Title: Shari Redstone's Road to Power at Paramount Global

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. After top CBS producer Bill Owens resigned, correspondent Scott Pelley delivered a carefully worded message on 60 Minutes.

Scott Pelley: Stories we pursued for 57 years are often controversial. Lately, the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration. Bill made sure they were accurate and fair. He was tough that way, but our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.

Reporter: President Donald Trump's $20 billion lawsuit against CBS and Paramount Global is still standing.

Jake Tapper: Now, Shari Redstone is the majority owner of Paramount.

Brooke Gladstone: Jake Tapper on CNN.

Jake Tapper: She stands to make a fortune if this multi-billion-dollar deal, this merger, goes through, and it seems as if Shari Redstone is likely to bend the knee to Trump and settle this allegedly frivolous lawsuit.

Brooke Gladstone: We thought it was as good a time as any to examine how Shari Redstone came to power in the first place. Back in 2023, I asked Rachel Abrams, co-author of Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, to lay it all out. Shari took over for her dad, Sumner, who died in 2020 at the age of 97.

Rachel Abrams: He would joke that he did not need to make plans for succession because he was going to live forever.

Brooke Gladstone: Was it a joke?

Rachel Abrams: I was about to say. I think a lot of people thought he was only half joking.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about his kids. His son eventually got fed up, sold his shares of the company, moved to a ranch in Colorado, never spoke to the family again, didn't attend the father's funeral. His daughter, Shari Redstone, he was even worse to her.

Rachel Abrams: Yes. He would publicly berate his daughter. He would call her unfathomable things in emails that are seen by other people. He was so temperamental that there were points where he would publicly say that he wanted Shari Redstone to take over, and then later on, he would publicly excoriate her. At the end of the day, no matter how badly he treated her, it was still her father, and up until the day he died, she hoped that he loved her.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about how Shari actually saved him, in a way. He was a real womanizer. He would pursue multiple women at the same time. Some of the women he had relationships with ended up working for his businesses, but he paid a hefty price for that, in your telling of events.

Rachel Abrams: One of the things that Sumner did that was wildly inappropriate for somebody in his position was he used his vast wealth and resources to basically take over the lives of women he was trying to pursue. There was a flight attendant on the corporate jets that he basically got fired, but then dangled job prospects in front of so that she would have dinner with him and accompany him to events.

These are really objectionable, horrific ways to treat women, and as somebody writing about our book put it, two of his perhaps most observant students basically used his own tactics against him in a way, because toward the end of his life, when he was losing the ability to advocate for himself, his speech was deteriorating, his cognitive function was deteriorating, these two women, who at times were romantic partners or companions, maybe caregivers, Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland, they basically, one after the other, move into his mansion and kind of take over his life.

They isolate him from his family. They tell him his family doesn't love him, and they siphon away millions of dollars from him. In one afternoon, each one of them was wired $45 million in a single afternoon, and these two women got very close to having Sumner add them to the trust controlling his empire. They came really close to gaining access to this multi-billion-dollar media fortune.

One thing that was so shocking to me and Jim Stewart, my co-author, was for all of Sumner Redstone's money and power and resources, you would think that there would be guardrails around him to keep out people like these women, and yet there weren't, in large part, because Sumner had excommunicated everybody that really cared about him from his circles.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about Sydney Holland. Apparently, Bravo's Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti Stanger, hooked him up with Sydney Holland, and less than a year later, he proposed to her with an enormous diamond. She moves in and takes on all the roles you mentioned, but apparently, it is his daughter who's finally able to loosen the grip of both Hertzer and Holland. How did she do that?

Rachel Abrams: Stanger, as you mentioned, set up Sumner with Sydney Holland, and one thing that Patti Stanger told Sydney Holland was, "Sumner Redstone is old-school. He is going to go out and do whatever he wants, but if you are to be involved with him, you cannot step out on this man. He can never find out that you have cheated on him or seen anybody else."

Sydney Holland, unbeknownst to Sumner Redstone, was having an affair with a man named George Pilgrim in Sedona, Arizona, and she would basically take the private jet to Sedona from Los Angeles to spend romantic afternoons and evenings with George, and then she'd fly home, back to the Beverly Park mansion where Sumner lived before he had gone to sleep, so he would be none the wiser, and Sydney would just shower.

George Pilgrim, who was at one point an actor, had a recurring role on a famous soap opera. He had been in a couple of cult hit movies. He had also been on my personal favorite credit, the History Channel's Ancient Aliens. Sedona, Arizona, is known for its New Age oddities and attractions, and George is really, really into aliens, so he embarks on this whirlwind romance with Sydney Holland, who, by the way, says, "I'm involved with Sumner Redstone, and I can buy your book."

He was shopping a book at the time. "I can make it into a movie deal. I can make whatever, any of your dreams, I can make it happen." All of this under Sumner's nose, and in the midst of all of this, there are so many questions about Sumner's cognitive abilities and who's really controlling him, and if he's in full control of himself, and what does this mean for the company? There's a lot of speculation, media circles.

Bill Cohan, who was a reporter at Vanity Fair, writes this story where he gets interviews with both Manuela and Sydney, and they're wearing ball gowns and professing their love for Sumner, and it's a fantastic feature, and Sydney Holland says in this article, is quoted as basically talking about how much she loves Sumner and how beautiful his hair is. All the way in Sedona, Arizona, this article comes out, and George Pilgrim, who thinks Sydney Holland is a woman he's going to marry and he's been having this affair with, he sees this, he's infuriated, and he's embarrassed.

He calls up Bill Cohan, the Vanity Fair reporter, and he tells Bill how he and Sydney have actually been carrying on all this time. Bill writes another article, and Sumner Redstone sees this, and much as Patti Stanger, the Millionaire Matchmaker, had warned Sydney Holland, he goes ballistic. He does not accept any kind of infidelity. Sumner kicks out Sydney Holland. Not long after that, Manuela Herzer gets kicked out of the mansion.

Whatever alliance that the two of those women had formed to sort of work in tandem to stay in that mansion had disintegrated once Sumner got mad at one of them, and after these two women leave his life, that is when Shari Redstone, his daughter, is able to come back in and start repairing the relationship with her father, get back in his good graces, spends more time with him, and ultimately cements her role as the successor to his media empire, which was very close to being taken over, or at least partially taken over by these women.

Brooke Gladstone: Going back to the business behind all the drama, you didn't expect to tell the story of the Redstone family when you started your research, right? What was the story you were going to tell?

Rachel Abrams: At the height of the MeToo Movement, The New Yorker published a couple of stories about Les Moonves, the former head of CBS, in which a total of 12 women accuse him of sexual misconduct as far back as, I think, the late '80s. September 2018, CBS announces that Moonves is out. He's gone, and Jim got a tip that the real reason Moonves left CBS had nothing to do with the stories in The New Yorker, even though it appeared that way.

Because every day, if you'll recall, in the fall of 2018, there was a news story about a new man being ousted for sexual misconduct accusations, but Jim had gotten a tip that it was actually because of Moonves's attempts to silence a woman he feared would go public with totally new accusations. He was basically being blackmailed to keep this woman quiet by offering her film roles and doing other things.

When CBS investigators questioned him about this, he did a lot to mislead investigators, and it was that vulnerability to blackmail, that poor judgment, that misleading, that ultimately caused CBS to determine he was too much of a liability and needed to go. Jim had gotten a tip about this, and separately, I had heard from a source who was in this incredible position to know what the investigators had uncovered about Moonves's behavior, and Jim and I end up pairing up and looking into this, and we ended up doing a few different stories for The New York Times.

I think we wanted to elaborate on the story about what caused Les Moonves to be ousted from CBS and how that changed the trajectory of this massive media empire, and I think that we always understood that part of that story was going to be understanding how much this mattered to Shari Redstone, and what I mean by that is right before Moonves gets ousted from CBS, he launches what amounts to a coup against Shari Redstone and the Redstone family because he does not appreciate that she is, in his mind, meddling in his business.

Shari Redstone, right around 2018, is talking to Moonves about how she wants to merge Viacom and CBS, and at that time, CBS was doing very well, and Viacom was really struggling, as many legacy media businesses have been, with changes in the media landscape, how people do or do not go to movies, streaming, all of that. Shari thought that the two companies should be united. Media companies need scale.

Moonves did not want to hear that, and he resented her from inserting herself in his view, and he and his loyalists on the Board of Directors of CBS decide to do this unprecedented move where they basically launch a lawsuit that would have stripped the Redstone family of control of the Redstone family business. Jim and I wanted our readers to understand what that would have felt like for Sherrie Redstone, which was a gut punch.

It was a gut punch for her to not just because it was the family business and not just because she had considered Les Moonves to be a friend of hers, but because she had just finished fighting to get these two women, Manuela Herzer and Sydney Holland, out of her father's life, and then to turn around and face this lawsuit that would strip her of control or threaten her place once again after just winning this very painful battle, we wanted our readers to understand what the stakes were, what the emotional stakes were, and where this whole thing would have fallen within the timeline of Shari Redstone's relationship with her father and her family in the business.

Brooke Gladstone: What does the story of this one media mogul tell us about the structural issues in the media industry today? You've said that this should be taught in business schools.

Rachel Abrams: One of the big lessons here is about corporate governance, or the lack thereof, that all of these people who were supposed to be looking out for the best interests of shareholders, absolutely failed to do so. What I mean by that is when the Board of Directors of CBS learned about rumors that their CEO, Les Moonves, could be or had been accused of sexual misconduct, they did basically nothing.

What they did was they hired an outside lawyer to essentially ask Moonves, "Hey, is there anything we should be worried about?" and took him at his word when he basically said no, and Sherrie Redstone was furious at the time, as is detailed in our book. She writes a letter to the Board of Directors, basically saying, "I can't believe that you would call this an investigation. This is not an investigation."

The Board of Directors, their response to some of these rumors or accusations of misconduct is, at one point, one of them says, "I don't care if 100 women or 50 women come forward with more accusations about Moonves. He's our guy," and that's so preposterous. Moonves is not anybody's guy on the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors represent the shareholders in CBS.

This book really shows you these corporate boards, which are often made up of people who have to attend a handful of meetings a year, not really do too much, they get to take a nice paycheck home when there is an actual crisis and problem to be dealt with. This is a window into an incredible case where they just completely failed to step up to the plate and react appropriately. I think that it really tells you something about corporate governance and corporate America that goes beyond the media industry.

Brooke Gladstone: Rachel Abrams is the co-author of Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy. Rachel, thank you very much.

Rachel Abrams: Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. If you're still hungry for more succession drama, our upcoming show gives a glimpse of the inner workings of the Murdochs. Tune in on Friday evening to hear it. Bye.

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