New Sumner Redstone Book Will Drop Sexual Assault Bombshell
In this week’s edition of Confider, we look at a new book that isn’t set to drop until February but is already making some Hollywood power players nervous.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
This reporting appears as one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
A bombshell new book about the battle for power at the Paramount Global entertainment empire will lay bare never-before-reported allegations of sexual assault against the late Sumner Redstone, Confider has learned, and one woman mentioned in the book has already issued legal threats to its authors.
Unscripted: The Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams, isn’t due to hit shelves via Penguin Random House until February, but it already has Tinseltown power players nervous about some of its salacious revelations.
Redstone’s ex-fiancée Sydney Holland—nearly 50 years his junior—has lawyered up, hiring pit-bull defamation attorney Larry Stein and sending Stewart and Abrams a legal threat over the participation of her ex-boyfriend George Pilgrim in the book, two people familiar with the matter told Confider. Holland is not, however, the person leveling sexual-assault allegations in the book against Redstone, Confider has learned.
Pilgrim is viewed as the man who broke up Redstone’s engagement to Holland back in 2015, but sources claim the ex-convict—who spent time in prison on fraud charges—has a deeply personal agenda to hurt Holland and there may be legal action if certain claims made by him feature prominently in the hotly anticipated book, which is already being shopped to streamers for a TV adaptation.
Stewart, Abrams and Stein declined to comment. Reps for Penguin, Redstone and Pilgrim didn’t get back to us.
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