The most toxic name in philanthropy
WITH THE SACKLER NAME PERSISTENTLY LINKED TO THE OPIOID CRISIS, FAMILY MEMBERS ARE IN THE LINE OF FIRE
It’s not a great time to be a Sackler. For decades, if you knew the Sackler name, it was probably because you saw it engraved on a towering museum wall or a university building — there is the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, the Louvre’s Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities in Paris, and plenty of others. In Connecticut, Greenwich Hospital houses the Sackler Center for Pain Management.
But now members of the side of the family that owns Stamfordbased Purdue Pharma stand accused in numerous lawsuits of helping fuel the opioid crisis by using deceptive marketing to promote the opioidbased drug Oxy
Contin as nonaddictive, then doubling down on sales efforts even as evidence mounted that the drug was being abused. And while the charges themselves are not new — Purdue and three of its top executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to criminal charges and paid a $634 million fine — it has been only recently that the focus has turned to the family.
Matthew Schneier, a reporter for the New York Times Style section, in February 2019 wrote an article titled “Uptown, Sackler Protests. Downtown, a Sackler Fashion Line.” He described a collection of activewear that Joss had unveiled at New York Fashion Week under the label LBV, her nascent clothing brand. He also brought up recent protests directed at Joss’ husband’s family, which owns Purdue Pharma.
The next day Joss posted a letter on Facebook. “Dear Matthew Schneier:” it began. “If a male entrepreneur’s business was prospering and popular, would the New York Times dare publish an article so focused on the family business of his wife?”
“I was flattered that you came to our LBV presentation,” the post continued, “but what better truth for this sad media reality than what you have done here — using the same baitandclick language to malign LBV, my own women’s initiative unrelated to Purdue, aimed at promoting women’s empowerment. What you accomplished in your baitandswitch text was to relegate my identity to only being someone’s wife, thereby erasing any signs of my successes or accomplishments as a woman.”
Reaction was swift and partisan. “Your response to this is super brave,” one reader commented. A Twitter user: “Should have written ‘Meet Joss Sackler, who just unveiled her hideous own fashion line made possible by blood money.’ ”
This is a problem for a very particular class of people: You have a lot of money, or a piece of artwork, or a patch of earth. The source of this money/artwork/earth is from a generation older than you, or it’s your generation but you married into it—you’re a beneficiary—and there’s a problem with the source. They were Nazis, for example. Or slaveowners. Or, in this case, made highly addictive opioids, and allegedly marketed them as safe. You weren’t a part of this, but now, like it or not, it seems you are. What, exactly, are you supposed to do? How are you supposed to act? How much of your life must you devote to apologizing, justifying, defending?
The eight Sacklers named in the recent lawsuits, including Joss’s husband David, vigorously deny all the allegations and say they will defend themselves in court. But it’s a big family, with members who never worked at the company and a whole branch that sold out before OxyContin went to market.
Some, like Joss, have asked to be judged on their own merits. “I support my family 500 percent. I believe they will be completely vindicated. But they have nothing to do with LBV,” she says.
At first, most of the public scrutiny and litigation around OxyContin was directed at Purdue. But in 2017, Esquire and the New Yorker published indepth articles about members of the Sackler family, including the three patriarchs, brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond (David’s grandfather), who owned Purdue Frederick, which later became Purdue Pharma.
In 2018 the artist Nan Goldin began staging protests at institutions that had received money from the Sacklers. Her activist group gathered in the Met’s Sackler Wing and threw fake prescription bottles into the reflecting pool. They staged a diein at the Guggenheim and dropped leaflets printed with “Sacklers Lie, People Die” from the museum’s spiral walkway. Goldin was escorted out of a movie theater in New York after protesting about the screening of an unrelated documentary made by Madeleine Sackler, a granddaughter of Raymond Sackler.
The protests coincided with the announcement of major lawsuits against the Sacklers. Then, in March 2019, an art world earthquake: Three institutions that have received generous donations from Sacklers over the years—the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Galleries in England, and the Guggenheim — announced that they would no longer take Sackler money. More recently, the Metropolitan Museum made a similar announcement.
Joss is not the only Sackler who feels unfairly judged as a result of all this. Dame
Jillian Sackler, who was the third wife of Arthur Sackler, has stated repeatedly that she should not be included in the blame for the opioid crisis. Arthur died in 1987, before OxyContin was developed, and she and his heirs were bought out of Purdue before the drug became available. “Arthur was an amazing man who did tremendous good, and I am just so proud of him,” she says.
Jillian is a towering figure in the world of philanthropy, praised both for making generous donations and for her facility at getting big projects completed. In the past two years alone she has helped celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University and the reopening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, and cohosted the black tie centennial celebration of the Foreign Policy Association, of which she is the chairwoman.
Things started going badly about two years ago.
“I was approached by the director of the Sackler Gallery in Washington, and he said, ‘Jill, what is this? What’s happening here?’ I said, ‘Arthur’s got nothing to do with it. This is all totally wrong. This is all wrong,’” she says. She had similar conversations with members of other boards she’s on. “As I far as I could make out, they all believed me,” she says. In the beginning Jillian tried correcting articles that lumped Arthur and her in with the Purdue side of the family by calling the writers herself. Finally she hired a publicity firm that now combs the news and makes frequent demands for corrections.
Not everybody agrees with her description of events. In September 2018, Goldin told ArtNet News, “But (Arthur) was the architect of the advertising model used so effectively to push the drug. He also turned Valium into the first milliondollar drug. And a similar drug, MS Contin, was released while he was alive, which was only a few molecules away from OxyContin. The brothers made billions on the bodies of hundreds of thousands. There are now 175 people dying a day. The whole Sackler clan is evil.”
Jillian refutes this characterization and any assertion that Arthur or she profited from OxyContin. She points out that no one on Arthur’s side of the family has been named in any of the more than 1,600 lawsuits that have been filed against Purdue, members of the Sackler family, and other pharmaceutical companies. Nobody has asked her to step down from a board position, and Harvard and the Smithsonian have both made statements saying they will not remove the Sackler name from their buildings.
When asked what she thinks the future holds, whether she’ll continue her philanthropic work, she seems flustered. “I don’t know the answer to that,” she says. These days, she says, when she is out in the world, “I barely dare mention my last name.”
‘I SUPPORT MY FAMILY 500 PERCENT. I BELIEVE THEY WILL BE COMPLETELY VINDICATED.’