In 2009, at an apartment cocktail party in New York’s East Village, Steven Richardson met one Martin Shkreli; soon after, Richardson invested $400,000 in Shkreli’s buzzing MSMB hedge funds. Though federal prosecutors allege that Shkreli went on to defraud investors of those funds, including Richardson, the two became close. Richardson, now 63 and a seasoned former American Express executive, described himself as Shkreli’s “personal mentor.”

In his testimony in a federal court in Brooklyn Wednesday, things certainly got personal—from troublesome Twitter use to sexually charged e-mails and Shkreli’s oral hygiene.

Shkreli, now 34 and notorious for a drug price hike, stands on trial for eight counts of securities and wire fraud. Federal prosecutors allege that Shkreli hid millions in losses at MSMB from bum trades, which he covered up by plundering the pharmaceutical company he founded in 2011, Retrophin. Richardson would become chairman of the board of directors at the pharmaceutical company.

Once a close advisor to Shkreli, Richardson recounted his slow realization that Shkreli was lying to him—plus that his mentee was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and being sued by Merrill Lynch for MSMB debts. At one point in his testimony, Richardson recalled how in early 2014, the Retrophin board discovered that Shkreli was overseeing a group of Retrophin employees trading with Retrophin investors’ funds, working like an internal hedge fund. The board told Shkreli to limit that activity, but Richardson alleged that Shkreli carried on and even set up a commission structure for the trading employees. When Richardson confronted Shkreli about it in the summer of 2014, Shkreli denied it.

“I was stunned, absolutely stunned,” Richardson said, according to NYT coverage of the testimony. “He’s lying to my face.”

Thin and soft skinned?

It was a turning point for Shkreli and Richardson—the beginning of the end of Shkreli’s time at Retrophin and their close friendship.

Before that, Richardson was not only giving Shkreli professional advice, but personal advice on matters such as dress and hygiene. With Richardson’s influence, Shkreli switched to spending nights in hotels instead of sleeping in the office in a sleeping bag and skipping brushing his teeth.

Richardson also wrote him stern e-mails on how he needed to improve his behavior, including on Twitter . Richardson said Shkreli was revealing information on the social media platform that the company wasn’t ready to announce, which was making the board uneasy. Richardson cautioned him to cut it out and shape up. (Shkreli was later banned from Twitter for harassing a journalist.)

But other e-mails were much softer—nearing romantic. Richardson, who is gay and in a partnership, admitted that in a 2010 e-mail he wrote to Shkreli, "only if I can touch your soft skin,” and on another occasion he encouraged Shkreli to take a bubble bath. The comments were about a rash Shkreli had on his neck and ears, Richardson said. But in his testimony, he also said that Shkreli made sexually charged comments and seemed disingenuous when he would “say things of a gay nature,” including being interested in a “hook up” with a waiter or office worker.

“I felt to some extent that maybe he was saying those things to me more because he felt I would want to hear them,” Richardson said.

Shkreli’s misleading behavior—romantic or otherwise—lasted throughout his time at Retrophin, according to Richardson. By September 2014, issues had piled up and the board fired him. When Richardson delivered the news, he said that Shkreli responded by saying: “I’ll beat you guys to build a new company, and I’ll get to a billion dollars before you can.”

On his way out, Shkreli tried to take Retrophin servers and files with him, forcing the board to revoke his access.

Shkreli went on to found Turing Pharmaceuticals in February 2015, which later got the rights to Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug. Shkreli infamously raised the price of that drug in September 2015 by more than 5,000 percent

Richardson, who resigned from Retrophin and now works as a consultant, said that his initial $400,000 investment in MSMB transformed into shares in Retrophin, which are now worth $1.9 million.