30 new york | july 8–21, 2019
She froze. Her father, Sumner Redstone,
had amassed an empire of media compa-
nies like CBS, which encompassed Show-
time and Simon & Schuster, and Viacom,
whose cable channels (MTV, Nickelodeon,
VH1) and movie studio, Paramount, had
seen better days, its stock price plummeting
as mismanagement and cord- cutting ate
into profits. For months, she had been
arguing that combining the companies
would keep them competitive; CBS board
members, including Gifford and CEO Les
Moonves, riding high on having the No. 1
broadcast network, had resisted.
Making a scene, Redstone worried, could
jeopardize her already fragile relationship
with CBS’s board, which was loyal to
Moonves and had watched her replace Via-
com’s chief executive and several board
members. “There was a concern that no
matter how gingerly she approached the
issue, the CBS side would interpret it as
part of a power play,” said someone who
gave her advice about it at the time.
Over the years, as her father’s on-again,
off-again heir apparent, Redstone had made
not a few enemies in the family businesses.
She had been described by journalists chan-
neling anonymous executives as “pushy and
overly keen for power,” someone who “rubs
everyone the wrong way” and “developed
something of a reputation for not mastering
the details.” Her father went from anointing
her his successor in 2002 to faxing a reporter
to say she’d made no contribution. Finally,
Sumner, 93, ailing, and absent from the
public eye, was officially supporting her
authority, but the road to reconciliation had
been rocky. According to the journalist
Keach Hagey, who wrote a biography of the
family, Sumner used to call his daughter a
“cunt” in front of company executives.
Redstone kept quiet on the 50-yard line,
but in the months that followed, she took a
series of steps to quietly push Gifford out. In
the summer of 2017, she told Moonves, with
whom she’d long been friends, that Gifford
had made her uncomfortable, and when
merger talks restarted, she believed
Moonves would see to it that Gifford
wouldn’t make it to the board of a combined
movement has hardly had a richer target
than CBS, with its board of mostly old white
men who protected Moonves and shrugged
off the company’s treatment of women. Gif-
ford, through his alleged behavior at the
Super Bowl, had put Redstone in the posi-
tion of a woman wondering whether she
should report a male colleague for making
her uncomfortable. (He would later deny
her account, saying he had given her “a
quick hug, just like I would my own family.”)
The new board of CBS is, like Viacom’s,
majority female for the first time—and
increasingly stacked with her allies. Women
are being put in charge and on the air at
CBS. And the face of the family controlling
these companies was once the patriarch
whose embarrasing sexual exploits were
aired in court; now it’s his daughter.
If there is such a thing as a feminist
mogul—and there are reasons to think
there isn’t—she probably doesn’t emerge in
the form of an heiress who privately referred
to her father’s girlfriends as his “little sluts.”
And yet ... why not Redstone? She inherited
it, but so did the Murdoch brothers, so did
Brian Roberts at Comcast, so did the New-
houses and the Sulzbergers and the Hearsts.
“There are certain presumptions about sons
who take over jobs from their dads,” she said
at an event for The Information in New
York last month. (She declined to speak for
this story.) All the other media companies
have lately gotten bigger, validating her
logic for the merger; CBS hasn’t collapsed
without Moonves; Viacom is no longer in
free fall. And Redstone has yet to be accused
of sexually assaulting anyone, which is say-
ing a lot in this business.
“She’s a bright young woman, a lot
brighter than people give her credit for,”
says former Time Warner CEO Dick Par-
sons, who, until he stepped down from the
board for health reasons, served as her
Sherpa for the CBS transition. (Parsons, at
71, is six years older than Redstone.) “Make
no mistake about it, Shari is her father’s
daughter.” There are some differences, he
says, chuckling. “Shari is much more con-
cerned with feelings, hers and those of oth-
ers. Sumner didn’t care about other people’s
feelings as far as I could tell,” he continues.
“Sumner was very bright, very focused—
Sumner could even be ruthless. And Shari
has some of those qualities.”
The onetime stay-at-home mother of
three is now around the same age her father
was when he leveraged his father’s Massa-
chusetts nightclub turned movie-theater
business into a global TV-and-movie con-
glomerate. The media industry Sumner
Redstone disrupted a generation ago has
changed almost beyond recognition, its
future as precarious as it has ever been. If
the CBS-and-Viacom merger goes through,in february 2017, Shari Redstone, the 62-year-old bil-
lionaire heiress and controlling shareholder of CBS and
Viacom, with a honking Boston accent and a fondness for
the bouffant blowout, was at the 50-yard line at Houston’s
NRG Stadium to watch her beloved Patriots play in the
Super Bowl. That was when CBS board member Charles
Gifford, who towered over the five-foot-two Redstone, his
own board’s vice-chair, grabbed her by the face to command
her attention and said, “We need to talk, young lady.”company. According to Redstone, Gifford
called her afterward and told her that was
just how he talked to his daughters.
“I’m not your daughter,” she replied.
“I’m the vice-chairman of the board you
sit on.”
As merger talks continued in the spring
of 2018, she asked Moonves for another
assurance that Gifford wouldn’t last. Days
later, Gifford, Moonves, and a handful of
other board members—including Martha
Minow, a former Harvard Law dean whom
Redstone had recruited and whom she had
recently asked to look into rumors about
Moonves’s conduct with women—went to
court in a daring bid to strip her of her con-
trol of the company, accusing her of
“threaten[ing] to replace directors who do
not do her bidding, and to force a merger
not in the best interest of CBS stockhold-
ers ... in an effort to bail out Viacom.”
In retrospect, it took some chutzpah for
Moonves to take Redstone to court, when as
reporting would later show, he was busily
covering up the sexual-assault allegations
against him. Less than six months later, he
was gone. So were Gifford and most of the
other elder men on the board who’d backed
Moonves. Among the highest echelon of
media moguls, the ones who flaunt resort-
casual at Allen & Co.’s investment confer-
ence in Sun Valley, Idaho, or breakfast at
the Regency (though Redstone prefers the
Pierre), and who supply the raw material
for the HBO drama Succession, her overall
position has only strengthened since. A
judge affirmed in January that her father
had the capacity to designate Redstone as
his health agent, definitively blocking
claims to his billions by various younger
women. CBS and Viacom are once again
talking about merging, though Redstone
cannot be officially involved until negotia-
tions are further along. If the merger goes
through, as it well may this summer, she
will have cemented her control of a $30
billion media kingdom.
And Moonves’s stunning downfall has
given Redstone, for all her wealth, some-
thing she’s never had before: a narrative
that justifies her own rise. The #MeToo