From 1997 through the guilty plea in 2007, Purdue had distributed only $126 million in cash to the Sacklers. Beginning in 2008, it started to distribute billions. In a 2014 email to Mortimer, Jonathan acknowledged, “We’ve taken a fantastic amount of money out of the business.” If the Sacklers took money from Purdue and moved it out of the country because they knew that eventually a lawsuit might “get through to the family,” then that might be a form of fraud, James contended, and now she wanted to try to claw back some of those funds.
