The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  But anyone who knew Sumner knew that he would never go for it. Paramount was his baby, his reason for being, the kingdom that made him the “King of Hollywood.” Soon after Dauman announced his plans to sell the Paramount stake, Sumner began to repeat the phrase “I don’t want to sell Paramount” to anyone who would listen—household staff, Brad Grey, old friends and family. By April, his feelings had made their way onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

  In the meantime, those hoping to keep prying eyes away from Sumner’s mental state were dealt a blow: Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Cowan ruled that Manuela’s case challenging Sumner’s mental capacity could proceed, and he set a trial date for May 6. In explaining his decision, he referred to the sealed thirty-seven-page report that Dr. Stephen Read had produced after examining Sumner in his mansion, calling it “sufficient to raise a reasonable question about whether Redstone lacked capacity,” adding that it was “difficult to read in describing how this man is hanging on to life.” He added that he found it “perplexing that Redstone still puts Philippe Dauman, and for that matter, Thomas Dooley, the COO of Viacom, ahead of his own daughter as his agent in case of incapacity,” an arrangement that “does not give the Court confidence” that Shari and Sumner had patched up their relationship.

  In the wake of this major victory for Manuela on many levels (since her complaint had also been full of allegations about how strained relations between Sumner and Shari were), the Redstones made a crucial decision: they hired a new lawyer named Rob Klieger to Sumner’s legal team.

  Up to that point, Sumner had been represented by Gabrielle Vidal, a litigator at Loeb & Loeb, the same law firm where Bishop worked as Sumner’s estate attorney. They were experts in estate planning and probate cases, but as this case was now headed for a very public trial, Shari and her lawyers had some qualms with Loeb being the sole counsel, given that Vidal and Bishop were on Manuela’s witness list. Vidal suggested an attorney, Klieger, who had been introduced to her husband, Aaron May, by a mutual friend. May called up Klieger and found that he was available. Klieger, who had recently joined the law firm of Hueston Hennigan, knew the business side of the empire well and had confidence and press-savvy and storytelling flair that rivaled—and ultimately bested—O’Donnell’s.18

  Despite his gray-flecked temples, Klieger was young and dynamic, with a Gen X cadence to his speech and dark eyebrows that made him look a bit like the actor Bobby Cannavale. He had grown up in Pittsburgh in a family of doctors and graduated from Stanford Law School in 1997 with the second-highest grade point average in his class. Thereafter, he headed for Hollywood, where he represented many Redstone-controlled clients, including Paramount, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Showtime. Along the way, he also dabbled in the creative side of the movie business, cofounding a production company called the Paradise Collective and landing executive producer credits on films like the 2016 sci-fi thriller Shortwave. In the promotional shots for the company, he posed with a movie camera in his hand. His legal briefs read like screenplays, with tight pacing, colorful scenes, and masterful attention to character development.

  His arrival signaled a major change in strategy. The Redstones were not simply going to fight Manuela in court to keep her away from Sumner. They were going to fight the whole machine—Manuela, Dauman, the boards, the trust, all of it—to put Shari in control, oust Dauman, and stop the destruction of the value of Viacom. The cornerstone of this strategy was to remove Dauman as Sumner’s health care agent and replace him with Shari. The disagreement over the Paramount stake provided the perfect illustration of how Sumner and Dauman’s long friendship had deteriorated.

  “Sumner had become very disillusioned with Philippe, principally not because of Viacom’s shitty performance, although that should have been enough, but principally because he didn’t listen to him on Paramount,” said one person close to Sumner. “As long as you are loyal to Sumner, he will give you leeway. Once he was disloyal to Sumner, Sumner no longer wanted to have anything to do with Philippe. So the first thing he wanted was to get Philippe off his health care agency.”

  The attorneys at Loeb & Loeb thought this was a highly risky maneuver on the eve of trial, but Klieger pushed for doing it anyway—for moving, in essence, from defense to offense. As Judge Cowan’s statement on Shari’s role showed, the risks for her were far greater not to be Sumner’s health care agent than any risk of complicating the trial.

  As the case headed to trial, both Shari and Dauman were subpoenaed to be deposed on the topic of Sumner’s mental capacity—something both of them wanted desperately to avoid. And so, by early April, Manuela’s and Sumner’s legal teams had entered into settlement talks, which Shari helped drive.19 A deal was hammered out that would have given Manuela $30 million plus the Carlyle Hotel apartment tax-free. And most crucially, in the midst of but not tied to this settlement deal, Shari was made Sumner’s health care agent in place of Dauman. The settlement talks fell apart, in part because Manuela came back with a series of demands, including that they cover her legal costs if she was sued by any member of their family, including their cousin Gary Snyder. Snyder, who also lived in Beverly Hills, had filed his own elder abuse complaint on Sumner’s behalf against Manuela in March, drawn from the details that Manuela herself had included in her initial petition to be reinstated as Sumner’s health care agent. The Redstones also refused to agree to Manuela’s demand that they fire Jagiello and Tuanaki, who she believed had been disloyal to her. But most of all, she wanted to see Sumner one last time, and for her and her children to be at his funeral. (Even if she was enriched by her relationship to Sumner, she truly cared about him, according to people who know her.) The Redstones were not having it. Even after the talks fell apart, however, Shari kept her role as health care agent.20

  Shari was now fully in control. She told the court how her father’s health “flourished” since she and her children have been able to visit regularly and taken over responsibility for his medical care.

  * * *

  The trial on May 6, 2016, was a full-blown media circus. The courtroom in Los Angeles Superior Court was so packed with reporters that officials were checking to make sure there was only one from every media outlet inside, forcing the rest to crowd in the hallway around a tiny, grimy window, where they could just make out PowerPoint slides with titles like “Redstone’s Delusions.” Shari was there, in a gray suit, with her son Brandon dressed more casually. So was Manuela, in black skirt and jacket, dark stockings, and black clunky heels. Shari shook her head “no” through much of O’Donnell’s opening statement, which described his client’s ouster as a “palace coup” that was “financed by his daughter Shari.”

  The main attraction, however, was a videotaped deposition of Sumner, aided by his speech therapist, which was played for a closed courtroom. Reporters were later given a transcript of the video. The transcript makes it impossible to tell exactly how well or authentically Sumner could form words, and where his own words end and the interpreter’s begin. In the course of the deposition, Sumner tries and fails to spell out words with a pointer and cannot answer the question of what his birth name was. But the transcript has him answering a question about what he thinks Manuela lied to him about with the phrase “about Terry’s availability and Sydney’s letter”—words clearly supplied by the interpreter. But one phrase comes across clearly, over and over, parrot-like: “Manuela is a fucking bitch.” And when asked whom he wants to make his health care decisions, he stutters but goes on to say “Shari.”21

  “I think he said what he wanted to say,” Judge Cowan said after watching the video. “How can I sit here and say, after seeing that video, ‘No, you’ve got to have Manuela’?” The following Monday, the judge dismissed the case, saying Sumner clearly expressed that he didn’t want Manuela in charge of his health care. But the judge was careful to note that this did not mean he was making a ruling of any kind on Sumner’s mental capacity.

  Klieger was triumphant, crowing that “Ms. Her
zer bet wrong when she assumed that Mr. Redstone’s difficulty communicating would result in her reinstatement in his life and fortune.” An associate of O’Donnell’s followed Shari from the courthouse to Sumner’s mansion, where he served her with a new, $70 million lawsuit against her, her sons, and members of Sumner’s staff accusing them of working together to destroy Manuela’s relationship with Sumner and deprive her of her inheritance.22 Manuela’s motives were now laid out on the table, and Shari was fully in charge. She was so pleased with Klieger’s performance that she asked him to represent her in the lawsuit she knew was coming from Manuela. In the hallway outside the courtroom, she cried with relief. “I am grateful to the court for putting an end to this long ordeal,” she said in a statement. “I am so happy for my father that he can now live his life in peace, surrounded by his friends and family.”23

  Around lunchtime the day the trial was dismissed, an audio recording of Sumner pleading with a prospective lover to participate in a four-way with “Bob” and “the most beautiful producer” was posted to the gossip site Radar Online. “Bob’s never done a threesome with two men,” Sumner says on the recording. “He’s done it with two women. So he’s a little bit nervous but he’s gonna come ’cause I want him to. So what will probably happen will probably really excite you. I’ll fuck her and she’ll suck Bob off and he’ll fuck her and she’ll suck me off. Before that, I’ll make her jerk off in front of Bob because she’s very hot when she jerks off. She’s better than what you do. She takes a long time and she moans.”24 The timing of the recording was not clear, but the New York Post claimed it was within the last two years. What dignity that had not been destroyed by the lawsuit was now completely gone.

  Chapter 22

  Pandemonium

  Philippe Dauman’s corner office was mostly filled with toys—SpongeBob SquarePants dolls, Dora the Explorer tchotchkes, and, most recently, a long lineup of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines representing the intellectual property–driven, merchandise-powered global future he envisioned for Viacom. But his most prized possession was a pair of boxing gloves signed by Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield minutes before Tyson bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear. The fight aired on Showtime, and Dauman was ringside. “The incident was unexpected and scary,” Dauman told the Financial Times. “There was pandemonium.”1

  If Tyson’s maneuver could ever have an equivalent within the hushed and bloodless suites of corporate media, it happened in the early evening of Friday, May 20, 2016, with the flick of a pen. That evening, barely two weeks after Sumner’s testimony against Manuela revealed that he didn’t even know his own birth name, a Los Angeles lawyer claiming to represent Sumner—someone Dauman had never heard of—emailed him with news that Sumner had booted him from the National Amusements board and trust. His replacement was a media analyst–turned–abstract painter named Jill Krutick who had been Shari’s friend of twenty years. On the document, Sumner’s signature was a nearly straight line veering up toward the top right corner of the page, as if signaling the direction he wished his stock price would one day go again.2 George Abrams met a similar fate. In a single, shocking instant, Dauman and his ally were removed from the true seat of power in the Redstone kingdom. With that gone, the rest—including his job as CEO of Viacom—would surely collapse.

  Ever since the women were thrown out of the house and Shari began spending about a third of her time at her father’s side, Dauman had been worried that she might try something like this. In January, he and Abrams had hired lawyers to explore what recourse they would have if they were thrown off the trust.3 (The answer was to prove Sumner was incapacitated and being manipulated by his daughter.) In the weeks after the trial, hints of mechanisms that would be used to oust him—such as the fact that Sumner could throw Dauman off the trust but not Shari—began to filter into the press.4 So when the blow finally came, shocking as it was, Dauman was ready. Minutes after the emails arrived, Viacom spokesman Carl Folta blasted them to Fortune as a “shameful effort by Shari Redstone to seize control by unlawfully using her father Sumner Redstone’s name and signature,” arguing that the recent trial demonstrated to all that “Sumner Redstone now lacks the capacity to have taken these steps.”5 As soon as Massachusetts government buildings opened on Monday morning, Dauman and Abrams filed a lawsuit in Norfolk Probate and Family Court, where the trust was settled, seeking to block their removal from the trust.

  Shari steadfastly maintained she had nothing to do with it. In a brilliantly crafted PR statement, she said simply, “I fully support my father’s decisions and respect his authority to make them.”6 Indeed, in the weeks after the trial, the Redstones built a network of lawyers and PR professionals around Sumner that put Shari at a remove from any of the statements or legal filings coming out under Sumner’s name. Central to this effort was Rob Klieger, Sumner’s lawyer, the creative, aggressive litigator who had won the case against Manuela.

  Shortly after joining the legal team battling Manuela in March 2016, Klieger had become a trusted adviser to the Redstone clan. He was, as one of them put it, “engaged” in a way no previous lawyer had been. He saw the big picture. Just as, before the trial, it was his idea to push for making Shari Sumner’s health care agent, after the trial, it was his idea to get Sumner a new lawyer—a “corporate counsel”—that Sumner would use to go to war against the men who had been his most trusted confidants for decades.

  Part of the reason that Sumner needed a new lawyer was that Paramount was clearly going to loom large in the coming fight, and Klieger was conflicted, as he was still working for Paramount on other matters. Klieger knew Paramount was about to spark a major fight because, before the trial, he was at Sumner’s mansion going over estate planning when Sumner asked him to please communicate to Viacom that he did not want to pursue the Paramount sale. Klieger relayed the message to Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, but Sumner insisted he go higher up the chain of command, directly to the board. So Klieger relayed the message to two board members: George Abrams and Fred Salerno, a former vice chairman of Verizon who had been on Viacom’s board since Verizon’s predecessor, Nynex, helped Viacom take over Paramount. Salerno heard Klieger out but said that he would need to verify what he was saying with Sumner directly, since he didn’t know Klieger and wasn’t even sure that Klieger really represented Sumner. (Salerno would try many times to visit Sumner both before and after the trial, to no avail.) Abrams called back a few weeks later, telling Klieger that he was no longer sure that what Sumner said he wanted was really what he wanted. “I’m going to be approaching this from the view of what I think Sumner would want,” Abrams told Klieger.

  After so many legal maneuvers, claims, and counterclaims—not to mention a rotating cast of lawyers plying their wares—it was hard to know who or what to believe at this point. It was no surprise then that neither Viacom’s management nor its board did anything when they received these messages. And that lack of action provided all the reason that Sumner would need to get rid of them.

  The day after the trial, Klieger flew to Hawaii on a preplanned vacation but spent most of his time there on the phone, trying to rustle up an unconflicted corporate counsel for Sumner. Through a referral, he found his way to Michael Tu, leader of the shareholder litigation practice at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, one of the very few Los Angeles firms that did not have some business somewhere with CBS or Viacom and was not daunted by the prospect of going up against the chief executive of one of the world’s largest media companies. Through another referral from Shari’s spokeswoman, Nancy Sterling, he found a spokesman for Sumner, the Boston-based Michael Lawrence. Tu and Lawrence then set about attacking Dauman and Abrams on behalf of Sumner, largely on the grounds that they were proceeding with the sale of a Paramount stake against his wishes. Viacom countered that they didn’t speak for Sumner, who had dialed into a board meeting a few days earlier without voicing any objection to the Paramount stake sale.

  In truth, both sides had their work cut out
for them. In challenging Sumner’s mental capacity, Dauman was now in the awkward position of arguing the opposite of what he had just argued in Manuela’s litigation, when he had submitted that affidavit calling Sumner “engaged and attentive.” Like Manuela, he had to thread the very fine needle of arguing that Sumner had had capacity very recently—in this case, as recently as February, when he had voted to tap him to succeed him as chairman of Viacom—and then suddenly lost it. Dauman’s legal challenges were compounded by Viacom’s continuing abysmal performance, which made any move toward removing him as CEO, however indirect, appear logical, in the best interest of shareholders, and very much in keeping with Sumner’s history of behavior toward previous CEOs.

  But the challenges and risks for Shari were even greater. Like Dauman, she, too, suddenly found herself on the opposite side of her previously held argument about her father’s mental capacity. After spending two years so convinced that Sydney and Manuela were taking advantage of her enfeebled father that she had pledged to sue them for undue influence, she was now arguing that he had the mental capacity to make massive changes to his long-held estate planning. (Before the year was out, the women’s long-held fear that their inheritance and gifts would be challenged proved well founded, and Sumner would sue Manuela and Sydney for elder abuse and undue influence in a suit the women claimed Shari was behind.) This view essentially put her at odds with the Viacom board, which had recoiled in horror at what Sumner’s testimony at Manuela’s trial had revealed about his mental state and promptly voted to cut his pay out of well-founded fears that they were vulnerable to shareholder lawsuits if they did otherwise. “You have to ask what you should be paying him, if anything,” said one person familiar with the board’s thinking. “You question whether he has the mental capacity to be a decision maker on the board.”