In September 2019, Joss Sackler showed her brand LBV’s new collection during New York Fashion Week. The label, which shares a name with her private social club, had recently brought on the designer Elizabeth Kennedy, and a crowd of Sackler and Kennedy friends, members of LBV, and influencers gathered on the terrace of the Bowery Hotel in the East Village for the event. Several attendees, when asked if they had any misgivings about showing up in public for a Sackler venture, expressed varying mixtures of indifference and boredom.

At least they understood the question. The night before, Courtney Love, responding to a reported offer of over $100,000 from Sackler’s camp to attend the show, had told Page Six, “I am one of the most famous reformed junkies on the planet—my husband died on heroin. What is it about me that says to Joss Sackler, ‘I will sell out to you?’” (A spokesperson for LBV and Sackler told the tabloid at the time that Love’s account was “not accurate.” Sackler told WWD in 2020 that LBV never made Love a formal offer.)

By this time, the name Sackler had become a byword for the opioid crisis, and Page Six described Joss Sackler as a “scandal-hit OxyContin heiress.” But the public connection between the family and the prescription drug had only recently become so flagrant. Just two years prior, in 2017, The New York Times, following a pair of articles in The New Yorker and Esquire that examined the relationship of some members of the Sackler family to OxyContin, reached out to 21 cultural organizations that had taken donations from foundations run by members of the famed family of philanthropists. None of the organizations indicated they planned to give the money back or refuse it going forward.

A museum or university dropping the Sackler name, or rejecting the family’s money, has since become a kind of institutional ritual. Last month, London’s Serpentine Galleries, already among the lengthy list to cut financial ties in the last few years, swapped out its old benefactors’ name. The furor surrounding Purdue Pharma, the Sackler–owned company behind OxyContin, has steadily progressed, and two new nonfiction works punctuate the family’s current standing by telling the story of the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic in depth and at length. Released within a month of one another, Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary The Crime of the Century establish a fuller picture of the family and the man-made origins of the opioid epidemic. Keefe is also the author of the 2017 New Yorker story. Prior to that year, “it was not as though it was a secret that the family owned this company and had derived billions of dollars from the sale of OxyContin, or that their company had pled guilty to federal crimes,” he said in a recent interview, referring to the 2007 admission by Purdue’s parent company and three Purdue executives that they had misrepresented the drug’s addictive properties. “But for whatever reason it didn’t seem to have really caught up with them.”

In his roughly four-hour documentary, which premieres next week on HBO, Gibney covers the history of the Sacklers but ultimately undertakes a broader sweep of the opioid crisis. “I thought of it as a murder mystery,” Gibney said in an interview. “You start looking for clues, and you start looking for eyewitnesses.” Culprits include the FDA, sales reps, doctors, legislators, pharmaceutical companies and executives, and Rudy Giuliani, who became the public face of the Purdue legal defense in the early 2000s. The film underscores how the opioid crisis resulted from a series of human choices—and how the people who made them had scores of opportunities to change course.

Before Richard Sackler—father of David Sackler, who’s married to Joss—became president of Purdue Pharma, he played a central role in the company’s launch of OxyContin in 1995. In 2019, New York attorney general Letitia James described the drug as the “taproot” of the health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 500,000 people have died from an overdose involving an opioid between 1999 and 2019. For years prior, beginning with Richard’s father, Raymond, and uncles Arthur and Mortimer, the Sacklers occupied a simultaneously prominent and mysterious position: their name had been plastered across museums and universities, but the nature of the fortune that paid for those placements remained far more private.

The Sacklers’ desire for public obscurity pulses through Empire of Pain. Keefe writes about how Richard’s brother, Jonathan Sackler, as an owner of Purdue, sought to keep the Sackler name out of reports about the opioid epidemic. Into his old age, Raymond asked about how to make the Times “less focused on OxyContin.” Jonathan’s daughter, the Emmy-winning filmmaker Madeleine Sackler, is known to brush off questions about the original source of her money, Keefe writes. Arthur, whose pioneering work in medical advertising set the table for Purdue’s later success, once said that privacy allowed him to “do things the way I want to do them.” But some opportunities became too tantalizing for him to remain out of view. In 1978, New York City mayor Ed Koch, a friend of his, toasted the opening of the Met’s new Sackler Wing.

“So much of what this story is about is what happens when turbocharged 21st-century commerce collides with health care,” Gibney said. As Keefe writes, Barry Meier’s 2003 book Pain Killer and Sam Quinones’s 2015 book Dreamland each cover both the roots of the opioid epidemic and members of the Sackler family’s complicity in it. But as familiar as the underlying problems had already been, Empire of Pain and The Crime of the Century arrive at a moment when the Sackler name itself is under siege.

The turning point, Keefe said, came with Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey and the photographer Nan Goldin: “That’s when things start to really snowball.” Healey started investigating the opioid crisis in 2015, she told Keefe, and early in 2019, she released her 274-page complaint against Purdue Pharma, which claimed that the named Sacklers “made the choices that caused much of the opioid epidemic.” The investigation relied on internal Purdue records, which showed Sackler hands at work all over the company’s decisions.

In 2018, Goldin, along with her activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), began staging protests at museums that bore the Sackler name or had taken donations from the family. “The Sacklers made their fortune promoting addiction,” Goldin wrote in an opening salvo for Artforum that year. “They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.” In March 2019, a month after PAIN’s protest at the Guggenheim, the museum announced that it would no longer accept gifts from the Sacklers, saying that members of the family had given it $9 million over two decades. In July of that year, about two weeks after Goldin protested at the Sackler wing at the Louvre, the museum removed the family name.

As Keefe describes in his book, the effects of this reputational shift for the family cascaded beyond the world of museums. Some of the Sacklers themselves, rather than their company or drug, became the subject of extensive newspaper and tabloid coverage and late-night segments. A hedge fund and a charter school network cut ties. Purdue became too much for even JPMorgan Chase to stomach, and the bank parted ways with the company. Such developments sent the family scrambling: Mortimer D.A. Sackler met with Michael Bloomberg for advice on P.R. strategy, ProPublica reported last year, and, according to Keefe, Mortimer’s wife, Jacqueline, upon learning that Last Week Tonight was preparing a segment on the family, unsuccessfully tried to arrange a personal meeting with John Oliver to intervene.

One of the most striking portions of The Crime of the Century deals with Insys Therapeutics, a different company that played a role in the opioid epidemic. Alec Burlakoff, Insys’s former vice president of sales, pleaded guilty in 2018 to a federal count of racketeering conspiracy. He agreed to testify against the company’s founder and former billionaire John Kapoor, who in 2020 was sentenced to 66 months in prison for a scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe the fentanyl-based spray Subsys. In the film, Burlakoff describes the psychology of Insys’s aggressive sales environment in somewhat excruciating detail. “He was remarkably upfront,” Gibney said. “What he was willing to do was to take me back to the moment in time and give me a sense of the flavor and enthusiasm with which he had committed these crimes.”

The Sacklers haven’t attempted any similar reckonings. David complained to Vanity Fair in 2019 about the “vitriolic hyperbole” and “endless castigation” of his family. More than 20 years after OxyContin’s introduction, Elizabeth Sackler, Arthur’s daughter and the benefactor of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, has sought to distance herself from the drug, emphasizing that her father died in 1987, before its introduction. But as Goldin pointed out to Artnet in 2018, Elizabeth’s father came up with the medical-advertising model that would later power OxyContin’s success, and used it to great effect to promote Valium during his lifetime.

Members of the family might quietly understand that, the broader reputation notwithstanding, it remains an alright time to be a Sackler. In an email, Jonathan suggested that Purdue had fallen victim to the same “blame frame” in America that resulted in mass incarceration, Keefe writes. Noting that Last Week Tonight was her son’s favorite show, Jacqueline wrote in an email to one of her lawyers and family members, “Lives of children are being destroyed,” according to the book. But out in the world, some Sacklers have continued to enjoy a variety of careers in creative fields. Although Joss has stated her displeasure at any association between LBV and her husband’s family company, the label has remained in the rotation of some celebrity stylists. Mortimer’s grandson Jeffrey Lefcourt started the bustling restaurant mini-chain The Smith. Decades after Koch’s christening, the Met, while saying the matter is under review, still carries the Sackler name.

“This is a story about impunity,” Keefe said. “This was always gonna be a story where the bad guys get away.” Purdue agreed to an $8-billion-plus settlement with the Department of Justice during the final months of the Donald Trump administration, but in part because the family moved vast sums out of the company before its recent bankruptcy proceedings, the Sackler owners of the company are expected to remain multibillionaires. It appears unlikely that any members of the family will be criminally charged.

Still, Empire of Pain, in its unraveling of the Sacklers’ self-mythology, functions as a record of the damage it might inflict. Early on, the book focuses on Arthur, whom his widow and some of his children have tried to dissociate from Purdue’s actions after his death. The oldest of the original brothers, Arthur envisioned what the family name could mean as he, Mortimer, and Raymond, born to immigrant Jewish parents in Brooklyn, accumulated status and recognition. He became fastidious about its placement at the institutions he donated to. He assembled a world-renowned collection of Chinese art, which his ex-wife regarded as a chance at “the possibility of immortality,” Keefe writes. He had learned the importance of a family name from his own father, and imparted the lesson to his children. In recent years, after the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery was rebranded the National Museum of Asian Art, and with his father’s grandest plans falling apart, Arthur Felix Sackler visited his cousin Richard in Connecticut to scold him for besmirching their name, Keefe recounts.

In 1971, the elder Arthur’s close friend and collaborator, the Spanish physician Félix Martí-Ibáñez, wrote a letter to Richard, who had just graduated from medical school. “I know that throughout your life,” Martí-Ibáñez said, “you will honor the illustrious name you bear.” He had more of a point than he could’ve imagined.

This article has been updated to reflect that LBV and Joss Sackler have disputed that they formally offered Courtney Love more than $100,000 to attend the LBV fashion show. 

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