She will be able to return to work and start drawing her $900,000 salary again, and she will be free to throw lavish house parties — as long as she doesn't invite any criminals.
Martha Stewart will also be wearing the must-have accessory for the convicted felon on the go: an electronic anklet that will allow authorities to monitor her movements.
After five months in prison in West Virginia, Stewart will be released next weekend to her 153-acre estate in the rolling horse country 40 miles north of midtown Manhattan. There, for another five months, she will serve the home detention portion of her sentence for a stock scandal.
The woman behind a billion-dollar homemaking empire will be confined to one of several houses on her estate in Katonah, except for 48 hours a week for “gainful employment,” said Chris Stanton, chief U.S. probation officer in New York.
Stewart, 63, who also has homes in Connecticut, Maine and the Hamptons, chose the Katonah estate, which she bought in 2000 for $16 million, to be her prison away from prison until August.
Probation authorities will use the anklet and random phone calls to enforce the ban on going outside during non-working hours.
As for employment, besides running Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and writing a column for her magazine, Stewart can prepare for the two TV shows she will be starring in — a revival of her daily homemaking show and her own version of “The Apprentice.”
Her contract with her company says that her salary, which was suspended while she was behind bars, will get reinstated during home detention.
It has not yet been established whether she will commute to Manhattan, travel to her TV studio in Westport or work at home. The details will be worked out at a meeting with her probation officer in the first few days after she gets out.
Allyn Magrino, a spokeswoman for Stewart's company, refused to comment.
After being convicted, Stewart expressed the hope that she would be out of prison early enough to plant a spring garden, and there has been talk that she might use the grounds or her huge new greenhouse to tape gardening segments for her show. But that would require a town filming permit and no application has been filed, said Alexandra Costello of the Town of Bedford, which includes Katonah.
While confined, Stewart will be free to entertain colleagues, neighbors, friends and relatives, Stanton said, as long as they are not criminals. Convicted felons are not allowed to consort with convicted felons.
She will probably not be able to oversee the multimillion-dollar renovation work under way at the estate, known as Cantitoe Farm. The project — which includes the building of a new stable for her horses, a carriage house for her horse-drawn buggies, and a small office building, and an overhaul of her long stone wall — accounts for the not-very-Martha portable potties seen on the property last week.
Stewart won a zoning variance for the stable, which is taller than normally permitted, after bringing chocolate chip cookies to a meeting of the planning board. Some conditions were imposed, however, including a ban on the stockpiling of manure.
Some residents seem happy that Stewart is their neighbor and felt she has been adequately punished for lying about why she unloaded her stock in a pharmaceutical company just before the price plunged in December 2001.
“She served her time and she can come home,” said Martha Brozski. “She's a businesswoman and she did what it took to get the job done. Is it all moral and ethical? I don't know.” Brozski added: “She did a quality renovation of those houses.”
Brozski spoke outside the post office in the village of Bedford, a Martha Stewart kind of town. The 324-year-old village green is surrounded by white-painted or red brick buildings, including a steepled Presbyterian church and a tack shop.
On the community bulletin board are thumbtacked signs — one selling free-range duck eggs, another offering lessons in beekeeping.