The new issue of Vanity Fair arrived today. We just finished reading Dominick Dunne's column on the Martha Stewart verdict. It's refreshing to see Mr. Dunne take the side of a defendant for a change. Dunne reported one item we hadn't seen before. Remember Mariana Pasternak, Martha's long-time friend who delivered the devastating testimony that while on a Mexican vacation, Martha said "Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you these things?" Mariana had been on the tarmac with Martha while her plane was being refueled when Martha received the critical phone call from Douglas Faneuil advising that Waksal was selling his ImClone stock. Dunne reports,

The fateful telephone call from Douglas Faneuil to Martha in San Antonio telling her that Sam Waksal was dumping all his stock....was on Dec. 27. Late that same day, there were rumors on Wall Street that Waksal's drug Erbitux was not going to be approved by the F.D.A. In Westport on December 28, Dr. Bart Pasternak, Mariana's ex-husband and the father of her daughters, sold $600,000. worth of ImClone shares --far more than Martha sold.

Interesting. We wonder if Mariana called her ex to tell him the news about Waksal. And if during the conversation, she perhaps said to him, "Isn't it nice to have brokers who tell you these things?" If so, perhaps her testimony on cross that she couldn't remember if Martha actually spoke those words or if that's just what Mariana was thinking, is closer to the truth.

Did the feds ever think that Mariana passed the tip on to her ex-husband? Dunne reports that Martha paid "tens of thousands of dollars" of Mariana's legal fees "before she began speaking with the government in 2002 about Stewart's ImClone sale." If Mariana wasn't under investigation for wrong-doing, why were her legal bills so high?

Has anyone else reported on this?