During a lunch break in his criminal fraud trial Friday, Martin Shkreli walked into a sixth-floor courtroom set up for reporters to watch his trial on closed-circuit television and lambasted the media and the prosecutors.
Martin Shkreli apparently needed to vent as the first week of his criminal fraud trial in Brooklyn, New York, was nearing an end.
During a lunch break Friday, he walked into a sixth-floor courtroom set up for reporters to watch his trial on closed-circuit television and lambasted the media and the prosecutors — calling the U.S. attorneys in Brooklyn “the junior varsity” to those in Manhattan.
“They blame me for everything,” he said of the prosecutors. “They blame me for capitalism.”
It’s almost unheard of for a criminal defendant on trial to walk into what’s essentially a press room and speak so openly to reporters. But there’s nothing typical about Shkreli, who live-streamed for hours after his December 2015 arrest and is currently discussing his case on Facebook.
Shkreli’s five-minute-long tirade was finally interrupted by his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, who came to the door of the courtroom and asked, “Martin, can I see you a minute?” Then, Shkreli was gone.
Earlier in court, prosecutors began laying out Shkreli’s entire business career, a more than decadelong stretch allegedly marked by zeal and deception.
Shkreli, 34, is fighting charges of operating two hedge funds like a Ponzi scheme. Prosecutors claim he took clients’ money without permission and used it to start drug company Retrophin.
Shkreli is also accused of looting $11 million of Retrophin’s assets to pay off investors who’d lost money in the funds.