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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for listening. A special thank you to everyone who's donated during our winter pledge drive. We can't do this without you. Coming up this week on the show, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer behind the lens for the film Elvis, Ms. Mandy Walker. Coming up later this hour, the Oscar-nominated film, Argentina, 1985. It follows the trial of Juntas, a historic case in which a civilian court tried former military leaders for crimes committed during their dictatorships. We'll speak with the film's director and one of the real-life lawyers who prosecuted the case. That is in the future. Right now, let's get this hour started with an epic battle.

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A media empire, an exiled son living on a Colorado ranch, a daughter both praised and ridiculed by a domineering sexist patriarch with a serious health condition. Toss in extreme wealth, a drive for power, a layer of greed. It is not the logline for a premium cable drama. It is the true story of the man born Sumner Murray Rothstein. He became a businessman, a billionaire, and he was a bully. It's documented in the new book, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family.

It's the story of the fight for control of CBS, Paramount Movie Studio, Simon & Schuster Publishing, and Viacom, the home of MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH1, and more. Viacom and Paramount were controlled for decades by media titan, Sumner Redstone through his company, National Amusements Incorporated, which also had a controlling stake in CBS run by the engaging but Me Too-ish, Les Moonves.

From the early aughts to just before the pandemic, these two companies, CBS and Viacom, and the executives running them were engaged in a battle for power, which broke open due to some only-in-Hollywood lawsuits and the Me Too Movement. It's all told in vivid detail in the book, Unscripted by New York Times reporters, James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams, who researched and reported on the story for three years. They join us now. Hi, James. Hi, Rachel.

Rachel Abrams: Hi.

James B. Stewart: Hi. Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: You can check them out tonight at Rizzoli books where they'll be in conversation with Ben Smith about the book that's happening at 6:00 PM. Let's talk about Sumner Redstone, who many people know passed away in 2020. Originally Sumner Rothstein, but his father changed the name and Sumner enrolled at Harvard under the name Redstone. While we remember him as a titan, James, of business, he was successful in a lot of other areas as well as a lawyer, he was in the military. What were the qualities that led Sumner Redstone to become such a power player?

James B. Stewart: He was brilliant in his heyday. He learned Japanese. He cracked the Japanese code in World War II, but I think you have to say it with his sheer willpower to succeed and to win at all costs that drove him to become a multi-billionaire and one of the most powerful men in media history. I think a formative incident was when he was staying in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston when it caught fire.

He escaped out a window. He hung by one hand from the windowsill as the flames laughed and burned his hand, ultimately disfiguring it for the rest of his life, but he survived. From then on, he was invincible. He was going to live forever and nobody should get in his way because he was going to win. Now, not mentioning at the time was there was also a mistress in the hotel room with him, the first of many in a long career.

Alison Stewart: That just sets the table for everything.

James B. Stewart: [laughs]

Alison Stewart: That gives you a little bit of everything about Sumner Redstone in one place. Rachel, where did he learn this? Where did he get this will, this drive?

Rachel Abrams: Well, he certainly was a self-made man. He starts with two drive-in movie theaters in the Boston area and ultimately ends up controlling a vast swath of media that for a long time shaped the movies and television shows that many of us grew up with and shaped our culture. As Jim said, that Copley fire was incredibly formative. He had this incredible desire to win at all costs and also to win, even if it meant that his daughter who he wouldn't even allowed to beat him in a tennis match would win. He could not champion his kid's successes if it meant that it would cost him anything. Where that comes from, boy, I bet a psychiatrist could really have a field day with that one.

Alison Stewart: Jim, Rachel's touched on something that I was going to bring up at the end of the interview, but I think it's actually good to bring up at the top of the interview. We in the media love stories about the media. If you could think of a reason why this story is important to the male carrier who maybe is listening to us right now in his earphones or a bus driver, why is a story about Sumner Redstone and his voracious appetite to win and his control of the media important to think about for the average person?

James B. Stewart: That's a great question because, frankly, I'm not really a Hollywood reporter per se, but this story goes so beyond those characters, or whatever. I think ultimately, it's a very profound story about the relationship between this highly competitive, successful rich father and a daughter who like most of us craved the love and the respect and the approval of a parent. That runs throughout the story.

Rachel and I were working on it, that there's a lot in literature in even non-fiction about mothers and sons and mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, but there's not very much about fathers and daughters. The dynamic there shapes the entire story. I think that's number one. Number two, again, we look at one company in great detail, but we don't think it's unique. The level of sexism, of misogyny, the shocking dereliction of duty on the part of directors who blindly followed a CEO even when the CEO was charged with serious sexual assault, I think is an incredible window into the failure of so-called corporate democracy and corporate governance.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, did you want to add anything?

Rachel Abrams: No. This is inherently a family drama. If you like succession, you will love this book. This book is all about human nature. People think about business stories sometimes as being strictly about business, but inherently there are people stories. There are stories about very flawed people who are driven by all the things that we're all familiar with. Greed, the desire to have companionship, the vulnerability of old age, and all of these very human needs and wants are what ultimately shaped the future of a multi-billion dollar company.

It's really the collision of the Me Too Movement meets the corporate boardroom, and we got a treasure trove of materials, text messages, emails, documents. We've all become accustomed to very manicured publicity statements in the wake of corporate scandals, but we never before have gotten to see what it is like on the inside when you can actually see executives in real-time melting down in response to a scandal. It's really unprecedented.

Alison Stewart: James, if you would share, Jim, would you share with our audience the kind of information that you got and sources that came through for you?

James B. Stewart: Yes. You can't write a great story without good raw material. I've never in my decades of reporting had so much as we did in this case. Fortunately, there were a number of sources we can't name, but who felt that this is a story that the facts should not be swept under the rug, which is probably what would've happened if many of them had not been willing to come forward.

They gave us the raw material that we needed. We didn't have to rely on their word or anything. They gave us the emails, they gave us the text. Somebody said to me that after reading this, "No CEO is ever going to write a text again." They're so revealing in a way that no recollection could possibly-- You see this happening in real-time. We got incredible transcripts of interviews that were supposed to be confidential. We got video calls.

Technology has made it possible now to recreate things in arresting detail, which thanks to these sources we were able to do. I think, in my experience, it's an unprecedented look of what was really going on behind the scenes of ordinarily very secretive institutions.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, you said about this being a family drama. We've mentioned Shari Redstone, and we'll get into more of that in the future, but he had a son, Brent, who was estranged. What drove Brent out of the picture.

Rachel Abrams: Sumner Redstone was not a loving dotting father. He was at turns abusive, he withheld his love and affection. He got into a business dispute with his son, to really just truncate the larger drama, and the son just threw up his hands and decided, "I don't want to be part of this anymore and I don't want anything to do with my father." He moved away and the two of them never spoke again.

It's really a testament to the relationship between Sumner and Shari. That despite all of the horrible ways that he was abusive toward her, that she still, at the end of his life when he really needed somebody to be looking out for him, that she actually still cared about him enough to swoop in and rescue him from some of the people who had moved in to take advantage of his wealth and power. This was not a man who prioritized having close, loving relationships with his family.

Alison Stewart: We are talking about the book, Unscripted with my guest, James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. We'll have more with both. We'll talk a little bit more about Shari Redstone, who the villains are in this story, I think there's a race for that, and more stay with us.

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You are listening to all of it and we're continuing our conversation with James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams. They are the authors of Unscripted: The Epic Battle for Immediate Empire and The Redstone Family Legacy. Let's pick up where we left off James, when we're talking about Sumner Redstone having to win, what was it in terms of business towards the end of his life that he wanted to win?

James B. Stewart: Well, I guess what he really wanted towards the end of his life was to win these women that kept crossing his path. I mean, he conquered everything else. I guess his biggest business victory was beating the legendary Mogul Barry Diller to buy Paramount Studios but he now had-- he had a multibillion-dollar media empire under his control but he'd never stopped wanting to conquer the women that he found beautiful crossing his path and, again, psychiatrists could look into this, his mother never approved of anybody he dated.

He didn't date in high school, whatever. He totally made up for it late in life but what sets this whole drama in motion is when he becomes engaged to a woman he met through the Millionaire Matchmaker of reality TV fan, gave her 9 carat diamond, and then she moved in. Soon after that one of his ex-lovers also moved in, and the two of them started taking over his life and his business empire and by the way, came very, very close to gaining control of the whole thing, which is what forced his daughter to come to enter the fray, and try to get these women out of his mansion.

Alison Stewart: It's stunning the amount of money and the ends the means he went to, to try to get women to be part of his life. Rachel, would you share a story of something, there's many extraordinary Sumner Redstone did when it came to women and having women in his life.

Rachel Abrams: This book is filled with stories where basically-- of anecdotes and examples of a multibillion-dollar Mogul basically using his wealth and power to slowly or quickly take over the lives of women that he deems to be attractive, as Jim said, and one of the amazing things about this book is that it's not just the story of the struggle for a family empire. It's also the story-- is the struggle for-- the story of how this man's sexual proclivities affected his business and can you even imagine being a daughter caught in the middle of this?

To answer your question, there was a flight attendant who was on worked on the corporate jets, and this is a woman who juggled multiple jobs at once and eventually she ends up on the plane with Sumner who just harasses her the entire flight, says really things that cannot repeat on public radio to her, and she gets off the plane and she never gets a job on the than the jet again.

While she's calling up the jet company to try to get her job back basically and try to get put back on the schedule, which they're just not doing for reasons that are sort of clear, but not really Sumner is calling her and messaging her and sending her gifts and just dangling her job back in front of her. He's basically saying, "Let's have dinner, we can discuss it, we can discuss the menu on the plane," and this is just one of the many examples of Sumner encounters a woman with far less money and power than he does. He decides he must have her and then he uses all the resources available to him to basically take over her life and not give her many options.

Alison Stewart: James, something I thought was interesting and I was curious, in your research how you felt about it as you got deeper into the story. There's a story you tell about Sumner Redstone. He's up there in age and is it Larry King who asks him how old he is and it keeps saying he's 65?

James B. Stewart: Yes, he's blatantly lying.

Alison Stewart: He just keeps saying it. Now, is he lying, or in some way does he believe it? Is he someone who is able to move the world so much? To however he wants it, on some level believed he was that young?

James B. Stewart: Yes, I think it's some of both. I mean, one thing you do see throughout this story is when these men and they're mostly-- they're all men, gain, this great wealth and power. They bend reality to their will, whether that's who they're going to have sex with or sleep with, or who's going to be put on a TV show. You see that over and over. I mean, he likes to say he would live forever and obviously he has to that was not going to be the case. He said he was 60s when it was pushing 90. He claimed he had the sex life of a 20-year-old, which we know in great detail that was not true either, although he certainly had an active sex life for a 90-year-old.

I think it was a combination but one thing that I thought was very revealing, he told, in fact, the woman, the flight attendant, he was confiding in, that the real reason he kept saying that he was going to live forever is that he knew that when he faced his final judgement, all the horrible things he did in life would be brought up and he would pay the price. He was terrified of dying and I thought that was a rare lash of self-awareness and insight and a sense that someday he was going to face a reckoning for the behavior that he knew was horrible.

Alison Stewart: We've talked about his romantic relationships, we talked about his relationship with his parents and with his son but there's a really important relationship we need to discuss which is with his daughter, Shari Redstone. Shari seem to be a reluctant participant in her father's business until she wasn't, what prompted her to get involved. Rachel, why don't you start that?

Rachel Abrams: Shari, basically is watching from a far in increasing horror as these women have taken over her father's life, moved into the mansion. They eventually, by the way, make off with at least $150 million, and Shari, at one point, gets a report from one of the nurses that's charged with taking care of her father, that the nurse-- there's a lot of really alarming behavior going on, that these women might be committing some sort of elder abuse, mistreating him.

It's so painful for her that she can't even-- she doesn't even want to have communication with the nurses, she asked her son to intervene, to start talking to this nurse and as Jim said, these women came very close to taking over the family business and Shari steps in not just to save the family business, and to keep it from this women but she also steps in as a daughter who becomes increasingly aware that her father might be falling prey to elder abuse.

Alison Stewart: There's this interesting sort of battle for Sumner's favor between his children and between Philippe Dauman, who is an executive who is a trusted confidant and some people think maybe the son that he [unintelligible 00:17:16] always would have one day. How would you describe, James, how would you describe the relationship with Philippe Dauman, and then how would you describe that relationships impact on Shari Redstone?

James B. Stewart: Well, Philippe Dauman was repeatedly described as Sumner's surrogate son. His main quality seemed to be-- I mean, he was certainly very intelligent and he was a lawyer, he worked very hard, but he was extremely loyal to Sumner, he did whatever Sumner wanted, basically. He was a hired professional, whereas his son, his real son, would actually push back, his real daughter sometimes pushed back and I think any of us who-- in families can imagine how painful it must be when you're the real son, to have your father comparing you unfavorably to this outsider who has become the surrogate son.

The same thing for his daughter to have pride of place in the family taken over by someone who's not even in the family, I think was very, very painful and Brent, the son, eventually just threw in the towel and retreated completely. He didn't even show up at his father's funeral. They were so estranged. Shari, on the other hand, I accept the fact that she always wanted his love, she loved him, she cared about him, even though he treated her horribly, and examples that we document in the book, she kept bouncing back. She had some of her father's tenacity, she had to, to confront the obstacles she did and to ultimately emerge in control at the end of all of this.

Alison Stewart: Rachel, what was challenging about writing this story?

Rachel Abrams: Well, I think that one thing that certainly made it more interesting was that we were writing in the middle of the pandemic and there was just a lot of crazy behavior. Jim and I were constantly calling each other up saying, can you believe this? We didn't have that many other people to talk to or a lot of other things to do. Challenging, I would say that sort of one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of this was just listening to some of these accusations of elder abuse and thinking, "My God, if this could happen to somebody like Sumner Redstone who should have all the guardrails around him, then it can happen to anybody."

It might sound a little bit corny, but this book really hammered home that what matters is who you have around you in your life to take care of you, to love you, to look out for you. That if there was ever a story that embody that money can't buy you happiness or love, this is it.

James B. Stewart: I can just add another challenge was verifying so much of the stuff and we had a wide range of sources here from extremely eminent lawyers and business people too, one of our main sources is an ex-con man who served time in prison and needless to say, he actually impersonated the grandson of William Randolph Hearst. Right off the channel of Mr. Ripley. Now, obviously, you have a source like that, he was completely on the record. You have to be really careful with that information and verify it in countless different ways, which we were able to do. Thanks to many other sources.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and The Redstone Family Legacy. It is by James Stewart and Rachel Abrams. Tonight, you can hear more about it at Rizzoli Bookstore at 6:00 PM. They'll be in conversation with Ben Smith. Thank you for giving us time today.

James B. Stewart: Thank you for having us.

Rachel Abrams: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: This is all of it.

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