Recently in the news: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/health/sacklers-purdue-op...
The news in that piece is that NY discovered the transfers at all. The transfers themselves are a decade old. The payments to the Sacklers from Purdue are from 2008-2016 but the lawsuits only date to 2018. All of this is in the article if you read it.
I.e., no self-payments after lawsuits became material threat.
Who's misreading what now?
Those substantial transfers ($1B) were a decade ago.
The sentence you quote does not appear in the NYTimes piece and is, in comparison, peanuts. I do not have access to the Bloomberg piece for full context, but the sentence you quote does not say the movements were self-payments from Purdue rather than just personal transfers between personal accounts. It also does not say all $20M was in 2018; there could be a $1k wire in 2018 for all we know from the single sentence.