july 8–21, 2019 | new york 33relationship with her father took a turn in
2013, around the time Argentine-born
Manuela Herzer, a Sumner ex he’d stayed
friends with, joined Holland in the man-
sion. Sumner was continuing to publicly
undermine Shari’s position as next in line.
“I will not discuss succession,” he told the
Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “You know
why? I’m not going to die.” He was 91.
Meanwhile, according to accusations later
made in a lawsuit, Holland and Herzer,
known in Shari’s circles as “the women,”
began methodically draining Sumner’s
accounts, having bags of hundred-dollar
bills regularly delivered to the mansion. His
will was changed to grant them $45 million
each; Sumner was stuck with the taxes.
Shari finally snapped. “[I] am going to go
after [the women] regardless of the
strength of the case,” she wrote her children
in emails later unearthed in discovery. Most
of her rage was reserved for her father, as
Sumner and some of his longtime execu-
Sumner’s billions, in Viacom and CBS hold-
ings, were in a trust for his grandchildren.
That summer and early fall, aspiration
pneumonia left the 91-year-old unable to
eat and barely able to speak. During one of
his hospitalizations, according to Shari’s
camp, a nurse took her aside to express con-
cerns about how the women were treating
Sumner. Shari later asked the nurse to keep
her son Tyler updated. The nurses, accord-
ing to eventual litigation, told her Sumner
was often in tears, told by the women that
his children and grandchildren hated him,
and that they gave him Ativan when they
wanted him to sign documents. Worst of
all, they had allegedly taken away the stock
ticker that was one of his few sources of joy.
In January 2015, Shari received a letter,
purportedly from her father, asking that she
sign a release promising not to sue the
women after Sumner’s death. If she did sue,
the letter said, she would be disinvited from
his funeral and Sumner’s family plots would
go to Holland and Herzer. “He thinks the
threat of not being allowed to go to his
funeral will motivate me,” Shari wrote. In
another email, she wrote Tyler, “And why
would I ever give SMR his dying wish of
peace when he never gave me any peace
during my whole life?” She decided to go on
the offensive, hiring a private investigator.
In the summer of 2015, Sumner kicked
out Holland, who had confessed to having
an affair, according to legal filings made by
Shari’s camp. By October, Herzer was out,
too. That’s when she filed a suit claiming
Sumner had recently become incapacitated
and seeking to be restored to her position as
his health-care agent and in his will. When
that failed, Herzer brought a rico suit
against Shari, who Herzer claimed “wanted
more” than what Sumner chose to give her:
“Knowing that her father’s remaining life
was limited, she instead methodically
hatched a criminal scheme to take over her
father’s life and to then use that dominion to
take over CBS and Viacom.” In October
2016, Sumner filed an elder-abuse lawsuit
against Herzer and Holland. The women
claimed his daughter was behind it.
Holland and Herzer’s response to the law-
suit laid bare just how much Sumner had
mingled his sexual appetites with his com-
panies. Holland claimed Sumner regularly
made massive payouts to women who pro-
vided him with “sexual favors,” including the
flight attendant on CBS’s corporate jet ($18
million), the flight attendant’s sister ($6 mil-
lion), “an aspiring reality-show producer”
($21 million), and a friend of Brandon’s girl-
friend ($6 million and a job at Showtime).
(Robert Klieger, a lawyer for Shari and
Sumner, called Holland’s filing “a work of
fiction punctuated by not-so-subtle threats
of extortion and antives, including Dauman, were trying to buy
Shari out of the company. “If my father
wants me to drop dead, he doesn’t need to
do anything else,” she wrote to her children
in June 2014. “He has made how he feels
about me perfectly clear.” She could have
walked away with the cash, but taking her
father’s place meant more to her, and she
perceived any disruption to the plan as an
existential threat.
She emailed her son around that time,
“My father deliver 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 han my children.” Needless
to say, her children—Brandon is an inves-
tor, as is Tyler, who is also a lawyer, and
Kim, who trained as an attorney, is a stay-
at-home mother of three—would be fine;
according to court filings, the majority ofThe Family Business: Part II
screens in all950 movie(Continued on page 74)CBSShari Redstone is the controlling shareholder of a sprawling media conglomerate.