Keryn Redstone, granddaughter of media mogul Sumner Redstone, says she will seek an injunction from a Massachusetts court preventing him or his company from selling assets or making corporate governance moves.
In a statement via her lawyer, she charges that her 93-year-old grandfather is no longer competent and that Redstone’s daughter Shari Redstone—Keryn’s aunt—is pulling his strings.
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“I will not rest until this massive fraud is exposed in open court and all of Shari’s illegal acts are vacated,” Keryn said.
In her statement, she says the Redstone family holding company National Amusements, which holds majority voting shares in Viacom and CBS, recently sold a Home Depot store property in West Roxbury, Mass. The store is on the site of one of Redstone’s original drive-in movie theaters.
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“When he was mentally competent, my grandfather would never have sold this property at any price,” Keryn Redstone said. “This is another example of my aunt Shari’s manipulation of my grandfather now that he is mentally compromised.”
The statement claims that Shari was behind the moves to remove Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and Viacom director George Abrams from the board of National Amusements and as trustees for Sumner Redstone’s trust. It also claima she engineered an attempt to dismiss five directors of Viacom, including Dauman.
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Those moves have been held up, pending decisions of courts in Massachusetts and Delaware. Dauman and the other directors similarly claim that Sumner Redstone is incompetent and acting under the undue influence of Shari Redstone.
“It is undisputed that Sumner suffers from a major neurological disorder that renders him mentally incapacitated with regard to numerous brain functions, including long and short term memory, processing, arithmetic, and executive actions,” said the lawyer, Pierce O’Donnell.
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"Sumner cannot walk, talk intelligibly, write, or eat through his mouth. Nor is it disputed that Sumner is susceptible to undue influence in making significant decisions. In this enfeebled, dependent condition, Sumner was prime for elder abuse," O'Donnell said.
“No one from the outside has seen my grandfather in many months,” Keryn says in the statement. “When I last visited him on Valentine's Day before Shari banned me from his house, he was listless and had a melancholy, vacant look, lacked any affect, and sobbed uncontrollably. He kept asking 'Where is Manuela? I miss her.' I am very worried about his healthcare and what Shari has done to him.”
