Shari Redstone prepares for battle to control a media empire

Shari Redstone pulls her iPhone out of her purse to show off "just one" picture of her grandchildren. She laughs then apologises when she sees that the back of the phone is covered with heart-shaped stickers - the result of a craft session with the two youngsters.

Petite, with coiffed blond hair, sharp blue eyes and a cautious smile, Shari is the picture of a doting grandmother. Beneath that cheery exterior, though, is a tenacious woman at the centre of a battle over her family's fortune as well as the fate of two of the world's largest media companies, Viacom and CBS.

Shari is the intensely private daughter of Sumner M Redstone, the pugnacious mogul who ruthlessly assembled a $40-billion entertainment empire, including Viacom's MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon cable networks, the Paramount film and television studios and the CBS broadcast network.

A Massachusetts native who speaks in a pronounced Boston accent, Shari shies from public attention with the same alacrity that her father attracted it. Her parents divorced after 52 years of marriage. He then remarried and dated women decades younger. He has feuded publicly with his children and cycled through a series of chief executives at his companies. He famously declared that he would never die.

Now, Sumner is 92, in poor health and confined to his $20 million Beverly Hills mansion. After he dies, or is deemed incompetent, Shari is expected to face off against Viacom's current leadership, including some of her father's closest confidants, to determine what becomes of his media empire - and by extension her children's inheritance and family's legacy.

The relationship between father and daughter is complicated. She was the one he phoned after surviving a hotel fire when he was 55. He persuaded her to join the family business and once told a reporter that life wasn't complete until people had "met Shari".

Over the years, however, he has denigrated her in conversations with other executives and chastised her for meddling in his business. He publicly criticised her attempts to position herself to eventually succeed him as chairman of Viacom and CBS. Their feuding often made headlines, such as the time he wrote a letter to Forbes saying his children had done little or nothing to help build the family empire.

Today she's not in his will. The bulk of the estate goes to charity.

Shari says that she has patched up her "very public" disagreements with her father. Lately, she has been a frequent presence in his home.

That portrayal of their relationship is being challenged now in a salacious lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by a former companion and romantic partner of Sumner. The suit says that he is not mentally competent and that Shari manipulated him to take control of his life, his companies and his money.

Shari declined to discuss the suit or her father's health. Her spokeswoman called the claims in the suit "unfounded," as have lawyers for Sumner, who declined to comment beyond their court filings.

Sumner controls Viacom and CBS through National Amusements, a private theatre chain started by his father, which holds about 80 per cent of the voting stock in the two companies. After Sumner dies, his stake in National Amusements will go to a trust created to benefit his five grandchildren.

The trust wields great power. It could, for instance, endorse the current leadership, install a new board and executive team or even sell the companies. Shari is one of the seven voting members of that trust.

© 2016 The New York Times