| Name | Gerald M. Levin |
| Page created by | Wiki Bot |
| Page created at | 23-10-2024 |
Gerald M. Levin (May 6, 1939 – March 13, 2024) was an American media businessman. Levin was involved in brokering the merger between AOL and Time Warner in 2000, at the height of the dot-com bubble, a merger which was ultimately disadvantageous to Time Warner and described as "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America."[1]
Levin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family of Russian and Romanian origins. His father was a "butter-and-eggs man" and his mother was a piano teacher. He lived as a child in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in Upper Darby and then Overbrook Hills. After graduating second in his class at Lower Merion High School, where he was named to the Honor Society, he attended Haverford College. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1963.
Levin was married three times and fathered five children. His first wife was Carol Needleman; they divorced in 1970. In 1970, he married Barbara J. Riley; they divorced in 2003. His third wife was Laurie Ann Perlman,; they divorced in 2020.
One of his children, Jonathan Levin, a 31-year-old high school English teacher at Taft High School in the Bronx, was murdered on May 31, 1997, during a robbery by one of his former students. The student, Corey Arthur, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to the maximum allowed term of 25 years to life in prison in November 1998, with the judge concluding that Arthur had taken sadistic pleasure in the crime and shown no remorse. An alleged accomplice, Montoun Hart, was acquitted on the same charges in February 1999. While Hart had written a confession, jurors were not able to find out how it was obtained and felt it was unreliable.
The murder occurred after Jonathan had mentioned in the classroom that his father was Time Warner head Gerald Levin. Prosecutors said Arthur and Hart, assuming that Jonathan was wealthy, stole Jonathan's bank card and tortured him to obtain the account's PIN, obtaining about $800 from the account.
Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in The Bronx, New York City, is named after the murdered teacher.
Levin died at a hospital on March 13, 2024, having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease prior to his death. He was 84.