AN AGREEABLE WITNESS.

Martha Stewart addressed the court just once during the brief hearing in her criminal case which was held last week in downtown Manhattan. Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum was about to approve what she called a "very leisurely" trial schedule proposed by Richard Strassberg, the lawyer for Stewart's co-defendant, Peter Bacanovic. Strassberg said there were so many documents to review that he wanted the trial put off until January 12, 2004--more than seven months after the indictment and three years after Stewart's sale of nearly four thousand shares of ImClone stock, the event that precipitated her prosecution. In keeping with the usual practice, Judge Cedarbaum asked Stewart if she would agree to this schedule. Stewart sighed, rose from her seat, and said, "I agree."

The long wait, which is fairly typical of white-collar cases, means that uncertainty will continue to cloud Stewart's personal and professional life well into next year. But there is another reason that the delay may weigh heavily on her. After her indictment, Stewart resigned as the C.E.O. of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, but she remains its principal visionary, in the newly created position of chief creative officer, and she will continue to work with the same personal assistant, Ann Armstrong, that she has had for the past five years. As the trial date approaches, this could get a little awkward, because Armstrong may turn out to be the principal witness against her.

By now, the tale is well known: Stewart sold her shares of ImClone the day before a negative report from the Food and Drug Administration drove down the value of the stock. The government did not charge Stewart with criminal insider trading, which was the original focus of the investigation, but, rather, with crimes relating to obstruction of justice--that is, with lying about her reasons for making the sale. According to the indictment, the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney's Office contacted Stewart about her trade on January 25, 2002, and scheduled an interview with her for February 4, 2002. About four days before the interview, according to people familiar with the case, Stewart pulled up a chair at Armstrong's desk and began examining the computer records of her telephone messages.

On the day of the trade, while Stewart was travelling by private plane to Mexico, Armstrong had taken the following message from Stewart's stockbroker (and now co-defendant): "Peter Bacanovic thinks ImClone is going to start trading downward." Now, sitting at Armstrong's keyboard, with Armstrong nearby, Stewart apparently deleted the original message and typed in a substitute: "Peter Bacanovic re imclone." Then she had second thoughts. ...