by Keach Hagey
Over the summer of 2014, worried that Shari was going to sue Manuela and Sydney for unduly influencing Sumner, Sumner hired four different legal teams to protect them, according to Sydney’s legal filings.17 As Sumner and Shari continued their negotiations on her buyout from the company, a new element of the deal took shape: according to a term sheet that circulated that year, in exchange for $1 billion, tax-free, she would relinquish her 20 percent stake in National Amusements and her claim to the chairmanships of Viacom and CBS and walk away with a handful of movie theaters that she had built, so long as she agreed to sign legal releases promising not to go after Sydney and Manuela’s gifts from Sumner.
Shari refused to sign, so Sumner, Sydney, and Manuela tried a different tack: on July 7, 2014, Sumner made burial instructions that stated that, in the event of any challenge to his estate plan, the family cemetery plots in Sharon Memorial Park in Dedham would be given to Manuela and Sydney.18 Still, Shari refused to sign the releases.
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As this private battle raged in 2014, Sumner’s public leadership of his media empire had atrophied to mumbled introductions at the start of earnings calls—where he recited a familiar script calling Dauman the “wisest man I’ve ever known” and praising Moonves as a “genius”—and perfunctory appearances at the CBS and Viacom annual meetings. Nevertheless, at its annual meeting in March, Viacom shareholders voted to boost his salary for fiscal 2014, which ended in September, citing his “vision and leadership.”19 CBS held its annual meeting two months later. Before the event, two large men carried Sumner out onto the stage behind a curtain. When the curtain was pulled back, Sumner, in what the Journal described as a “strong but slurred voice,” welcomed the crowd and introduced Moonves as a “super genius.”20 As soon as the meeting was over, the curtain was closed. CBS did not hike his pay for that year, but it did continue to pay him a $1.75 million salary and a $9 million bonus, among other forms of compensation. Shareholders would never see him in person again.21
In July, Viacom’s stock hit an all-time high: $88.36 a share. Almost immediately afterward, Sumner suffered a series of health scares that put him in the hospital three times in quick succession. The hospitalization and subsequent health decline would mirror the beginning of a long slide in Viacom’s stock price. They would also bring about the beginning of the end of the women.
Chapter 20
“Sharp as a Tack”
In September 2014, Sumner lay in a hospital bed in a private room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, recovering from yet another brush with death. His swallowing problems had gotten worse, and he had inhaled food into his lungs, causing aspiration pneumonia that had sent him to the intensive care unit. It was his third trip to the hospital that summer, but this time his condition was bad enough that his family had been called in from the East Coast. The hospital stabilized him and transferred him to his own room, where Sydney was waiting with two nurses for his family to arrive. The doctors did not want Sumner to risk another episode by continuing to eat solid food, so he was receiving nutrients through a tube in his nose. That made Sumner even more ornery than usual. He asked his nurses to move him to a reclining chair, and as they did, he began arguing with Sydney.
“I want my $45 million back,” Sumner told Sydney, according to the sworn declaration of one of the nurses, Giovanni Paz. (A person close to Sydney denied that he named a specific figure and said he was simply screaming deliriously about money.)
Sydney tried to change the subject, Paz said, but Sumner was insistent.
“I will give you your money back, but let’s not talk about this now, let’s talk about this another time,” Sydney told him, according to Paz. “Your family is coming. Please don’t do this to me.”
Sydney stepped away from the nurses to call Manuela, who was in New York, according Sumner’s lawyers’ filings.1 She came back into the room and, according to Paz, told Sumner’s nurses, “We have to put him to sleep.” (People close to Sydney’s thinking say she never made that last statement, and argue that it is ridiculous to suggest that anyone but hospital staff had control over the medications administered to Sumner in the hospital.) A few minutes later, a nurse from the hospital came to the room and administered a sedative. Sumner relaxed and grew quiet. By the time his grandson Brandon arrived, he was almost asleep.
Paz was uncomfortable and alerted Brandon later to what he had seen.2 It was the first in what would turn out to be a series of actions by Sumner’s nurses over the next several months to warn Shari and her family about aspects of the women’s treatment of Sumner that worried them. In later litigation, Sumner’s lawyers would characterize the nurses as concerned whistle-blowers, while Sydney’s and Manuela’s lawyers would paint them as a spy ring paid by Shari and her allies. Manuela would eventually go so far as to file a federal RICO case—the kind designed to put away mobsters—against Shari, her children, and the nurses, alleging they were part of a conspiracy that included illegal recording. Manuela later dropped the nurses from her suit, but Sydney continued to go after them. “Holland is not going to be able to prove her claims,” said Bonita Moore, the lawyer for Octaviano and Jagiello. Shari and Tyler deny charges they were directing the nurses to record.
Paz turned out not to be much help to Shari, as Manuela and Sydney fired him a few days later, telling him he lacked the necessary medical qualifications.3 In the wake of his firing, Shari paid him a month’s salary, according to emails that emerged in later litigation.4 But another nurse, Joseph Octaviano, turned out to be very helpful indeed. A few days later, he pulled Shari aside at the hospital and told her that the women were constantly telling Sumner that she and her children were liars, that they hated him, and that they never wanted to visit. He said they often berated Sumner, frequently reducing him to tears, and offered to tell Shari what he was seeing in the mansion, even though he knew he risked meeting the same fate as Paz.5
Sumner’s health crisis brought the long-simmering tensions between Sumner’s family and his live-in companions into open warfare for the first time. Because Sydney and Manuela, and not his own family, were designated as his health care agents, health care decisions sparked screaming fights. One of them was overheard by Keryn, who was coming down the hallway toward Sumner’s hospital room when she heard Shari, her daughter, Kim, and Sydney arguing about what she later learned was the doctor’s recommendation to move the temporary feeding tube in his nose to a permanent one in his stomach. “Listen to the doctor,” Sydney said, according to Keryn. “This is what the doctor is saying.” Shari replied, “That’s not kosher!” (In later court filings, Manuela alleged that Shari had opposed the permanent feeding tube, but Shari has denied opposing it. In an email to his family at the time, Tyler advised that “if there is no other possible way to provide nutrition, then a feeding tube may be necessary,” adding, “If he’s deemed competent to make a decision, it’s not our call.” It was ultimately installed.) Sumner, agitated, could only grunt his objection to their fighting, according to Keryn, saying, “Stop it! Stop it! I’m alive!”
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Sumner returned to Beverly Park a shadow of his former self. He could not walk or stand on his own. He required a catheter. He would never eat another meal again. And perhaps worst of all, for the silver-tongued crusader whose way with words had been his ticket to success ever since he stood on the raised floorboards of Boston Latin School and delivered his declamations, the aspiration had, according to Manuela, caused brain damage that left him barely able to speak.6 What speech he had was limited almost entirely to monosyllabic grunts. He was more dependent upon Manuela and Sydney than ever, and Shari’s hostility to them only made him push her farther away. “I just called to tell him that I love him and that I would be there tomorrow and all he kept saying was leave Sydney and Manuela alone,” Shari wrote her children on September 15. “He said it 100 times. He was not interested in the fact that I loved him or that Tyler and I were coming out.”7
The next day, Shari and Ty
ler came to visit Sumner at his mansion while Sydney and Manuela were out. Things quickly got tense, and Sydney called the house, telling Sumner to ask his family to leave. He did. Octaviano wrote Shari an email later that day saying the incident was typical of the way he had seen the women treat Sumner in the past. “I witnessed verbal abuse almost every day,” he said. “One time Manuela told your Dad that none of his family loves him, except them.”8
Shari thanked him and asked him to update her son Tyler going forward. At twenty-eight, Tyler was the baby of the family, sharing his mother’s enthusiasm about the latest technology but also steeped in the religious and mediation traditions of his father’s family. Like his father, he was both a lawyer and a rabbi, following in his father’s footsteps to earn his JD at Brooklyn Law School while simultaneously studying for his rabbinical degree from Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin. After college, he started his own legal practice, focusing on corporate transactional work. He joined his friends’ technology start-up, BugReplay, as CEO and later cofounded another called tvParty, but starting in 2013, he also began bearing the responsibilities of a much older man, joining the boards of both Brooklyn Law School and National Amusements. At National, he served on the special committee created to evaluate his mother’s potential buyout in 2014, alongside David Andelman and George Abrams.
A pragmatic peacemaker by nature, Tyler was worried about his mother’s intention to sue the women. As negotiations for that potential buyout dragged into the fall, he became frustrated that his mother still refused to consider signing the releases. “To not even consider the releases is a mistake,” he wrote in an email on September 30. “She’s going to be suing the women (and getting no money back), she’s going to be suing Philippe (who supposedly says he won’t enforce the agreement naming her chairman), she’s going to be suing NAI over the redemption which she claims is a dividend to which she is entitled to 20 percent—and that’s a minimum.”
As the missives ostensibly from Sumner ratcheted up the pressure, begging Shari to sign the releases to give him “peace of mind,” Shari dug in. “And why would I ever give SMR his dying wish of peace when he never gave me any peace during my whole life?” she wrote to Tyler on October 1. “Going after those [women] will give me peace. They should get what they deserve.” She hired a private investigator to research their pasts and told Tyler in an October 5 email that she was pleased with the initial results. “In one week we sure have them pegged based on background.” A week later, her anger with her father was palpable. “He could not go to any stronger lengths to ensure we are all left with nothing and that his little sluts get it all with no interference by us,” she wrote in an email. “And of course that David and George and Philippe are 100 percent protected and I can be dumped.”9
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On November 14, 2014, Wall Street analysts dialing into Viacom’s quarterly earnings call could just make out the words as Sumner opened the call in a faint voice: “Good morning, everyone. Here’s my wise friend, Philippe.” It would be the last time they would hear his voice.
Viacom had performed better than analysts expected, due to the surprise success of Paramount’s latest Transformers movie. But beneath the quarter’s performance lay some deep cracks in the core business. The cable networks were in free fall, with double-digit ratings declines across all the biggest networks. BET was down 34 percent for the season, Nickelodeon down 28 percent, and MTV down 27 percent in their target demographics. Dauman blamed the declines on Nielsen, which was not yet able to measure viewing on mobile devices. “We are at a transitional moment where the existing measurement services have not caught up to the marketplace,” he said. Nielsen took his critique seriously enough to respond that same day, ensuring that it was “committed to delivering comprehensive measurement,” but in general the rest of the industry interpreted Dauman’s argument as—as one media executive derisively put it—“The dog ate my homework.” Dauman announced a new plan to try to boost the amount of advertising revenue that was “non-Nielsen dependent” in the future, suggesting that no one should expect ratings improvements, or measurement improvements, anytime soon. Even more potentially dangerous, over the summer, two small distributors, Suddenlink Communications and Cable One, had dropped Viacom’s entire package of two dozen channels and lived to tell about it. Between them, they only accounted for a little more than two million subscribers, but analysts worried that they might signal the beginning of the end of Viacom’s distribution dominance.
For years Viacom had used the leverage of Nickelodeon’s pole position among kids’ channels and must-have shows like The Daily Show to force cable and satellite companies to take its entire package of twenty-two channels, increasing their fees every few years when the distribution contracts were set to expire. But with every media company doing some version of this, the average cable bill was rapidly approaching $100 a month, a wholly unsustainable price point in a world filled with appealing $8 alternatives like Netflix. Everyone knew the dam was going to break, and soon. Viacom’s distribution troubles seemed like they might be the breaking point. Analysts openly fretted that Dish Network, with its roughly thirteen million subscribers and mercurial, poker-playing CEO Charlie Ergen, could be next. But on the call Dauman assured the analysts that Suddenlink and Cable One were “isolated incidents.”10
Two months later, Dauman’s contract was extended for another two years. “Philippe has been my long-term partner in building Viacom into the global entertainment powerhouse that it is today,” Sumner said in a statement. “He has been an extraordinary CEO over more than eight years, and his strategic vision and creative leadership have delivered outstanding operational and financial results.”11
A week later, the company revealed that Dauman’s compensation had risen 19 percent in the previous fiscal year to $44.3 million, even though the company’s share price had fallen 8 percent during that time.12
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Three days later, on January 29, 2015, a number of Sumner’s nurses and household staff, including Octaviano, filed a report with Los Angeles County Adult Protective Services, alleging that Sydney and Manuela had been mentally and financially abusing Sumner, according to Sumner’s lawyers. January had been a brutal month in Beverly Park, filled with crying and screaming from Sumner, as the fight to get Shari, her mother, and her children to sign releases protecting Sydney and Manuela reached its climax—a letter from Sumner to Shari and her children threatening to bar them from his funeral unless she signed. Through it all, Octaviano’s emails provided Tyler a behind-the-scenes look at how the correspondence coming to them from Sumner came to be, and why family members were having trouble getting through to Sumner. On January 8, for example, the day that Shari’s family received the threatening letter, Sydney met with estate planning attorney Leah Bishop and Sumner in the fish room at around eleven a.m. By eleven thirty, Octaviano wrote, he could overhear Sumner crying during the meeting. A while later, Sydney came by to tell Octaviano that Sumner was not to receive phone calls from the family, “especially Shari and Kim,” though Steven Sweetwood, his stockbroker and step-nephew, and Keryn Redstone could be put through.
A few days later, on January 12, Kim finally got through and spoke to her grandfather on the phone. When Sumner told Sydney that he had told Kim that she and her two young children were welcome to visit anytime, Sydney got angry, telling Sumner that Kim was a liar just like the rest of the family, Octaviano reported. Sumner replied by screaming, “I love Kim!” prompting more screaming from Sydney.
These incidents fit into a broader pattern of abuse outlined by nurses Jeremy Jagiello, Octaviano, and Paz in sworn declarations for later litigation. In their telling, Sydney and Manuela spent a great deal of time coaching Sumner on what to say to Bishop, sometimes writing a script in large letters on a notepad so that he could memorize his lines before estate planning meetings. They woke him up to have him sign cash withdrawal forms or legal documents when he was groggy. And during sensitive meetings with the women about money,
the nurses were sent from the room but often overheard Sumner crying; when the meeting was over, they would come back in to find Sumner had gotten so upset that he had soiled himself and had been sitting like that for at least a half an hour. Jagiello reported that putting through calls from Sumner’s family around this time was a “fireable offense.”13
Sydney believes these anecdotes are fabrications by nurses who were on Shari’s payroll. In Manuela’s legal filings, she argues that after Paz got $10,000 from Shari, the other nurses expected similar largesse to side with her, or at least job security.14 In one email between Octaviano and Shari in Sydney’s legal filings, he responds to her question about what she could do for him by telling her that he would like to buy a house.15
Adult Protective Services sent an investigator to the house to visit with Sumner, but Sydney, who was out of town, instructed staff not to let them in, and instead to ask them to make an appointment for later, according to Jagiello’s declaration. When the appointment came a few days later, the investigator walked in to find Sumner surrounded by the women and lawyers, including Robert Shapiro, best known as a onetime member of O.J. Simpson’s legal “dream team,” one of the big legal guns that Sumner had encouraged Sydney and Manuela to hire to protect them from Shari. The investigator only spoke to Sumner, the women, and the lawyers, but not to any of the nurses, staff, or family, according to Jagiello, who was at the house that day. Adult Protective Services never took any action on that complaint, or on another one filed in August of that year.16 Manuela’s lawyers claim that the abuse complaints were bogus.
Undeterred, Shari and Tyler continued to gather information about what was going on inside the house. At times, the nurses’ communications to them suggested that some nurses were not merely listening, but secretly recording conversations between Sumner, the women, and their lawyers—a crime in the state of California.