His public statements about his father, made in the wake of Joseph’s death, were among the most direct family accounts on record. The language Gary used—”mean and evil,” “never loving and caring”—was not the language of someone working through complicated ambivalence. It was the language of someone who had arrived at a conclusion and was prepared to state it plainly.
Anthony’s Account
Of the five sons who were alive when the will’s contents became public in September 2017, Anthony Joseph Lewis was among the most publicly vocal about his reaction.
Anthony spoke with Inside Edition, the syndicated television newsmagazine, in the period immediately following the public disclosure of the will’s contents. According to the reporting from that interview, Anthony said he was “not surprised” by the exclusion. The statement was notable precisely because of what it implied: that the disinheritance was consistent with a pattern he had already understood. He was not discovering something new about his father’s intentions when the will was disclosed. He was reading, on paper, what he had already understood to be true in practice.
The precise wording of the interview is sourced from reporting that cited Inside Edition’s coverage; the original broadcast could not be independently verified from the sources accessible for this article. What the secondary reporting established was the substance of Anthony’s response: unsurprised, and apparently resigned rather than angry.
Anthony’s reaction was the most documented among the brothers. The others—Ronald, Christopher, and Scott—did not appear to have given comparable on-record interviews in the immediate aftermath of the disclosure, based on the reporting reviewed for this article. The silence of the other brothers was noted in coverage but not explained; it may reflect a choice to stay out of the public record on a painful family matter, or simply the media’s uneven access to people who had not previously cultivated public profiles.