Jillian Sackler, an arts philanthropist who struggled to preserve the reputation of her husband, Arthur, by distinguishing him from his two younger Sackler brothers and their descendants, whose aggressive marketing and false advertising on behalf of their pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, triggered the opioid epidemic, died on May 20 in Manhattan. She was 84.
Her death, in a hospital, was from esophageal cancer, said Miguel Benavides, her health proxy.
Dr. Arthur Sackler, a psychiatrist and researcher who became a pioneer in medical marketing, bought Purdue Frederick, originally based in New York City, in the 1950s and gave each of his brothers a one-third share. They incorporated the company as Purdue Pharma in 1991. (Its headquarters are now in Stamford, Conn.)
Dr. Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million.
The company’s misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it.
In 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that deal. A revised settlement was reached in 2025, with the Sacklers and Purdue agreeing to pay $7.4 billion without receiving immunity. The first payment, within three years, included $1.5 billion from the Sacklers and nearly $900 million from Purdue.
But the backlash from the crisis prompted universities and cultural institutions — including the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — to obliterate the Sackler name from programs, buildings and galleries, and to declare that they would no longer accept any philanthropy from the family.
Ms. Sackler — a British native who was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for her philanthropic work — mounted a concerted publicity campaign to absolve her husband of any complicity or culpability, repeatedly reminding the public that he had died long before the scandal erupted.
While she stopped short of saying that the drug was the “root cause” of the opioid crisis, she accused the company of misleading advertising. She told The Guardian that the other members of the family “have a moral duty to help make this right and to atone for any mistakes made.”
As for Arthur, she added: “I think he would not have approved of the widespread sale of OxyContin.”
The couple were avid art collectors and patrons. One art scholar described Dr. Sackler as “a modern Medici.” The couple was associated with major cultural and academic institutions like the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution; the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (now part of the Harvard Art Museums); the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University; and the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, both at Tufts University.
After Dr. Sackler died, his wife continued his philanthropic agenda. Donations from his estate and insurance benefits helped finance the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia at the National Academy of Sciences, and Studio International, an art magazine. Their name was removed from some, but not all, of those institutions.
Gillian Lesley Tully was born on Nov. 17, 1940, in Stoke-on-Trent, in central England south of Manchester. She changed the spelling of her first name when she moved to the United States to be with Dr. Sackler, whom she met in 1967 when he was visiting London; they married in 1980.
Her father, Kenneth Tully, worked at Midland Bank (now HSBC UK). He married a colleague, Doris Queenie-Gillman Smith. Ms. Sackler had a younger brother, Brian Tully, who died in 2019, leaving her no immediate survivors except for Dr. Sackler’s children from an earlier marriage.
Among them is Elizabeth Sackler, a philanthropist who has described the estimated $13 billion amassed by her aunts and cousins during the opioid crisis as “morally abhorrent.”
Ms. Sackler attended New York University. The couple moved into a home on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where she continued to live after her husband’s death.
In her role as president and chief executive of the Dame Jillian and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities, she referred to the other branches of her husband’s family as the “OxySacklers.”
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2019, she wrote that her husband had been smeared through “guilt by association.”
“Neither Arthur nor his heirs had anything to do with the manufacture or marketing of OxyContin,” she asserted. “Suggestions that his philanthropy is now somehow tainted are simply false.”
She added: “Arthur is not here to answer back, but I can tell you that blaming him for OxyContin’s marketing, or for any other wrongdoing by the pharmaceutical industry, is as ludicrous as blaming the inventor of the mimeograph for email spam.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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