The central question, of course, is whether Redstone is actually calling the shots himself, or if Shari Redstone, his onetime estranged daughter, is propping him up long enough to engineer her own deliberate palace coup. At stake here is not only the future leadership of Viacom (Shari Redstone openly detests Dauman, her father’s protégé, who is known within the company as “P. Diddy”), but also the future direction of CBS and Viacom themselves: Will they be sold after Redstone dies? Will they be recombined under the control of Les Moonves, the CBS chairman and C.E.O., as some people speculate? Or will the Redstone family continue to control the two companies through their 80 percent voting stake in each, just the way Redstone, a former tax lawyer and graduate of both Harvard and Harvard Law School, designed things?

Recently, Fred Salerno, a longtime director of both Viacom and CBS, and a former chief financial officer of Verizon, asked to visit with Redstone to perhaps get some clarity on the matter. Salerno had just been appointed Viacom’s lead independent director and he believed that he and William Schwartz, another Viacom director, owed it to the company’s shareholders and board members to determine whether Redstone was acting on his own free will when he removed from his trust and the National Amusements board both Dauman and George Abrams, his longtime attorney, and replaced them with people with ties to Shari Redstone. (In May, a Los Angeles judge ruled that Redstone was capable of making his own health-care decisions. “This dispute is not about Shari Redstone,” Robert Klieger, Redstone’s lawyer, noted recently. “It is about Mr. Redstone’s right to have the individuals he wants and trusts managing his assets upon his death.”)

Salerno inquired about his visit to Redstone’s assistant, but he heard back from Michael Tu, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Tu told Salerno he would consider the request “seriously,” but he also asked that Salerno provide him with an agenda for the meeting. Salerno replied with his belief that he and Schwartz should have “unfettered and unfiltered access” to Redstone as they have always had in the past. He also objected to the idea of having to write up an agenda, but he did so as requested, with the first item being “Greetings and pleasantries about our shared experiences over decades together as colleagues.”

Salerno also wanted to chat about whether Redstone really intended to block the sale of a minority stake in Paramount, the Hollywood studio, that Viacom had been exploring, or whether, in effect, Redstone’s recent written pronouncements on this topic, including calling Paramount his “baby,” were really simply an example of his daughter’s influence over him. (On Friday, both Redstones visited studio chief Brad Grey on the Paramount lot.)

I e-mailed Tu late last week to see if the meeting between Salerno and Redstone had been scheduled. The visit seemed like the logical next step in this demented drama. After all, as a corporate-governance and fiduciary matter, shouldn’t Salerno, a longtime Viacom director, be able to meet with Viacom’s largest and controlling shareholder to determine whether his recent directives are coming from Sumner himself? Instead,Mike Lawrence, the chief reputation officer—I kid you not—at Cone Communications, a Boston P.R. firm, responded on behalf of Tu. “These are internal Viacom board communications and we are not going to be speaking about them publicly,” he wrote. And no meeting has been scheduled.

In an even more bewildering plot twist, however, Salerno has since taken matters into his own hands. On Tuesday evening, he sent a two-page personal letter to Sumner Redstone in which he admonished, “it is alarming that your representatives refuse us the opportunity to talk with you, express our perspectives, share our friendship, or understand directly from you what your wishes might be and why.”

After attempting to alleviate any concern that Dauman and other company officials have been attempting to sell Paramount “lock, stock, and barrel . . . in the middle of the night and hide it from you,” Salerno appealed to his a longtime friend with a question that has been plaguing innumerable investors, employees, and litigators: What the hell is going on here? “We want to understand what is happening with you,” Salerno concluded. “And I can assure you that you can count on us to stick up for you and for the many other Viacom shareholders you have served so well for so many years.”

“It’s a coup d’état without a doubt,” this person told me. “This will go down as the worst example in corporate history of somebody hijacking a publicly traded company when the truth comes out.” (Nancy J. Sterling, a spokesperson for Shari Redstone, responded, “It is absurd for anyone to accuse Shari of manipulating her father. Sumner makes his own decisions.”)

But few should be as worried about Shari Redstone’s rise as Dauman. If she had her way, presumably, she would replace him as C.E.O. of Viacom in a nanosecond. “That may or may not be the worst thing in the world,” this person continued.

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http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/shari-redstone-power-moves-viacom