stewart isn’t bitter about the friendship’s rocky history, and there’s no bad blood—at least from Stewart’s perspective.

Ina Garten reflects on early friendship with Martha Stewart

Culinary legends Ina Garten and Martha Stewart first crossed paths in the early 1990s, back when Garten ran her now-closed Barefoot Contessa store in East Hampton, New York.

Stewart visited the shop and struck up a conversation with Garten, who was sitting at her desk right in front of the cheese case.

That serendipitous moment led to a friendship that saw the two working together on charity benefits, with Stewart hosting and Garten serving as the caterer.

"We ended up actually doing benefits together where it was at her house and I was the caterer, and we became friends after that," Garten recalled, speaking fondly of those early days.

In a 2017 interview with TIME, Garten reportedly praised Stewart for elevating the world of home arts, saying, "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."

But while Garten admired Stewart's ability to elevate domestic work, she also saw herself taking a different path.

"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," she explained.

Stewart also spoke warmly of Garten in the past. In fact, she wrote the foreword to Garten’s first cookbook, 'The Barefoot Contessa', in 1999, admitting it "took a while" to understand what motivated Garten.

But eventually, she recognized a "true kindred spirit with really similar but unique talents".