In 2022, a federal judge barred Martin Shkreli, a former pharmaceutical executive, from working in the industry for the rest of his life after he was convicted of illegally hiking the price of the drug Daraprim.
But just months later, he returned to the drug business and violated the order, government lawyers said in a court filing on Tuesday.
The attorneys general of New York and six other states joined the Federal Trade Commission in accusing Mr. Shkreli of “repeatedly and flagrantly” violating the lifetime ban by publicly trading the stocks of dozens of drug companies and discussing his opinions of the industry online. They asked a judge to force Mr. Shkreli to divest his stock in drug companies and to give up any profits from those trades, according to the filing submitted in federal court in Manhattan.
“Mr. Shkreli has repeatedly ignored the injunction’s clear and unambiguous prohibitions and has shown little regard for the obligations imposed on him as a result of his prior illegal conduct,” Mark R. Meador, the commissioner of the F.T.C., said in a statement. “His ongoing efforts to participate in the pharmaceutical industry, despite the court-ordered ban, reflect a deliberate pattern of defiance that undermines the purpose and efficacy of the court’s remedy and the law.”
A working telephone number for Mr. Shkreli could not be found on Tuesday. Lawyers who represented him in his civil trial did not immediately return phone calls.
Mr. Shkreli was convicted of orchestrating an anticompetitive scheme to control the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat potentially deadly parasitic infections like malaria and toxoplasmosis. Mr. Shkreli’s company had significantly raised the price of the drug, while making it impossible for other drugmakers to win approval to bring generic alternatives to market.
The order initially went into effect in January 2022, when Mr. Shkreli was still serving a prison sentence for an unrelated 2017 criminal conviction. But soon after his release in May 2022, the filing said, he began streaming his trades online, engaging in trading competitions and posting about pharmaceutical companies on social media.
Officials said his illegal activity occurred in four phases: a trading competition with another person on YouTube in 2022; a short-sell of a small biotech firm’s stock in 2024 and other pharmaceutical trades; a trading challenge in 2025, in which he shorted three small biotech firms and traded many other pharmaceutical stocks; and a trading challenge that he started in June 2026 with a $10 million account.
According to the government’s filing, Mr. Shkreli used livestreams to encourage investors to short certain pharmaceutical company stocks based on his prediction that the companies’ key clinical trials would fail.
In an April 2025 livestream, the government said, Mr. Shkreli told his viewers, “I’m showing you how to trade and invest in biotech.” Later that year, in another livestream, officials said he divulged what he called his “magic trick,” saying, “It doesn’t matter what trades I make because I can always find a couple of biotech stocks to smoke.”
Officials said they believed Mr. Shkreli’s sister, Leonora Izerne, and his partner, Chelsea Voss, were helping him to violate the ban — for example, by funding his trades — and asked the court to require them to preserve any potential evidence.
The government’s lawyers said the violations were likely to be “just the tip of the iceberg,” because the motion was based on a review of only a fraction of Mr. Shkreli’s social media footprint. The filing listed statements he made on livestreams alluding to additional accounts, losses and trading that he kept offline.
“I have some other accounts that I’[d] show you, but, like, I know feds are watching,” Mr. Shkreli said, according to the filing.
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