NYT Reporters James Stewart and Rachel Abrams Dish on the Sordid Drama of Sumner Redstone’s Media Empire

The final years of media titan Sumner Redstone were as sordid as they were consequential. The nonagenarian’s vast empire, which encompassed Paramount, CBS, CBS News, Showtime, MTV, and Nickelodeon, was thrown into chaos in his final years thanks to corporate mismanagement, internal fights over who would succeed him, and his outrageous obsession with sex.

Now, for the first time, the stunning tale of the Redstone empire and legacy has been chronicled at length in a new book, Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy.

James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams, two Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalists who have reported extensively on how the Me Too movement took down powerful media figures who for decades seemed untouchable, worked together on the book, which includes a trove of fresh reporting and shocking documentary evidence.

I spoke to Stewart and Abrams on this week’s episode of The Interview about their new book, their writing process, Redstone’s wild personal life, the family struggle for his company, and what remains of the Paramount empire.

Read excerpts from our conversation below.

On Sumner Redstone’s personal life and the many women to whom he gave a lot of money

Abrams: I am so proud to have worked on a book with Jim Stewart that has more sex and depravity than anything else I’ve ever written. In large part, that’s Sumner’s personal life. As he got older, he increasingly indulged his extracurricular interests. And it was becoming a huge distraction, not only in his personal life, but the people around him were starting to worry that it was interfering with his ability to run his companies. His appetites, in addition to his old age, made him increasingly vulnerable to people who wanted to use him for money and did use him for money and managed to siphon off so much from him. At the end of his life, there were two women who moved into his mansion and walked away at the end of the day with at least $150 million.

On whether his personal indiscretions were well known within his empire

Stewart: Let me give you one anecdote that I just love. It’s a small thing, but it tells you all you need to know about that. So there is this huge Paramount celebration, and Sumner shows up with this woman. It was one of the women living in the mansion with him. And she was wearing this incredibly revealing dress and lucite stiletto heels. A reporter happened to be there and said to the head of PR for Viacom, “Who’s that?” And he said, “Oh, that’s his home health care aide.”

Abrams: With a straight face.

Stewart: With a straight face! So I rest my case. Did they know? Yes. Yes, they knew.

On how Sumner’s daughter Shari Redstone took control of the empire

Stewart: It was quite a battle. First of all, the two women who had moved in with her father came very close to seizing control of the trust, which in turn controlled the voting power over these companies. So first, [Shari Redstone] had to derail that, which she succeeded in doing through a story we could never have made up. That’s a whole chunk of the book. Then, she had to deal with the extremely hostile chief executive of Viacom, which owned all the cable companies and Paramount, who was often referred to as Sumner’s surrogate son, which of course, drove her crazy when she was his real daughter. They had a huge showdown. And again, because by then she had regained a closer relationship with her father, they did control the voting power. They were able to replace the trustees and then in turn the board, and they got rid of him. That was a huge battle. And then, just when she thought it was all over and she could breathe easier, Les Moonves at CBS whipped up their board, and they declared war on her. And with this lawsuit, who knows where that would have ended up, except for the Me Too movement that swept Les Moonves out. Then, finally, she redid the board. Ultimately, she merged the companies. She now is firmly in control.

On their writing process

Stewart: As Rachel said, we didn’t really know each other at all. I’ve never had a co-author before, so I never really knew what this was going to be like. But it was really fantastic. We complemented each other in so many ways, including our areas of specialty and backgrounds. The fact that we were of different ages and levels of experience really helped a lot in so many ways. So it was great working with her. It was during the pandemic, and it was great having a co-author because I had nobody to talk to really. Rachel and I would be on the phone every day.

The story changed because we thought it was more of a corporate drama. As we said, corporate meets Me Too. And then, the family drama became more clear. We threw out a lot of what we originally wrote and started all over again. And then, once that was clear, it really did flow. I won’t say easy because writing is never easy, but it did spiral out.

McLaughlin: Did it help that so many of Sumner’s relationships ended in lawsuits?

Abrams: Yes, absolutely. When there is a lawsuit, you have a narrative spine. You’ve got documents. One of the things we got were previously confidential documents in some of this litigation. So the lawsuits definitely helped us fill out the story in all of its contours and textures.

Stewart: One thing I learned is you can’t write a great story without great facts. No matter how good a writer you are, it’s not going to happen. And because we knew the confidential source that gave us so much raw material, the lawsuits, the documents that we hadn’t seen before, I’ve never had an opportunity to write something with this rich a load of underlying facts.

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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