EPISODE 6

“You Know How He Is about Women”

By March of 2014, Holland and Herzer were planning their most brazen gambit by far—a plan to get their hands on the over $200 million in Viacom and CBS stock and stock options Sumner had earned while serving as chairman of the companies. Unlike the billions in stock held by National Amusements and locked up in the irrevocable trust, these securities were in an unrestricted account. The women wanted Sumner to sell the assets—and give the proceeds to them immediately, rather than having to wait until he died.

Holland and Herzer hired a prominent trusts and estates lawyer—Richard B. Covey at Carter Ledyard & Milburn in New York—to advise them on how to go about it. On March 21, in anticipation of meeting with him, Holland sent Herzer an email with “a list of things I think we should cover.” On the list were “changing the trust to add both our names to it”; “changing the Sumner Redstone Foundation so we can run it now and after Sumner’s demise”; and “get the monies now rather than waiting until Sumner dies.”

Getting Sumner to go along with the plan required a sustained campaign, much of it overheard by Giovanni Paz and other staff at the Redstone mansion. His nurses, ordered out of the fish room and told to wait in the kitchen in one instance, reported hearing Holland and Herzer cajoling him for money. They told him that Shari hated him and only cared about money and would likely sue to contest any bequests to them. She might litigate even sooner. They might get nothing. The only way to ensure they got the money was to give it to them now.

Sumner resisted.

They kept at it, at one point saying they “were the only ones who loved and would protect him. If he loved them back he would cash out. If he did not, he would die alone.”

Another obstacle was David Andelman, the Boston estate planning lawyer who had represented Sumner for over thirty years. He was a trustee of the trust controlling National Amusements and on the boards of National Amusements, Viacom, and CBS. Andelman watched closely over Sumner’s assets, and Sumner always consulted him about tax consequences. Like many billionaires, Sumner was obsessed with minimizing his tax bill.

To Holland’s frustration, Andelman kept raising tax objections to any sale of stock and options. (As well he might have, since the sale would trigger capital gains taxes and gift tax on any transfer to Holland and Herzer.) “David keeps using that gift tax excuse,” Holland complained in the March 21 email to Herzer.

A few weeks later, in April, Sumner hired a new tax and estate planning lawyer: Leah Bishop of the Los Angeles firm Loeb & Loeb, a lawyer who was later suspected to have been recommended by Holland and Herzer. Andelman, who found out only when Bishop asked for copies of the National Amusements trust documents, worried that Sumner might be trying to change the terms to marginalize Shari and her children.

With Andelman sidelined, Sumner gave in. On May 16 Holland instructed Paz, whose duties included answering the phones, to block all calls to Sumner, even those from his doctor. That day he sold $236 million in stock and stock options, according to regulatory filings he was required to record. The proceeds went into his checking account at City National Bank in Los Angeles.

The next day Holland had the stock ticker removed from Sumner’s bedroom so he couldn’t follow his share prices. His nurse, Jagiello, observed that Sumner “fell into a depression almost immediately.”

Two days later, Andelman called Elvira Bartoli, Sumner’s account manager at City National Bank, to check on Sumner’s balance. It was $90 million less than he expected. He was even more surprised when Bartoli told him she wasn’t allowed to disclose where the money had gone, something that had never happened in his many years of working with Sumner and the bank. Sumner had always discussed such large financial transactions in advance with Andelman, in part to go over the tax consequences. Andelman usually handled the mechanics of any transfers.

Andelman pressed for an explanation, and finally Bartoli capitulated: the $90 million had passed by wire transfer to Holland and Herzer, $45 million to each, on the same day Sumner sold his stock and options.

Andelman was alarmed. The sale had generated about $100 million in after-tax proceeds. Gift and other taxes would now come to more than $90 million. Holland and Herzer had virtually drained Sumner’s account. (He would eventually have to borrow $100 million from National Amusements to pay the taxes.)

Andelman confronted Sumner the same day and said he was concerned he was being “pressured” by the two women. Sumner became “visibly angry” at the suggestion, going so far as to call Andelman an “asshole.” He “insisted the decision to transfer those funds had been his alone,” Andelman recalled.

Andelman told George Abrams much the same thing when Sumner’s longtime lawyer expressed his dismay. Abrams tried to raise the issue directly with Sumner, but he flatly refused to discuss it, saying his personal life was none of Abrams’s business (though the lawyer had advised him on both his divorces).

Sumner wondered aloud how he could give the two women even more, asking, “If I sell my unvested options sometime in the future, can I receive any money from them?” and “Will there ever be a time when I can withdraw money from National?”

Moonves found out about the two $45 million transfers when the CBS general counsel told him Sumner was struggling to find ways to pay the gift tax. Moonves didn’t want to touch the issue; he thought the situation was a mess and wanted to stay as far from it as possible.

Sumner didn’t act in isolation. Besides his lawyers Bishop and Andelman, other trustees, including Dauman, were aware of the changes to the trust and the massive gifts. “Sometimes I would be surprised by the amounts involved,” Dauman acknowledged. “So I would discuss with David. And he says ‘this is what he wants to do.’ ” Andelman added, “You know how he is about women and, you know, these women take good care of him,” and “obviously he didn’t have a good relationship with his daughter.”

In the midst of this, Bishop asked Sumner to meet with Dr. James E. Spar, a noted geriatric specialist and professor of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, on May 21. Prior to the meeting Holland and Herzer allegedly spent “hours” with Sumner “telling him exactly what he was supposed to say.”

The effort worked. Dr. Spar reported that Sumner “demonstrated impressive knowledge of his estate, knew the people named in his estate plan and how they are related to him, and revealed no hint of delusional thinking in the discussion of his estate plan.” In his opinion, “the testamentary decisions [Sumner] discussed in this evaluation struck me as reflecting his own authentic wishes, and not the influence of Manuela, Sydney, or anyone else.”

Dr. Spar’s report would now help insulate Holland and Herzer from any future claims they had exerted undue influence on Sumner. With such large sums involved, that was more than just a possibility. These latest developments understandably caused renewed concern on the part of Shari and her children.

When she first heard about the giant transfers, Shari was dumbfounded. When she’d raised the issue of selling some of his CBS shares after the Midway incident, Sumner had said he’d never sell them under any circumstances. Now he had sold them all. And Sumner hated paying taxes. Yet he’d just gone and needlessly triggered enormous gift and capital gains taxes.

Shari believed that either was inconceivable, unless Sumner had succumbed to the undue influence of Holland and Herzer, no matter what he told his lawyers and Spar.

“There needs to be a plan where they don’t control access to my father,” Shari wrote in an email to Andelman that month. And on May 26, 2014, the day before Sumner’s ninety-first birthday, when Shari and her three children would be in Los Angeles for his party, they agreed to meet at the Peninsula Hotel to discuss the situation. Shari vowed to “go after them regardless of the strength of the case.”

The stage was now set for an exceedingly awkward celebration of Sumner’s ninety-first birthday on May 27. Given his declining health and difficulty with both speech and eating, Holland and Herzer had planned a much smaller and low-key affair in a private room at Nobu, the Malibu outpost of celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa. No gossip columnists or photographers were tipped off, and the guest list was private.

When Shari and her children arrived, Brent’s daughter Keryn Redstone was occupying the seat next to her grandfather. According to witnesses, a heated argument broke out between Shari and Keryn over the seating arrangement. Keryn maintained in a sworn declaration that her grandfather had recently injured his hand and asked her to sit next to him to help him eat. But then “Shari demanded that I change seats with her, so she could sit next to Grumpy. I declined because Grumpy specifically asked me to be next to him to help him eat. Shari erupted and threatened to kill me.” (Shari has denied that any such exchange took place.)

That summer Shari also hired lawyers, who retained an ex–FBI agent, Jim Elroy, to investigate Holland and Herzer, a prospect which so unsettled Sumner (not to mention Holland and Herzer) that he hired four sets of legal counsel to counter the effort. “It’s upsetting that this is happening,” wrote Leah Bishop, Redstone’s personal estate lawyer at Loeb & Loeb, in a November 2014 email to Holland and Herzer, “but Sumner cannot stop Shari from doing this.”

Bishop also reached out on their behalf to the famed trial lawyer David Boies, who earlier in his career had represented Sumner. Now she asked him if he’d represent Holland and Herzer in an anticipated lawsuit by Shari. Bishop insisted that Sumner wanted to make the gifts and didn’t want any interference from his daughter or other family members. Boies thought it odd that Bishop, Sumner’s lawyer, was the one arranging a lawyer for the two women. He said he’d need to speak to Sumner directly to confirm that these were indeed his wishes. Bishop said that wouldn’t be possible because Sumner’s speech was unintelligible.

Boies nonetheless agreed to interview Holland and Herzer in New York, before deciding he wanted no part of it. No representation ensued.

The intrafamily feud did nothing to deter Sumner from continuing to shift assets away from his daughter and grandchildren to Holland and Herzer, whom he seemed to consider his real family. Bishop had him meet again with Dr. Spar. Sumner was “quite concerned that the documents made sure that Manuela and Sydney would inherit the house and its contents,” Dr. Spar reported. He quoted the following exchange:

“In your relationship with Manuela and Sydney, who’s in charge?” Spar asked.

“I am,” Sumner said.

“Some might say they have you wrapped around their finger and can manipulate you.”

“That could never happen.”

“What if they threatened to leave you if you did not give them something they want?”

“They wouldn’t do that.”

“But what if they did?”

The question angered Sumner, according to Spar. “I would tell them to go fuck themselves!” Sumner replied.

Once Bishop was out of the room, Sumner “said to me something like, ‘Make sure Manuela and Sydney get everything,’ ” Spar added in his report.

Meanwhile, Shari’s pleas to her father for financial assistance went unheeded. In a June 2014 email to her son Tyler, she lamented, “My father delivered a message to me thru his attorney that he understands my children are struggling and he doesn’t give a shit and he doesn’t care that everyone in Sidney and Manuela’s family including their parents and children are treated better and have an easier lifestyle than my children.”

And to all of her children she wrote, “If my father wants me to drop dead he doesn’t need to do anything else. He has made how he feels about me perfectly clear.”