A U.S. judge on Wednesday ordered Martin Shkreli to be jailed while he awaits sentencing for securities fraud, citing a Facebook post in which the former drug company executive nicknamed the “Pharma Bro” offered a $5,000 reward for a strand of Hillary Clinton‘s hair.
U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in Brooklyn said the Sept. 4 post, which prompted a call from the U.S. Secret Service, showed Shkreli posed a danger to the public that warranted revoking his $5 million bail. U.S. prosecutors had moved to jail Shkreli last Thursday. Shkreli, who earned the nickname “Pharma Bro” for exploits that included increasing to the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, apologized for the post in a letter to Matsumoto on Tuesday, calling it an “awkward attempt at humor or satire.”
READ MORE: ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli apologizes for Facebook bounty on Hillary Clinton’s hair
Shkreli said in the post, since deleted, that he needed the hair to “confirm the sequences I have,” an apparent reference to genetic testing.
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Shkreli was convicted in August of defrauding investors of two hedge funds he ran, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare. He was acquitted of stealing from a drug company he later founded, Retrophin Inc, to pay them back.
Though the charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, Shkreli will likely serve much less, in part because none of the investors lost money.
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Patients and U.S. lawmakers were outraged in 2015 when Shkreli, then chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of anti-infection drug Daraprim by 5,000 percent.
Since his December 2015 arrest, he has clashed frequently with critics on social media. Twitter banned him from its platform in January for harassing a female journalist, another incident prosecutors cited in their motion to revoke his bail.
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