In a 2015 deposition, he tried to estimate how much the family had made from OxyContin. He said it was over $1 billion but less than $10 billion. In a video of the deposition that emerged in August, he was asked if he believed OxyContin was marketed too aggressively. He answered with a single word — “no” — while barely glancing up from papers he was looking through.
Representatives for Raymond Sackler’s branch of the family did not respond to interview requests.
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THE FAMILY BRANCHES: MORTIMER SACKLER
At the end of his life, Mortimer Sackler lived in London. His widow, Theresa, who lives in England, and children Mortimer D.A. Sackler, Kathe Sackler and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt are all former board members and are named in lawsuits.
Mortimer D.A. Sackler and Kathe Sackler were also Purdue executives.
In an April 1 deposition, Kathe Sackler was asked about an email attributed to her that concluded, “PS, I will strenuously protest approval of any document that suggests or implies, as this draft does, that Richard Sackler was responsible for the idea of developing a controlled-release oxycodone product. As you know, when I told Richard of my idea in the mid ’80s, he asked me what oxycodone was.”
In questioning under oath, though, she said she did not remember writing that and that it would have been uncharacteristic of her to do so.
Representatives Mortimer Sackler’s branch of the family did not respond to interview requests.
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THE MONEY
In 2016, Forbes magazine listed the Sacklers as one of the 20 wealthiest families in the U.S. and tallied their holdings at $13 billion.
For decades, the family members have been major philanthropic donors. In the 1970s, they underwrote the Metropolitan Museum of Art wing that houses an ancient Egyptian temple and bears the Sackler name.
This year, institutions including the Met, Britain’s Tate museums, New York’s Guggenheim and Tufts University, where the graduate school of biomedical sciences also bears the family’s name, have announced they will stop taking gifts from the family or re-evaluate the relationship. The Louvre Museum in Paris took the Sackler name off a wing.
In legal filings, states have contended that the heirs of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler have accepted payments of at least $4 billion over the last dozen years.
Arizona’s attorney general has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to force the family to return some money to Purdue so it could be fair game in lawsuits against the company. New York’s attorney general has requested financial records of entities connected to the family to try to trace the money. Her office said in a legal filing this month that it found $1 billion transferred to the family through Swiss banks and other secret accounts.
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THE YOUNGER GENERATION
The major exception to the Sackler family’s silence in recent years came when Richard Sackler’s son David and David’s wife, Joss, both in their 30s, both gave interviews for magazine profiles published earlier this year.
Joss Sackler has a doctorate in linguistics, serves as a rock climbing guide and has a fashion line. In a Town & Country interview, she expressed frustration with media attention on her connection to the Sacklers rather than her own work. More recently, she feuded about OxyContin with rock star Courtney Love, who said in an Instagram post this month directed at Joss Sackler, “Your. People. Killed. My. People.”
David Sackler, a Princeton University graduate who runs a family investment firm, made headlines last year when it was reported that he had paid $22.5 million in cash for a mansion in Los Angeles’ Bel Air neighborhood. He told Vanity Fair that the family has been vilified in part because family members have not told their story publicly.
“We have not done a good job of talking about this,” he said. “That’s what I regret the most.”
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