What Elle Magazine Got Wrong About Romantic Obsession

The Elle magazine article The Journalist and the Pharma Bro tells the story of Christie Smythe, a Bloomberg reporter at the top of her field who ditched her marriage and her job when she fell in love with Martin Shkreli, the widely-despised pharmaceutical executive who jacked up the price of a lifesaving drug used to treat AIDS patients. Her feelings for him only grew when he went to prison on fraud charges. She told Elle they were “life partners,” but once he found out their relationship would be the subject of an article, he stopped communicating with her.

The article is now blowing up the internet. As a journalist who wrote Unrequited, a book about women and romantic obsession, I’m not surprised. We’ve long been fascinated with women who lose themselves to their passion for difficult or withholding men. It's a very old story—medieval medical treatises describe women succumbing to "uterine fury"—turned contemporary media myth of “love against the odds,” often with a twist of misogyny. The more successful the woman, the greater the thrill of the takedown. Remember the tabloid feeding frenzy over Lisa Nowak, the so-called diapered astronaut?

The article, written by Stephanie Clifford, sparked widespread criticism and speculation about Smythe’s mental health. Was she the vulnerable victim of a narcissistic con man? Smythe insists that she has no regrets and made her choices “very consciously.” But along with recounting the ways her love has given her happiness and purpose, she lets slip darker thoughts. Getting in deep with Shkreli came from “incremental decisions, where you’re, like, slowly boiling yourself to death in the bathtub.”

What’s clear to me: Smythe is in the grips of an obsession. I know this makes me sound like yet another armchair therapist, but I’m providing a description, not a diagnosis. She’s a woman who explains that probably only one percent of the things he tells her are true, yet that’s “awesome;”who freezes her eggs in preparation for the end of Shkreli’s sentence; who justifies the fact that he's not returning her emails by speculating that he’s holding back for her own good, worried about how the reaction to the article will affect her.

Obsession can feel glorious and affirming, stripping you down to raw feeling, shaking up your priorities, an awakening, energizing force. This can be an amazing thing. Obsession is the “falling” in falling in love, the force that brings us together in loving, mutual relationships—though of course it doesn’t always work out that way. Obstacles—say, an imprisoned, incommunicative beloved—can heighten obsession, turning it into a conviction instead of a gateway to intimacy.

For my book, I interviewed dozens of women about past experiences of romantic obsession. It became abundantly clear that uncovering the reasons for and meanings of these experiences requires perspective that can only come with time. You can learn a lot about from an obsession, and grow from it, but the process can be long and difficult as the determined insistence of “love against the odds” yields to a nuanced mix of insight and regret.

The Elle article offers no such perspective. It can’t. Smythe is still falling. The article ends with a portrayal of her in tears. She vows to wait for her beloved as he serves out his sentence, even though she’s just learned of the third-person statement he’s provided for the article: “Mr. Shkreli wishes Ms. Smythe the best of luck in her future endeavors.”

This cringy conclusion prevents us from gaining anything from the story beyond a feeling of superiority and the cheap voyeuristic thrill of a woman undone by amour fou, posing for photos in floral dresses designed by “The Vampire’s Wife.” We might as well cue up Fatal Attraction.

I’m a journalism professor, and I know why a story this juicy won’t wait. It’s timely. It strikes a chord, inspiring commentary comparing Shkreli’s evil charms to President Trump’s. But if we want to move beyond the old myth of the woman ruined by love into any real understanding of why a successful journalist would give it all up for the worst of men, we need the perspective only time can bring to an obsession—a kind of patience the fast-paced, judgmental infosphere won’t allow.