Excerpt of Sheila Johnson Co-founded BET Biography...Her Story SOUNDS VERY FAMILIAR...

By the early 1980s, the BET cable network had taken shape and was beginning its meteoric growth. Its founding was a joint enterprise on the part of both Johnsons, and when BET was sold to cable giant Viacom in 2002, even as both their personal and business relationships had become acrimonious, they split the proceeds of the sale equally. In the early years, BET was noted for a variety of programs showcasing the best of African-American culture. Sheila Johnson had a hand in several of those, forming an in-house hip-hop chorus and personally creating the weekly "Teen Summit" talk show, featuring up-front discussion of problems such as the threat of AIDS.

Johnson's official title at BET was executive vice president for corporate affairs, but she was an equal partner with her husband in many respects. Family friend Susan Starrett told the Washington Post that the billion-dollar Johnson fortune couldn't have been built without her work, and Johnson herself, asked by the Post whether she had played a supportive role in her husband's career, answered "Why, yes I did. I always put him first. I knew who he was. I know who he is. I was his best friend and his biggest supporter. I believed in him before he believed in himself."

Yet Johnson was dissatisfied with her role. "I detested that, living up under the cloud of Wife Of. I could not stand going to places, and everything was focused on the man, and the wives were sitting around, like they don't exist. Don't. Exist," she told the Post. Too, she felt alienated by the increasingly raunchy direction of BET's programming in the late 1990s. Some felt she played the role of the conscience of the company, and on a day-to-day basis she was more likely to be found listening to the music of classical composer Maurice Ravel than taking in one of BET's bump-and-grind musical productions. As the Johnsons' marriage deteriorated amidst rumors of Robert Johnson's affair with one or more subordinates, Sheila Johnson (who later lamented to the Post that her husband "had a body count") was fired by her husband in 1999.

Read more: Sheila Crump Johnson Biography - Concentrated on Music, Co-founded BET, Turned to Equestrian Lifestyle, Generously Gave Away Millions http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2418/Johnson-Sheila-Crump.html#ixzz0uKka5HLd