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The Nevada Supreme Court on Thursday ended a defamation lawsuit brought by casino mogul Steve Wynn against The Associated Press in 2018, rejecting Wynn’s bid to get a jury to hear his claim that he was defamed by an AP story about accounts to Las Vegas police from two women who alleged he committed sexual misconduct.
The seven-member court upheld a February ruling by a three-judge panel citing state anti-SLAPP law, or “strategic lawsuits against public participation." Nevada is among most states and the District of Columbia with statutes blocking lawsuits that are filed to intimidate or silence critics.
That ruling said anti-SLAPP statutes “were designed to limit precisely the type of claim at issue here, which involves a news organization publishing an article in a good faith effort to inform their readers regarding an issue of clear public interest.”
In what the unanimous court said Thursday was an effort to clarify the law, Justice Ron Parraguirre wrote that Wynn, as a public figure, needed to show “clear and convincing evidence to reasonably infer that the publication was made with actual malice."
“The public had an interest in understanding the history of misconduct alleged to have been committed by one of the most recognized figures in Nevada,” the opinion said, “and the article directly relates to that interest.”
Attorneys who represent Wynn personally and those who handled the case did not respond to email and telephone messages seeking comment about the ruling by the state's highest court.
“The Associated Press is very pleased with the Nevada Supreme Court’s decision," Lauren Easton, AP vice president of corporate communications, said in a statement.
Dominic Gentile, a veteran Nevada lawyer well-known for his work in First Amendment law, said the ruling “will make it even more difficult for a public figure to bring an action over expressive conduct.”
“In most cases, the standard is ‘a preponderance of evidence’ that a lawsuit is being brought to stifle speech,” he said. “This case has taken that and raised the bar for someone who is a public figure to not get thrown out of court.”
Gentile has been an attorney in the state since 1979 and has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd School of Law. Malice, he said, means “you know it’s false or you didn’t do enough to determine that it was.”
Wynn, now 82 and living in Florida, is the billionaire developer of a luxury casino empire in the U.S. and the Chinese gambling enclave of Macao. He has consistently denied sexual misconduct allegations, which were first reported in January 2018 by the Wall Street Journal.
He resigned as CEO of Wynn Resorts Ltd. after the reports became public, divested company shares and quit the corporate board. Last year, he cut ties to the industry he helped shape in Las Vegas, agreeing with Nevada gambling regulators to pay a $10 million fine, with no admission of wrongdoing.
In a flurry of settlements in 2019, the Nevada Gaming Commission fined Wynn's former company a record $20 million for failing to investigate claims of sexual misconduct made against him before he resigned, and Massachusetts gambling regulators fined the company and a top executive $35.5 million for failing to disclose while applying for a license for a Boston-area resort that there had been sexual misconduct allegations against Wynn.
Wynn Resorts agreed in November 2019 to accept $20 million in damages from Wynn and $21 million more from insurance carriers on behalf of current and former employees of Wynn Resorts to settle shareholder lawsuits accusing company directors of failing to disclose misconduct allegations.
Those agreements also included no admission of wrongdoing.
Wynn filed his defamation lawsuit in April 2018 against AP, one of its reporters and one of the women, Halina Kuta. Kuta filed claims to police that Wynn raped her in the 1970s in Chicago and that she gave birth to their daughter in a gas station restroom.
Neither accuser was identified in the AP report. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in documents obtained by AP under a public records request. Las Vegas police refused to provide additional details and said too much time had elapsed since Kuta said the events occurred in 1973 or 1974. No charges were ever filed against Wynn.
The AP typically does not publish names of people who say they are victims of sexual assault, but Kuta agreed to be named in later news reports.
Wynn attorneys argued that the article, which cited police documents, failed to fully describe elements of Kuta’s account that would have cast doubt on her allegation.
A trial court judge later ruled that Kuta defamed Wynn with her claims, which the judge termed “totally fanciful,” and awarded Wynn a nominal $1 in damages.
