Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who infamously purchased the rights to a life-saving cancer and HIV medication before increasing the price by more than 5,000%, has a shady history involving stalking a colleague’s family and harassing them by promising to make them all, including their four children, homeless.
Shkreli, the then-CEO and founder of biopharmaceutical company Retrophin, harassed now-former colleague Timothy Pierotti and his family after a business deal gone bad. According to a court affidavit, Pierotti claimed Shkreli hacked into his AOL, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and harassed his family members over social media. In 2013, Shkreli also allegedly wrote a letter to Pierotti’s wife saying, “I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this.”
According to the affidavit, Shkreli went as far as to add one of Pierotti’s sons as a friend on Facebook so that he could tell him his father owed him money by saying, “I want you to know about your dad … he betrayed me. He stole $3 million from me.” Shkreli also reportedly reached out to Pierotti’s brother, father and another child who was a minor.
In 2014, Retrophin fired Shkreli as CEO for “repeatedly breaching his duty of loyalty to Retrophin,” prompting the founding of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Retrophin ended up suing Shkreli for $65 million saying he “was the paradigm faithless servant.” The complaint detailed further:
“Starting sometime in early 2012, and continuing until he left the company, Shkreli used his control over Retrophin to enrich himself and to pay off claims of MSMB investors (who he had defrauded).”
