The Sleazy, Slimy Drama Behind the Redstone Succession Fight

It hardly comes as a revelation that the media and entertainment mogul Sumner Redstone—who controlled two of the planet’s most influential companies, Viacom and CBS, almost until his death in 2020 at age 97—was something of a monster; he evoked, by most accounts, an oversexed combination of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Children.”

Nor is it big news anymore that disgraced former CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves—in his heyday the Redstone empire’s most successful and richly compensated executive, until his forced resignation in 2018—stands credibly accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and worse.

To be sure, co-authors James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams faced an epic challenge in making their book Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Hollywood Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, a must-read for anyone who followed the juicy saga in real time.

Not to worry.

Abrams, a New York Times investigative reporter, and Stewart, a Times business columnist—both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize—have written a jaw-dropping yarn of how two publicly traded companies featuring an iconic movie studio (Paramount), the highest-rated broadcast network (CBS), dozens of local television stations and several popular cable outlets (including MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Showtime), along with a prestigious book publisher (Simon & Schuster), fell victim to a rogues’ gallery of grifters, sycophants, incompetents and gold diggers who were empowered by a once-brilliant business tycoon’s damaged psyche and wanton megalomania.

In the book’s parallel narrative, Abrams and Stewart add fresh facts to the story of Moonves’ downfall, notably his desperate campaign to cover up his sordid past, especially after learning that The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow was in the hunt. Moonves erroneously blamed Redstone’s daughter Shari, the CBS vice chairman and an increasingly powerful corporate rival, for his mushrooming PR troubles, and met, texted and socialized again and again with a down-on-his-luck talent agent who represented one of his alleged victims and leveraged Moonves’ growing distress to benefit himself, the authors report.

Against the backdrop of Harvey Weinstein’s comeuppance and the multitude of rich and powerful miscreants being held accountable by the #MeToo movement, it’s mystifying that Moonves chose this moment of maximum vulnerability to sue the Redstones and their movie-theater-owning holding company, National Amusements, in a quixotic effort to block the merger of CBS with Viacom and remove Shari from corporate control by diluting her and her father’s voting stock.

The cluelessness of Team Moonves, even after the publication of Farrow’s devastating New Yorker exposé, was personified by CBS board member Arnold Kopelson, a Hollywood producer and ardent Moonves supporter. A decade earlier, Kopelson had ignored damning evidence of the CEO’s sexual misconduct, even though the victim in this case was a close friend who also happened to be Kopelson’s diabetes doctor.

Dr. Anne Peters, director of the clinical diabetes program at the University of Southern California, agreed to see Moonves, also a diabetic, at Kopelson’s urging in 1999. The authors write that during their 7:00 a.m. appointment:

Unscripted contains surprises even for journalists, like me, who occasionally covered Moonves and spent time in Redstone’s id-warped presence to grapple with his reality-distortion field. Probably the most astonishing storyline—meticulously presented here in slimy detail—is how a pair of the nonagenarian billionaire’s paramours moved into his Beverly Park mansion, persuaded him repeatedly to change his will in their favor, took over his life and health-care decisions, blocked the Redstone family’s access (lying to the old man that his daughter and grandchildren didn’t love him and never called) and even, at times, refused phone calls from his own doctor.

Together, the two women leeched more than $150 million from Redstone’s bank accounts and stock holdings, and very nearly gained control of his empire. The tag team of Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland (who had accepted the rabidly jealous Redstone’s offer to become his third wife) might have succeeded but for their bitter falling-out over Holland’s hanky-panky with a handsome fraudster, convicted felon and failed soap opera actor named George Pilgrim; the actor’s dangerous liaison with Redstone’s fiancée—once Herzer forced Holland to confess to the old man—ultimately torpedoed their carefully laid plans.

The chronicle of Pilgrim’s progress—replete with sexually provocative videos, along with text and voicemail messages supplied to the authors by Pilgrim (“Need my cock sucked,” he once wrote to Holland, who replied, “I would love to do that soon”)—provides a treasure trove of lunacy, testament to the human capacity for reckless self-indulgence.

Indeed, as her supposedly future husband descended into dementia and physical ruin (eventually requiring a feeding tube to stay alive), Holland regularly booked a $7,900 round trip by private jet—at Redstone’s expense, of course—for sex sessions with Pilgrim in Arizona and Los Angeles; meanwhile, the authors report, in 2014 alone, she and Herzer managed to charge $3.5 million to Redstone’s credit cards, to say nothing of the stacks of $100 bills that were delivered each week to the Beverly Park mansion.

In terms of journalistic coups, however, Abrams and Stewart’s most significant success—aside from what they describe as benefiting from “a trove of documents provided by confidential sources”—probably was gaining the total cooperation of Sumner’s press-shy daughter Shari, who “responded to all our questions either directly or through a spokesperson, and participated in fact-checking, as did [her adult sons] Tyler and Brandon Korff.”

A Boston University-trained corporate lawyer, she initially resisted taking an active role in the family business and, as the authors write, her “relationship with her father was, to put it mildly, complicated. Over the years, she had clashed bitterly with her father, sometimes publicly. At the same time she craved his affection and approval, which he dangled frequently before her (especially when he needed something) but then withdrew.”

Redstone “was often dismissive of her ideas and belittled her in meetings,” they write. “Sumner may have loved Shari in his way, but as an executive, he held her to the same exacting standards as anyone else who worked for him, perhaps even higher ones. When it came to business, Sumner often treated her as a rival, another competitor to be vanquished.”

When she argued against some of his ill-advised schemes—taking exception, for instance, to Redstone’s pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a floundering video game company, a stake that was ultimately unloaded for a mere $100,000—“Shari’s anger was nonetheless mild compared with her father’s fury over her defiance of his wishes,” the authors write. “He disparaged his daughter to Viacom executives, board members—practically anyone who would listen. He pelted her with profanity-laced emails and faxes, copying Viacom executives, even on multiple occasions calling her the four-letter ‘c-word,’ as it was delicately described inside the company. When his longtime lawyer and confidant George Abrams, among those copied on the missives, begged Sumner not to use such hurtful language, he erupted, insisting he’d call his daughter whatever he pleased.”

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Redstone, who loved press attention, seldom missed an opportunity to publicly humiliate his daughter, giving multiple interviews in which he expressed doubts about her qualifications to be his successor.

Regularly underestimated by such executives as Moonves and Redstone’s sycophantic chief enabler, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, Shari nevertheless hung on. Her older brother Brent—who did join the business early on, working briefly and unhappily for Viacom—stopped speaking to their father entirely, moved to a ranch in Colorado, and sued Redstone for more than $1 billion.

The 68-year-old Shari, these days president of National Amusements and non-executive chairman of Paramount Global (as post-merger ViacomCBS was rebranded last year), is surely the heroine of this saga. She banished Herzer and Holland, triumphed over Moonves and Dauman, and managed to stabilize the troubled empire with her hiring of Bob Bakish to run the newly merged company. He “warmly welcomed Shari’s ideas and involvement.” the authors write.

“By most objective measures, Shari was proven right about the merger and her choice of Bakish as chief executive. During the two years he’d presided at Viacom, Bakish had brought the company back from the brink… After long describing herself as a reluctant mogul, Shari told friends and advisers she loved her new role.”