The former owner of Paramount Global chair said giving Donald Trump $16 million to settle his complaint over 60 Minutes’ Kamala Harris interview was a “no brainer.”
“I believed it was always in Paramount’s best interest to settle,” Shari Redstone, 71, told The New York Times in her first major interview since selling to David Ellison’s Skydance. “We may not like the world we live in, but a board has to do what’s in the best interest of shareholders.
Shareholders were eager to cash in on Paramount Global’s impending $8 billion merger with Skydance, she explained, which required a cooperative Trump White House to give FCC approval. But Trump’s lawsuit claiming Paramount property CBS “selectively edited” its interview with Kamala Harris from the 2024 campaign trail became a major obstacle.
Redstone also shared with the Times that she agreed with critics who said Trump’s claims were exaggerated—however Redstone herself had her own gripes with the news program.
Puck reported in May that the heiress took offense over 60 Minutes’ coverage of the one-year anniversary of the Israel-Gaza conflict, believing the broadcast was biased against Israel. That report alleged Redstone appointed a new editorial standards overseer to skew coverage in the other direction. It also claimed she’d allegedly told 60 Minutes producers to hold off on stories critical of Trump until after the merger went through.
Redstone insisted to the Times in the new interview that she had nothing to do with the suspected “side deal” Paramount made with the president, which would add $20 million worth of public service announcements selected by the White House to CBS’ airwaves, as further penance for 60 Minutes’ Harris interview editing.
“I hope it isn’t true,” she said. Lawyers for Skydance called the rumored deal, which Trump revealed to reporters and on his Truth Social platform, “unmitigated false bulls–t.”
An FCC filing revealed that what Paramount promised Trump’s administration in writing was coverage that included “multiple viewpoints” and the end of any diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Lawyers for Trump told the Times that there’s an understanding that the PSAs will run.
That understanding would justify why the company was able to get Trump to settle for just $16 million, after he’d initially sued the company for $10 billion and then $20 billion. But Redstone insisted that even though she was “blown away by the price,” she had no idea how they came to such a low agreement. “I don’t know, and I didn’t ask,” she said, having reportedly given settlement negotiations over to Paramount’s board.
In addition to allegedly getting involved in editorial at 60 Minutes, however, the Times reports that Redstone was also distressed that she hadn’t been consulted about CBS’ cancelation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show. But she didn’t necessarily disagree with the decision itself.
Paramount announced—pre-merger approval—that the show, on which Colbert had just declared days before the company had given Trump “a big, fat bribe” by settling with him—would end in May 2026. Trump gloated about the “major part” he hoped he played in getting his nemesis off the air. Paramount called the decision “purely financial.”
Though many of Paramount’s steps through to its Skydance merger pleased the president to the displeasure of his critics, the heiress, whose family made an estimated $2.4 billion in the deal, declared, “We did what we set out to do.”
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