All of the heartbreaking revelations from Netflix's Martha Stewart documentary

Martha Stewart might be one to mince garlic but never words.

R.J. Cutler, director of “Martha,” a Netflix documentary about the nation’s first female, self-made billionaire (now streaming), shares the perfect example of her directness in an interview with USA TODAY.

“She once told me that she went to one therapy session,” Cutler says, “walked out 10 minutes into it and said to the to the doctor, ‘Don't bill me.’” (Stewart has also been outspoken with her criticism of his film. More on that later.)

Stewart does not enjoy looking back on her 83 years, Cutler says: “She likes powering forward.” Past her five-month prison sentence and 1990 divorce from publisher Andrew Stewart after nearly 30 years of marriage. During one of the five days Stewart sat for on-camera interviews, she shut down questions about the demise of her marriage. “I handed over letters that were very personal,” Stewart tells Cutler in the film. “So guess what? Take it out of the letters.”

Stewart shares photographs throughout her life, her diaries from minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Alderson in West Virginia and those letters to her ex, in which she questioned in anguish, “When you tell me that this is no longer your home, after all we did here together, why shouldn’t I say I am going to burn it down?”

It's the moments throughout Stewart’s life where she freely expresses her vulnerability, humanity and imperfection that are the most alluring, more so than any perfectly curated Martha Stewart Living cover because they're real. While Stewart has said this film is “not the story that makes me me,” here’s the documentary's recipe for making the world’s first influencer.

'I hate those last scenes': Martha Stewart criticizes Netflix's 'Martha' documentary

Martha Stewart’s dad protested engagement with a slap

Stewart describes her father, Edward Kostyra, as “a dissatisfied, unhappy human being,” who might’ve been an alcoholic. She said her dad was “mean” and highly critical. At times, he hit his children with a yardstick or belt. And when Stewart told her parents of her engagement to Stewart, a man she’d fallen “madly in love” with on their first date, Kostyra struck her. “Slapped me hard on my face,” Stewart remembers. She says the “bigot” objected, saying, “No. You’re not marrying him. He’s a Jew.” Stewart persisted, marrying Andrew in 1961.

Andrew Stewart’s affairs broke Martha

Stewart admits to kissing a handsome stranger on her European honeymoon but doesn’t consider it infidelity. She also acknowledges “a very brief affair with a very attractive Irishman” but says, “I would never have broken up a marriage for it. It was nothing.”

Andrew, however, had “quite a few” girlfriends during their marriage, she says. While Stewart encourages women to leave cheating husbands, she says she couldn’t walk away.

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Stewart’s friend Kathy Tatlock says Andrew’s affairs took such a toll on Stewart that she would pull her hair out. In letters to her husband, Stewart wrote of being in “a really fragile, breakable state” and in such agony that she couldn’t sleep or eat.

“I have to go to San Francisco and talk about weddings and my wonderful life,” she wrote. “I hope you are enjoying your freedom. And I hope my plane crashes.”

Stewart says Andrew wanted to split after nearly 27 years of marriage, against her wishes. They separated in 1987 and divorced in 1990.

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Stewart reflects on prison and the prosecutors who ‘should’ve been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high’

In 2004, Stewart was convicted of lying during an insider-trading investigation, after she dumped shares of biopharmaceutical company ImClone just before the company disclosed its cancer treatment failed to receive Food and Drug Administration approval.

“It was so horrifying to me that I had to go through that to be a trophy for these idiots in the U.S. attorney's office,” Stewart says in “Martha.” “Those prosecutors should’ve been put in a Cuisinart and turned on high.”

She remembers the embarrassment of a strip search upon her arrival for her five-month sentence at Alderson. She also says she was sent to solitary confinement for touching a guard. “No food or water for a day.”

Adding to her loneliness, she was only visited once by her then-boyfriend Charles Simonyi, the software architect of Microsoft Word and Excel. Simonyi later dumped Stewart, telling her while the two were in bed together that he was marrying Lisa Persdotter (whom he married in 2008).

“He hadn’t told me a word,” Stewart says. “I thought that was the most horrible thing a person could do. How can a man who spent 15 years with me just do that?”

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The ‘Martha’ controversy: What Stewart has said about the documentary

“Martha” bears Stewart’s name but not her seal of approval.

“It’s more about my stupid trial, which was so unfair,” Stewart told Joanna Coles, Daily Beast’s chief creative and content officer, in September. Stewart liked the first half of “Martha” but took issue with Cutler’s dismissal of her suggestions. “You shouldn’t have a final edit, (but) you should have a cooperative edit,” Stewart said.

Cutler says he and Stewart still “talk all the time,” and he commends her participation in the documentary.

“But it's no secret that Martha would have made a different film if she were the filmmaker,” he acknowledges. “I've worked with other people and made films about them, and they certainly would make different films. You would make a different film about Martha than I made, and I respect that. But I think the day we met, we agreed that if we were to do this I would have final cut, and Martha understood that.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Martha Stewart in documentary: Prosecutors belonged in 'Cuisinart'