Martha’s circle may be staying away precisely because it doesn’t want to be thought of as being in this circle (when you deconstruct the relationships of the rich and the people who attend them, it does look so undignified).

There is, too, the sense that Martha and her troubles represent just a certain kind of hysteria. McCarthyism is not a structural condition but an anomalous one. It passes. Slate, the online magazine, had the clever idea to send Henry Blodget, a fellow boom traveler and securities-business malefactor, to cover the trial. It is Blodget’s view that the Martha trial is just about a particular six-month period. Martha is the victim, the detritus, of a historical moment. She got caught in an overreaction. And the moment that she got caught in has passed.

And then there is, not unnaturally, a competitive sense among the rich. Martha monopolized a lot of attention. More than her fair share. This resentment (and surely it is that) now has evolved into something of a cautionary tale. I found myself at a dinner party the other night given by an investment banker (the premise of the party seemed to be fresh-looking young people with prominent last names) who pronounced the theme of the age to be “keeping our heads down,” staying far from the limelight, avoiding getting on or being put on a pedestal. “Don’t,” he said, “make yourself a target.” If publicity might once have been the most valuable currency, now it has suddenly come to have seriously negative value. The rich (at least the truly rich) have to return to insularity and exclusivity, and stay out of harm’s way of hoi polloi media (this is, of course, a truism that the rich have always understood and forgotten only during the most manic economic phases). Certainly, these young people seemed to take this advice very seriously.

It is hard, of course, to feel all that sorry for the rich (nor was it probably so intuitive to feel sorry, in another time, for the communists), particularly the rich who yell at the help (which may be all of the rich). And yet, there is a principle here. We ought not to prosecute somebody just because the tide turns against him—or her. It seems obvious, then, what should happen. The rich and everybody else on the make in New York (quite an ugly mob) should head down to the courthouse to defend their self-interest.

Come on—free Martha.

Related:

• Archive: “This Media Life”
• Articles by Michael Wolff
• Table of Contents: February 23, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!