Redstone photographed at the Hollywood Reporter’s Annual Nominees Night event on February 10, 2014.
By Michael Tran/FilmMagic.
During his decades atop National Amusements, the holding company that controls some 80 percent of the voting rights of both CBS and Viacom, Sumner Redstone oversaw production of an extraordinary, career-defining collection of films, from There Will Be Blood and An Inconvenient Truth to Titanic and Mission: Impossible. But in the twilight of his long life, Redstone’s legacy rests increasingly on a far shorter, low-budget iPhone video. Last January, Arnold Kopelson, the Hollywood producer and then CBS board member, ventured to Redstone’s Beverly Hills estate to see his old friend and to commemorate what could be their final visit. He took out his iPhone and filmed a short video of Sumner. Shortly afterwards, Kopelson expressed disbelief about the state of his once mighty pal, who is now 95 years old. Redstone could not walk or move without assistance. He received nourishment through a feeding tube. He could not talk. “I’m talking as maybe the closest outsider in his life, and I wish it were otherwise,” Kopleson told me before he passed away suddenly in October. “There is no way this man knows what’s going on. He does not respond. He looks at me and sometimes I like to think that there’s a glint in his eye.”
Kopelson’s iPhone video engendered much controversy. Shari Redstone, Sumner’s once-estranged daughter, was concurrently pursuing a merger of Viacom and CBS, the two companies that her father had intentionally separated more than a decade before. At the time, Shari was incensed that Kopelson had taken the video. Through her attorney, Robert Klieger, also a CBS board member, she suggested that Kopelson had somehow committed an illegal act in the process of making the video. Soon thereafter, Kopelson was gone from the CBS board. Meanwhile, the ongoing beef between Shari Redstone and Les Moonves, then the C.E.O. of CBS, had gone nuclear. In April, the CBS board voted to issue a sufficient number of stock dividends that would massively dilute the Redstones’ control of the company; that vote led to a protracted legal battle in the Delaware Court of Chancery. Kopelson’s video, which by then had taken on a mythic lore among observers of this dystopian family drama, became a piece of evidence in the litigation.
CBS wanted the judge in the Delaware case to review Kopleson’s video and then conclude that it proved that Sumner was not capable of making the business and legal decisions that Shari claimed he did throughout 2016 and that put her in charge of the family business. But the Redstones and CBS settled the Delaware litigation in September as part of the comprehensive agreement regarding Moonves’s departure from the company amid allegations of sexual harassment. The legal settlement rendered the question of Sumner’s mental competency moot, at least in that proceeding. A month later, Kopelson passed away. (Kopleson always maintained that everyone knew he was taking the video. Klieger, for his part, has asked that I include the following statement in all of my coverage of the Redstone drama, which I will condense for these purposes: “As usual, Mr. Cohan’s ‘reporting’ is bursting with willful inaccuracies that could not withstand even the most basic fact-checking.”)
But the topic of Sumner’s competency is still being adjudicated in a state court in California where the Redstones are continuing a legal battle against Manuela Herzer, a longtime friend and girlfriend of Sumner’s. (The two are currently estranged.) The Redstones have claimed that Herzer committed “elder abuse” against Sumner before Shari Redstone had Herzer removed from Sumner’s house in October 2015. The Redstones want back the $75 million or so that Sumner gave to Herzer over the years in the forms of gifts, cash, and California real estate. Herzer has argued, in return, that Sumner gave her the gifts willingly and that Shari Redstone manipulated her father into kicking her out of the house and into cutting her out of his will. Herzer has argued that, because of his deteriorating health, Sumner had no idea what Shari was doing. Herzer and her attorneys asked the judge in the case to review Kopelson’s video and to decide whether it shows how incompetent Sumner has become. The judge, who has seen the video, has not yet ruled on the matter.
It’s unclear if Kopelson’s video will ever be seen by Redstone’s friends or by the journalists covering the Redstone saga. (My requests to see it have been routinely denied.) Recently, however, documentation of the elder Redstone’s condition has become available. According to a newly filed “declaration” in the California lawsuits, a Los Angeles police detective, Jason Perez, visited Sumner last month, perhaps one of the few outsiders to see him since Kopelson’s visit in January. Perez, who has been on the L.A. police force since 1998, is part of a team that investigates elder-abuse allegations. He wrote in his declaration that on September 27 he received a copy of a report about Sumner that had been filed with the Los Angeles County Adult Protective Services. Perez tried to visit with Sumner at his mansion that day but said he was turned away at the gate and denied entry.
On October 9, Perez returned to Redstone’s mansion, and this time was allowed in. Klieger was also present for Perez’s visit. Perez reported that Sumner “was in his living room sitting up right in a chair with pillows between his back and the back of the chair.” He wrote that there was “no evidence of physical neglect or abuse.” But, he continued, “Mr. Redstone obviously was incapable of any meaningful communication or ability to conduct any sort of decision-making regarding directing his care and, in my opinion, incapable of conducting any legal or financial transactions whatsoever. He was not responsive to my questions and incapable of being interviewed for even basic information. It was obvious to me in my lay opinion that absent 24 hour care, he was incapable of taking care of himself and mentally non-responsive. It would be neglect if he was left unsupervised. The person I saw could not have possibly reviewed complicated legal documents let alone direct attorneys or participate in legal proceedings.”
This characterization, if true, lends support to Herzer’s legal argument about Sumner’s cognitive abilities, or lack thereof. In a filing accompanying Perez’s declaration, her attorneys described Perez’s observations as “highly material testimony.” Perez concluded that Sumner was “on the lowest end of responsiveness” of the many elderly people he had interviewed in his career and that he “was in fact non-responsive to the most basic of questions.” Since Perez concluded that there was no “physical” elder abuse or neglect of Redstone that he could detect, he turned the matter of whether there was any “financial” abuse of Redstone to two of his colleagues in the Los Angeles police department. Their investigation has been underway for about a month, and is continuing. (Sara Evans, the National Amusements spokesperson at Finsbury, declined to comment about the Perez declaration.)
As much as Shari Redstone would like the world to think she has legitimate control of her father’s media empire at CBS and Viacom and that she is the new doyenne of Hollywood, that question is still being adjudicated, and rightly so. If the judge in the California case were to rule—after thinking about the Kopleson video and the Perez declaration, among other evidence including Sumner’s flat-line signature on various legal documents—that Sumner has been and remains incompetent and could not have signed off on the crucial 2016 documents that gave effective control of National Amusements to Shari, then the curtain of calm that has descended around CBS and Viacom since Moonves’s departure could be ripped away, once again throwing the two companies into the same kind of disarray that they have just been trying desperately to overcome.
More Great Stories from Vanity Fair
— After the midterms, Democrats are finally preparing for war
— Bill Browder—Putin’s public enemy No. 1—on his Russia investigation and running for his life
— Of course: evidence emerges that Trump was less than truthful about all that hush money
— The thing that killed Vine is what made it great
— Silicon Valley is watching: will Nancy Pelosi take on Facebook?
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.
Credit:Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
No comments:
Post a Comment