There was a time, not long ago, that America’s media and entertainment businesses were largely run as personal fiefdoms of their owners, executives and top stars. Then came the #MeToo movement and the sexual harassment scandals of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and a host of others.
Now a new account of the career of media mogul Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020 at the age of 97, reveals just how awful, shocking and abusive that culture was at one of America’s biggest media empires.
The book, by New York Times journalists James Stewart and Rachel Abrams, paints a fresh picture of a corporate culture that believed that so long as the stock went up, and complex C-suite power games were in play, there was no compelling reason to place checks on the appetites of those whose need for control spanned institutional and sexual power.
At the peak of his power, Redstone controlled Viacom, Paramount Pictures, movie-theater chain National Amusements, CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and the publisher Simon & Schuster. In the age before Netflix and HBO, these household names threw off cash and prestige on an industrial-scale.
But as Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy details, there was “an astonishing saga of sex, lies, and betrayal” taking place behind the scenes.
Many incidents, but not all, involved Redstone himself. The son of a Boston linoleum salesman, Redstone finished at the top of his class at the Boston Latin School and won a scholarship to Harvard. He had helped crack Japanese codes during World War II, and turned his father’s two drive-in theater business into multi-billion media behemoth of multiplexes – a term he coined – infused with the smell of popcorn.
The structural complexity of the companies Redstone controlled gave him free rein to indulge his instincts. In his houses, TVs were tuned to the stock price of the National Amusements, which he controlled through a preferential share-ownership structure.
But Redstone’s fortune was only half the story: what he did with it was itself an epic saga of brutal politicking and sexual predation. His ruthless will made him not a man to be argued with. He had, after all, once saved himself from incineration in a burning Boston hotel by hanging off a window ledge until his hand was badly and permanently disfigured.
According to Unscripted, Redstone amended his trust more than 40 times to add or remove beneficiaries, often the women he dated who got progressively younger as he got older. Several received $20m, “a lot” received $10m, and “many, many” received over $1m.
He propositioned one future girlfriend, 26-year-old Malia Andelin, who was working as a flight attendant on the company jet, with the line: “Who the fuck are you?” She responded in kind. “I hear women like to be spanked,” Redstone followed up. “Do you like to be spanked?”
“Some say I created Mission: Impossible, and some say that this mission is impossible,” Redstone told Andelin in a message on her voicemail. “But I made this mission possible… I know that if you called me back and you were a risk‑taker, this call could perhaps change your life.” He sent her a crystal‑encrusted handbag in the shape of a panther. “I’m a panther and I’m going to pounce,” read a note.
Redstone reportedly dated his grandson’s girlfriends. “He acts like a 15‑year‑old kid at summer camp,” one executive remarked. At age 85, he boasted on a retreat for fellow media moguls: “I have the vital statistics of a 20-year-old!”
He fought with his daughter, Shari, and into his 80s lived in a mansion with two women, Sydney Holland and Manuela Herzer, who, converted from lovers to gatekeepers, scheduled his girlfriends and isolated him from his family and friends.
As Redstone became increasing senile, his daughter tried to expel his minders and, later, to recover the $150m he had handed over to them after he was warned he would die alone if they left him. But as that drama progressed CBS’s CEO Les Moonves becomes embroiled in another.
As the CBS board hatched a plan to dilute the old man’s control by merging CBS and Viacom, Moonves, a one-time daytime TV actor, was exposed by then #MeToo crusader Ronan Farrow who located six women with accusations of harassment and intimidation and published their accounts in the New Yorker.
“It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” a veteran producer told the magazine. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”
Moonves left the company in 2018 and sued for a $120m severance package. Three years later, he settled a New York State investigation into stock sales before the sexual harassment allegations were made public for more than $30m.
Unscripted offers shocking insight into the company’s culture during the Redstone-Moonves era. In one instance, Redstone spent $500,000 promoting the Electric Barbarellas, a breathtakingly trashy all-girl band, who made their CBS network debut on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on March 2011.
MTV executives protested the development of a Barbarellas reality show, calling the group “unwatchable and the music just as bad”. Sumner insisted: “I won’t be defied,” he said. Reviewers branded the show a “hypercontrived, superstaged, and hair‑extensioned mess”.
One question that hangs over the Redstone-Moonves era, as it does the media industry at large, is how the attitudes and behavior of senior executives within corporates structures exert influence beyond their immediate environment. In which case, the culture of Redstone’s empire had a traumatizing and abusive impact far wider than just the corporate offices in which it played out.
“It’s common sense that the people who run the media industry have an influence on the things we see and the culture they are controlling,”said Robert Thompson, trustee professor at the S .I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
“When American television was run by white males what we saw was reflected in the things they thought interesting. It’s one of the reasons why there was a call was to diversify not only what was in front of the camera but also behind the camera”, Thompson said.
“One can certainly see how the culture of that period created so much of the misbehavior we got. Executives operating on the level of wealth, power and entitlement are in some ways living in a different world. Whatever their id tells them, they have the resources to fulfill it.”
But there’s a larger question, too. The corporate structure of Redstone’s media creation was so complex and subject to his need for control that few were able or willing to challenge it.
When Redstone died during the Covid-19 pandemic, he was buried in his hometown of Boston. Few were present, but one of those was his daughter Shari. At the end of the service, she knelt close to his grave and sang Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” – a song to which Redstone often returned.
Even in death, apparently, his power lingered.
“You use the corporate structure to keep people confused enough to maintain another kind of control,” Thompson pointed out. “You’ve got these bad behaviors that #MeToo tried to exorcise, but that moves into a weird choreography of exploitation. Every element of this is a tale as old as time.”
• This article was amended on 18 February 2023 to include the names of Unscripted’s authors, which were inadvertently lost during editing.
