Photo Illustration by Vanity Fair; Photos from left, by John Shearer/Invision/AP, by Rob Latour, both from REX/Shutterstock.

For the Redstone family, there is no victory untainted by dynastic strife. With peace breaking out for the first time in years between CBS and Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, following the defenestration of Les Moonves, her longtime nemesis, a hot war still rages on in a Los Angeles courtroom between Redstone and Manuela Herzer, a onetime girlfriend of Sumner Redstone, Shari’s father, and a former beneficiary of his estate. And it’s starting to get pretty interesting.

Ever since Shari Redstone arranged for Herzer to be booted out of her father’s Beverly Hills mansion three years ago, Herzer has been battling with the Redstones to try to get herself reinstated into Sumner’s will, if and when the 95-year-old family patriarch moves to the great beyond. In May 2016, Herzer filed a lawsuit in state court in California against Shari, her two sons, and a variety of employees at Sumner’s mansion, in which she argued that Shari had cut her out of her inheritance from Sumner and that her privacy had been violated. In October 2017, Herzer also filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that many of the same people had criminally conspired against her in order to remove her from Sumner’s life and as a beneficiary of his will. That lawsuit, in which she sought in excess of $100 million, has since been dismissed.

But the state lawsuit continues. And it could overlap with the corporate intrigue at CBS in unexpected ways. For instance, Herzer is trying to get her hands on, and enter into evidence in the case, a now-famous iPhone recording of Sumner, taken on January 28, 2018, by Arnold Kopelson, a Hollywood producer and longtime friend of Sumner’s. Kopelson was also a long-serving CBS board member, who left the board on Monday as part of the separation agreement between Moonves and CBS. CBS was also trying to get the Kopelson video entered into evidence in the Delaware lawsuit between CBS and Shari Redstone about the legality of the since-abandoned plan to dilute the Redstones’ voting stake in CBS down to 17 percent, from the nearly 80 percent that the family still controls. The judge in the Delaware case, Andre Bouchard, ultimately obtained the January 28 video and kept it in his chambers, while also proclaiming in an August court hearing that the video could be useful evidence about whether Sumner Redstone has been fully aware and cognizant of the events swirling all around him.

The separation agreement between CBS and Moonves included a provision that ended the Delaware litigation, thus making the Kopelson video moot, at least in that proceeding. But Herzer still wants it, as well as another videotape of Sumner’s May 2016 deposition. She is trying to prove that Sumner Redstone was not capable of making the decision to remove her from the will or to remove her from his mansion, and rather that it was Shari, not her father, who engineered the whole caper. If Herzer is able to prove that allegation, it could also mean that Shari usurped her father’s role, without his knowledge and support, in the family’s control of CBS and Viacom—one of the very things that CBS was hoping to prove in Delaware court. So while the departure of Moonves from CBS gives Shari complete control of CBS and Viacom, Herzer’s lawsuit could still raise serious questions about the legality of her control.

At the moment, things seem to be going Herzer’s way, and the Kopelson video could still become a relevant piece of evidence. As part of an agreement between the California litigants’ attorneys in August, the judge in the state court case will look at the two videos of Sumner as part of a hearing, scheduled for September 19, to determine whether the Redstones’ attorneys at Hueston Hennigan should be disqualified from the case. In a declaration filed on September 6, Robert Klieger, the Redstones’ attorney at Hueston Hennigan who is also a CBS board member, wrote the court that he had received a phone call from a Redstone nurse as Kopelson was recording Sumner, telling Klieger that Kopelson was making the video “surreptitiously.” (Kopelson denies that the video was taken secretly.) The nurses also told Klieger that Kopelson had asked them “to rouse” Sumner when he was sleeping during a movie, showing in his home theater, and that Kopelson had “begun quizzing Mr. Redstone about CBS.” (In an e-mail about why Herzer is trying to get him removed from the state lawsuit, Klieger told me, “Apparently they don’t like litigating against me.”)

Klieger wrote in his declaration that Kopelson admitted he made the video and that he did so because he “always takes pictures with Mr. Redstone” and “wanted to hear his voice.” When Shari discovered that Kopelson had taken the video of her father—which others have told me is “very hard to watch” because of Sumner’s obvious incapacitation—she initiated his ouster from the CBS board. As part of the CBS settlement with Moonves, that move was made final. Whether Kopelson’s video of Sumner ever finds its way into the public realm remains to be seen. In a recent interview, Kopelson told me he doesn’t “really care” about the video anymore and that it was merely a recording of his friend on a January day, the last time he saw Sumner.