Crazy Rich: Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

by Jerry Oppenheimer

While Casey was scheduled to be hospitalized that day at the exclusive and luxurious Cliffside Malibu clinic overlooking the Pacific, a stay expected to last anywhere from several weeks to several months, Sale Johnson Rashad planned to take Casey’s adored three-year-old, Ava-Monroe, back to New York, and care for her while Casey was in treatment, but she had promised to bring her back for visits.

  None of it happened the way Sale had envisioned.

  Before the day had ended, Casey had ordered her mother from her rented Beverly Hills home—literally threw her out into the street, luggage and all—called the police claiming that her mother was trespassing and attempting to take her baby, and had her trained attack dog, a fierce German shepherd by the name of Ollie who Casey had gotten because of a previous claimed stalker, on hand to guard her premises.

  “Casey knew in her heart that she couldn’t take care of Ava, but she couldn’t ego-wise and illness-wise say I know I can’t take care of her like she needs to be cared for, you should keep her while I get help,” says Sale, recalling that horrific day and the terrible events that would soon follow.

  Sale had asked the nanny, Katrina, who helped Casey care for Ava “and loved her very much” to pack a bag for the toddler because “she’s going to come with me. Ava was sitting on my lap and Casey got upset and got jealous that Ava was with me and screamed, ‘Get out of my house. If you don’t get out of my house, I’m calling the police and have you arrested for trespassing.’ Casey did call the police, put my bag outside, and locked me out.”

  The confrontation occurred just seventeen days after her estranged father married Suzanne Ircha, who had become Casey’s nemesis.

  Evicted and stranded in the street with her luggage, furious but also concerned about Casey and Ava’s welfare, Sale Johnson used her iPhone to also call the police, telling the dispatcher: “My daughter may have called you for you to come to this address and I just want you to know that you should send two officers, not just one, because she’s not stable, and I just don’t want there to be any big problems.”

  When the officers arrived, Sale advised them, “She’s on medication, she has a dog in there that’s an attack dog, so do not just walk in the house, and she had a couple of drinks.”

  Earlier that same day, mother and daughter and one of Casey’s friends had had lunch together. At that point in time, Casey was all set to enter the clinic; they were even going to let her bring one of her dogs—but while Sale was on the phone around the corner from the outdoor café wishing her own ninety-two-year-old father in Northern California happy Father’s Day, Casey had downed at least two Bellinis, “which was not a great plan,” says Sale. Angry because her mother had taken too much time on the phone, light-headed because the alcohol was now working on top of whatever medications were in her system, Casey had become belligerent.

  “And once she gets mad”—Sale Johnson can never forget—“all hell breaks loose, and when we got home she was screaming and yelling. I said I would take Ava back to New York, and bring her back and forth whenever the clinic said she could have visitors, and she said, ‘Well, I’m not going to the clinic.”

  And the standoff began.

  At first Casey refused to admit the police officers, demanding to see a search warrant.

  “She was even angrier now,” recalls Sale, “because she saw through the window that I had talked to the police first, so now they were my police, not her police, so she didn’t want to open the door.”

  The police finally convinced her to put the guard dog away and come outside. When they asked her if she was on medication, she told them it was none of their business, and they had to pry her full name out of her. Finally, she let them inside, but nothing was amiss: Ava was running around happily playing with her nanny.

  The officers finished their inspection, came back outside, and told Casey’s mother that there was nothing they could do. At that moment, the nanny, who knew better, sent a text to Sale’s iPhone, telling her that she had unlocked the door “and will you please come and take Ava.” Sale showed the message to the sergeant in charge, who warned, “‘She will have you arrested for kidnapping.’ I was distraught at this point.”

  Sale checked into a hotel in Marina Del Rey.

  “I sat in a chair in the window, looked out at the boats, and made a million phone calls and sent a million e-mails trying to figure out what to do, and finally decided on the second day that I was going to organize an intervention.”

  It all was on Sale’s shoulders because Woody was completely out of the picture in terms of helping, or caring, in her view.

  “He didn’t want to have anything to do with Casey,” she says. “It was too much trouble. But fathers are supposed to take a bullet for their kids, and he went the other way. I can’t defend his behavior for that because I thought it was appalling. But that’s who he is. He doesn’t have the emotional makeup to deal with it. It’s like, I’ll be an ostrich and put my head in the sand, and when I pull it out, everything will be good.”

  * * *

  Casey’s mother began to put together a list of those whom she wanted to participate in her planned intervention.

  The group included a doctor from the clinic that Casey had been booked into. It included a former assistant of Casey’s who still cared for her and had remained a friend. Sale had hoped to have Casey’s best friend—Ava’s godmother, Nicky Hilton—involved, but Paris Hilton’s sister said she was flying to New York and couldn’t attend, but told Sale to call her on the phone and she’d talk to Casey long-distance during the intervention. Sale called Barry Peale, a Beverly Hills real estate agent and photographer who had helped Casey buy and sell homes, had become a confidant of hers, and had been named Ava-Monroe’s godfather. Sale also invited a British girl who was a friend of Casey’s, “who had some sort of title but did nothing in her life.”

  The last person she added to the list was Kathy Hilton, Nicky and Paris Hilton’s mother. Like the middle-class Nancy Sale Frey from St. Louis who had married into the Johnson dynasty and had reinvented herself as a socialite, the former Kathy Richards, born in middle-class Long Island and raised in the L.A. suburbs, had done the same. She had married Richard Howard “Rick” Hilton, a grandson of the founder of the Hilton hotel chain. The Hiltons married about a year after the Johnsons. “If I hadn’t married Rick, Mom would have taken me down the aisle with a gun in my back,” Kathy later told her sister, the actress Kim Richards.

  When the Hiltons moved to New York from Los Angeles, it was Sale Johnson who introduced Kathy around to the right people—“I’ve known her since her kids were babies and we’ve been friends for many years”—and Casey and the Hilton girls became bosom buddies and party girls together, dubbed “celebutantes” by an intrigued media, especially when the talentless Paris earned her star by turning an amateur sex tape into a multimillion-dollar career of sorts.

  Like Diandra Douglas, Kathy Hilton was another one of those older women whom Casey had considered a surrogate mother, so when Sale asked Kathy to participate in Casey’s intervention, she naturally agreed. “I knew Kathy had dealt with an intervention before because she had somebody in her family, her sister, Kim, who’d already been through this,” says Sale. “Kathy told me, ‘I’m an expert.’”

  Casey’s intervention was scheduled for the third day after her confrontation with her mother, and Sale arranged for everyone to meet in a park near Casey’s home. Sale laid out the strategy. “I told them that the only way this is going to work is if we all go in and tell Casey how much we all love her, but that we are there to help her, and that we hope she’s going to accept our help. We can’t make her think that she is okay the way she is.”

  After the huddle, Sale, still upbeat about getting her desperately needed treatment, hustled everyone over to her daughter’s home.

  Casey opened the door. She was practically naked, and with her was a longtime girlfriend, Courtenay Semel, the daughter of Terry Semel, former chairman of Yahoo! Inc. and Warner Bros.

&n
bsp; When Semel saw Sale and the others walking into the house, she darted into a bedroom and locked the door.

  By the time everyone was in the house, Casey was furious. She started cursing at her mother, and demanded, “What the fuck are they all doing here? Get out of here.” To the clinic doctor she hollered, “You are not welcome.”

  Sale explained as calmly as she could that they just wanted to talk to her, and asked her to sit down, but Casey didn’t want to hear from any of them. One of the interventionists said, “Casey, we know your dad cut you off, and you don’t have any money.” Sale says it was actually she who had suggested to Woody that he cut off the flow of money.

  The issue with her father further infuriated Casey, who screamed. “My mother doesn’t know anything,” she yelled. “I spoke to my father yesterday and I’m not cut off at all.” Sale responded, “Casey, you know that’s not true.”

  Everyone else remained silent.

  “I called Nicky Hilton,” says Sale, “and she tried to talk to Casey, but Casey didn’t want to hear it.”

  Glaring at the doctor from the clinic, Casey ordered her out of the house.

  Then Kathy Hilton spoke up, telling Casey, “You just seem to be really stressed. Why don’t you let me take Ava, and you take a little break.”

  Casey instantly agreed.

  Sale couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “It was not like Casey needed a vacation, and if anybody took Ava, it should not have been Kathy Hilton. She should have been saying, why don’t you let your mom take care of Ava.”

  That was it.

  Everyone else at the failed intervention left.

  Sale, hurt and upset, watched as Casey placed a car seat for Ava in Kathy Hilton’s car.

  At that point, Sale confronted Hilton.

  “‘Kathy, what are you doing?’ She said, ‘Well, Casey said I should take Ava.’ I said, ‘No, you suggested that you take Ava, but I’m Ava’s grandmother, and I’m supposed to be taking Ava,’ and she goes, ‘Well, Casey’s giving her to me.’ So they put Ava in Kathy Hilton’s car and she drove off with my granddaughter.”

  At that point Sale, stressed and anxious about Ava and Casey, decided to return home to regroup and confer with her second husband, former professional football player and NBC sportscaster Bobby Earl Moore, known professionally as Ahmad Rashad. A convert to Islam in the early 1970s, his new name meant “Admirable One Led to Truth.”

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  Sale Johnson was Ahmad Rashad’s fourth wife. One of his previous three was the popular actress Phylicia Ayers-Allen Rashad, who had played Bill Cosby’s wife on TV’s The Cosby Show. Rashad’s best man at that wedding was O. J. Simpson. From all of Rashad’s marriages he had quite a brood when he married Woody’s ex: three daughters, two sons, and one stepson. With Sale, he added three stepdaughters.

  In 2005, Sale, single since her divorce in 2001, was playing golf with a male friend at Donald Trump’s National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York, a Manhattan suburb. The only other party on the course that day—the club still wasn’t finished—was one that included the real estate mogul and reality TV star Trump, the professional basketball great Michael Jordan, and Rashad.

  “We all happened to stop at the little shack to get a sandwich, and Donald introduced me to Ahmad that day,” says Sale. “When Ahmad got back on the course he asked Donald about me, and Donald told him that I knew everybody, that I was involved in a lot of things, and then Ahmad had his assistant try to find me.”

  They eventually began a serious relationship, but at first the fact that he was black was a hurdle for her.

  “I had a lot of friends that were people of different colors,” she says, “but to date, much less marry somebody [who was black], was like a real departure. But Ahmad didn’t have a color. He was his own person, and his friends didn’t really have a color, and I didn’t think about [race] when I was with him.”

  They were married on his fifty-eighth birthday on November 19, 2007, in a small ceremony at the Manhattan restaurant La Grenouille. Among the guests was Trump, along with National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern. Also in attendance was the groom’s buddy Derek Jeter, and Princess Yasmin Aga Khan.

  Casey was not among the celebrants.

  Shortly after they were wed, Sale purchased an almost five-million-dollar French Palladian-style mansion with a guesthouse and forty-five-foot-long swimming pool on two acres overlooking the eleventh green of the Jack Nicklaus–designed Bears Club golf course in Jupiter, Florida—nirvana for the two because they both were golf nuts.

  Sale says her friends, for the most part, were happy for her, but some, like Casey’s first pediatrician, Dr. Ed Saltzman, reacted with surprise that she had married a black man.

  “I was stunned,” he says. “I’m not a bigot, but to me it [interracial marriage] adds a lot of problems to a person’s life. After they were married Sale complained to me that Ahmad was very demanding. I didn’t get the impression it was a great life.”

  * * *

  Nancy Sale Frey Johnson Rashad desperately tried to contact Kathy Hilton in California to find out how and where Ava-Monroe was. Finally, she tracked her down at the Bel Air Hotel where the Hiltons were staying with the baby.

  Sale gave them a list of necessities for Ava such as the vitamins and special milk that she required, and then called each day to make certain the Hiltons were following her instructions.

  At the end of that week, Sale made her daily check and learned from Rick Hilton that the Hiltons were flying off to Dubai for a week to see Paris, where she was shooting a reality show called Paris Hilton’s Dubai BFF, and that they were turning over the child to a trusted friend.

  When the Hiltons returned from Dubai, the woman gave Ava back to them, apparently no worse for their absence.

  Rick Hilton then called Sale and told her that Kathy was going to hire her niece to take care of Ava “and they wanted me to pay for her hotel room at the Bel Air and all of her wages and expenses. I said, ‘Rick, you’ve got to be kidding! The idea is to make Casey take responsibility for her child and realize that she can’t, and then ask for help, not bail her out. You’re just enabling her behavior.’”

  At that point, Casey was in the midst of an even more serious emotional downward spiral, and finally checked herself in to rehab at Cliffside Malibu, and turned Ava over to Kathy’s sister Kim (of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reality TV program), who had her own long history of alcohol addiction. Back in the 1970s, pushed by her aggressive stage mother, she had appeared in a number of films and TV series such as Nanny and the Professor, and had two marriages, one to Gregg Davis, the son of billionaire oilman and Hollywood mogul Marvin Davis, with whom she had two children.

  At first, Sale accepted the situation because “Kim had been sober for ten years and at that point she was fine.” What soon infuriated Casey was that the child had started calling Kim “Mommy.”

  Casey “went ballistic and said to Kim, ‘Give me my kid back! What do you mean she’s calling you mommy. I’m her mommy.” And Casey, going from the frying pan into the fire, called her chum Jasmine Lennard, who then watched Ava for a number of days.

  Lennard was another controversial young woman in Casey’s orbit—skinny with low-slung breast implants (which she reportedly later had removed), she once was described by the snarky media Web site Gawker as a “transatlantic fameball,” and “a hypersexual British socialite” who was part of the Hollywood celebutante train-wreck crowd.

  Back in the Malibu clinic, Casey claimed that while she was taking a shower someone, presumably a man, had walked into her room and stood watching her and wouldn’t leave. As a result Casey left the clinic for the last time.

  “He wasn’t molesting her,” says her mother, noting that, “Casey can be sensationalistic, so you never knew whether to believe something like that, but that was her excuse for leaving the second time.”

  * * *

  The last time Casey saw her daughter
was on August 27, 2009, when her stepfather, Ahmad Rashad, accompanied by Casey’s sister Daisy, arrived in Los Angeles to rescue the three-year-old from her emotionally drowning adoptive mother, who once again had been hospitalized for her diabetes while her child was being passed around from one friend to another.

  “Nobody went and took Casey’s baby,” declares her mother. “Casey asked Daisy to come and get Ava after conversations with me. Casey had said this before and I said to Daisy, ‘I don’t want you to waste a trip flying to California and she’s going to change her mind.’”

  A single-page document was prepared, stating that Daisy was coming to take Ava for as long as deemed necessary, and without any legal repercussions. “They certainly would not have taken Ava without Casey’s agreement,” emphasizes her mother. “But everyone was saying that I swooped in and kidnapped Ava. I didn’t do any of that. I wasn’t there.”

  When Casey was released from the hospital, she moved back into her rented Beverly Hills home with Jasmine Lennard, but by the fall of 2009, the Johnsons had stopped paying Casey’s rent, and Jasmine had no money. With her millions cut off by her estranged, divorced parents, who were playing tough love, Casey was getting deeper into debt. Her Porsche was repossessed, a former landlord sued her for back rent and property damage, and other bills for her extravagences had piled up.

  Casey’s uncle, Christopher Johnson—Woody’s youngest brother and a stockholder in the Jets—was one of the trustees of her fortune, and was often left in shock by his niece’s crazy spending. “He did his best to impart a sense of values in Casey by putting a lid on her acquisitions,” maintains Eric Ryan. “Chris was in the position of having certain legal and fiduciary responsibilities regarding Casey and also had a great deal of affection for her. But it was a cantankerous relationship on Casey’s part, and a couple of times she threatened to sue. Chris would say to her—no money for a house, but I’ll pay for your rehab, and Casey would be like, ‘How dare you withhold my funds. It’s my money.’”