Martha Stewart Said What?

“After you’re exposed, like I was in the press so terribly in 2001 and 2002, I went through my own 9/11, a personal tsunami. You learn that it’s okay. It’s okay to really, really be yourself, because nothing—nothing—you do [otherwise] will really make a difference.”

—Martha Stewart, speaking in Indianapolis on Nov. 5

It’s now three days since the dust settled on the grand Martha Takes Indy event of 2013. (And what would she say about that dust?) But so far, there’s been little outrage over the above quote, which Stewart gave during her address at the first-ever Indiana Governor’s Conference for Women, according to the closing paragraph of the Indianapolis Business Journal’s write-up about her visit.

Stewart’s comments about her time in prison for criminal activity involving insider trading are even more startling considering the fact that she herself is a New Yorker. Of course, this isn’t the first time she’s said something inflammatory about her so-called tribulation: Stewart previously lamented that she lost “a fortune” by spending five months in prison, and before she entered it compared herself to Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon, saying “many, many great people have gone to prison.”

Indy dwellers swelled with anticipation and then all but literally frothed at the mouth over the Queen of Living’s main appearance this week, not to mention her forays around town to the likes of local staples Napolese, Long’s Bakery, and Cafe Patachou (in that order) and the relative fledgling Thirsty Scholar. IM definitely played its role in that here and here.

We expected. She delivered. So help me blog, she even penned her own dispatch to the world at large about her time in Indy. But what to make of Tuesday’s comments, comparing her personal strife to a mass tragedy? Sorry, Martha—that’s not “a good thing.”