Sumner Redstone's Estate and the Advance Directive That Became a Battlefield
Sumner Redstone controlled two of the largest media companies in America and was worth billions of dollars, and yet for nearly two years the single most consequential document in his life was not a merger agreement but a one-page advance health care directive. In October 2015, at ninety-two, he revoked it, removing Manuela Herzer — his companion of a decade — as his health care agent and from his Beverly Hills mansion, in the space of a single afternoon. What followed tested how a court decides whether a document like that reflects a person's own choice, or someone else's.
Rather than lean on either side's account of what happened, the more reliable record is Forbes correspondent Natalie Robehmed's reporting from inside the Los Angeles courtroom, published May 9, 2016, the day the case collapsed — coverage filed from the trial itself rather than assembled afterward from press releases.
Herzer petitioned Los Angeles Superior Court to be reinstated as Redstone's health care agent, alleging he lacked the capacity to have revoked her status and that his daughter, Shari Redstone, and members of his staff had unduly influenced the decision to remove her. Judge David Cowan declined to dismiss the case at the outset, ordering a formal capacity evaluation and allowing the matter to move toward trial in the spring of 2016. Two days into that trial, the judge watched a videotaped session in which Redstone — communicating through an aide trained to interpret his impaired speech — expressed clear and unmistakable hostility toward Herzer. Cowan dismissed the case immediately, finding that the testimony "completely alters" the picture Herzer's side had presented. Herzer went on to file a new suit against Shari Redstone alleging a conspiracy to remove her from Redstone's life, seeking seventy million dollars in damages; that suit was also dismissed, and in January 2019 the two sides settled their remaining disputes, with Herzer agreeing to return $3.25 million of the money Redstone had given her over the years.
The fight over Redstone's health care agent was never really separate from the fight over his media empire. National Amusements, the family holding company through which the Redstones controlled roughly eighty percent of the voting stock in both Viacom and CBS, had no mechanism for evaluating Sumner's capacity apart from whatever a court ultimately decided — so the question of who could speak for him medically was inseparable from the question of who could vote his shares. Philippe Dauman, then Viacom's chief executive and a longtime Redstone ally who had resisted Shari's growing influence, was removed from the National Amusements board within months of the Herzer ruling and settled his own competency challenge that August, ending his tenure at Viacom. Shari Redstone emerged from the litigation in effective control of the company, eventually engineering the 2019 reunification of Viacom and CBS. Sumner Redstone died in August 2020, at ninety-seven.
What the Redstone matter shows with unusual clarity is that testamentary capacity and health care capacity are legally distinct questions, decided under different statutes and different burdens of proof, and that a person's fitness to name — or remove — a health care agent can be litigated, and relitigated, while that person is still alive and still, in some functional sense, able to express a preference. California's probate and health care statutes permit exactly this kind of challenge, because courts take seriously the risk that a diminished principal is being steered by whoever currently has the most access to him.
None of this requires a media fortune to become real. Any family with an aging parent, a blended household, and more than one adult child with a strong opinion can produce a smaller version of the same dispute: a late-life change to a health care proxy that one sibling insists was coerced and another insists was simply their parent, at last, being honest about who they trusted. Contested capacity does not wait for probate — it can erupt at any bedside, and it is very often the health care directive, not the will, that gets fought over first.
Health care proxies and powers of attorney deserve the same periodic review as a will, and any late-life change to one is worth pairing with contemporaneous documentation — a dated note from a treating physician confirming the principal's capacity at the moment of signing, and ideally a private conversation with the principal, alone, about why the change is being made. That kind of record costs almost nothing to create and can do more to head off years of litigation than any clause a lawyer could draft after the fact.
Estate Planning Lesson: The document naming who speaks for you deserves as much care as the one naming who inherits from you, because it is very often the first one anyone contests.
