Hey, stop us if you’ve heard this one: A gazillionaire real estate mogul who has built hotels and casinos in Las Vegas was accused of sexually harassing and assaulting dozens of women going back to the 1970s. He got mad, not at himself for alleged behavior that made him a walking lawsuit waiting to happen, but at media outlets that had the temerity to report on the allegations. The nerve! Just because the allegations were news about a well-known public figure!
Now, instead of crawling off to his shame closet and thinking about what he has (ALLEGEDLY) done, the mogul is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a 60-year-old legal precedent that has long protected media outlets from being sued willy-nilly by deep-pocketed assholes who demand attention but get very, very butthurt if any of it is even the teensiest bit less than laudatory.
Ha ha, no, it’s not Donald Trump (THIS TIME). It is Steve Wynn, billionaire casino mogul and purveyor of the world’s most obvious hair dyes. On Friday, Wynn filed a petition with the Supreme Court, in which he asked the court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that established limits on defamation lawsuits and reasserted the importance of the First Amendment to journalists’ work.
Naturally, that means conservatives have long hated Sullivan. Getting it overturned so that rich people won’t ever have to read another negative word about themselves in The New York Times has been a long-term goal of the conservative movement. Now, with the Trump-stocked Supreme Court moving to give its wingnut brethren everything they have ever wanted no matter how nonsensical or in conflict with settled law and precedent, Steve Wynn is taking the first shot at fulfilling their wish.
Let us travel back in time, to the halcyon days of 2018 and Trump’s first term, which compared to his second is starting to feel like a fucking golden age. The #MeToo movement was going full bore when the Wall Street Journal broke a story about dozens of allegations of “sexual misconduct” leveled against Wynn over the course of several decades. Female employees of his casinos started coming forward with stories about times Wynn had groped or propositioned or pressured them into sex. The board of his company announced they would investigate the allegations.
Wynn resigned a few days later. Before he did so, he denied everything, accused his ex-wife of being behind the accusations, and released a statement that included this passage:
“We find ourselves in a world where people can make allegations, regardless of the truth, and a person is left with the choice of weathering insulting publicity or engaging in multi-year lawsuits. It is deplorable for anyone to find themselves in this situation.”
He might as well have thrown in a “Chicks, man.”
As happens in these situations, more stories started coming out about Wynn. A few weeks after his resignation, the Associated Press published a story in which a woman claimed she had borne Wynn’s child after he raped her sometime in the 1970s. When the other allegations broke, she had gone to the Las Vegas Police Department to swear out a complaint. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations on such charges is 20 years, so the police couldn’t investigate them.
Wynn, in his wounded-rich-guy fury, promptly sued his accuser for defamation. A court determined that her accusations were “fanciful,” she had indeed defamed Wynn, and awarded him a token $1 in damages.
Then Wynn decided he would also sue the AP and the reporter who wrote the story for defamation, arguing that they had not put in enough details from the accuser’s statement to police that might have cast doubt on her version of events. Courts in Nevada rejected the argument, citing the state’s anti-SLAPP laws and saying the AP, acting without malice, wrote the story in a “good faith effort to inform their readers regarding an issue of clear public interest.”
So, fine. Wynn doesn’t like that the AP wrote the story, but it was public news, they weren’t trying to libel him, thus they did not meet the “actual malice” standard required by New York Times v. Sullivan, the First Amendment holds, yadda yadda yadda.
Which brings us to this week, and the writ of certiorari Wynn filed at SCOTUS. In it, he asked the court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, arguing that the protections the case granted have gone too far, and that Sullivan “encourages people to libel first and question never.”
Also, there’s this:
Sullivan is not equipped to handle the world as it is today—media is no longer controlled by companies that employ legions of factcheckers before publishing an article. Instead, everyone in the world has the ability to publish any statement with a few keystrokes.
True! Just writing a bunch of shit on Twitter does not (necessarily!) make you a journalist. But if Wynn wants to go after an outlet that does not seem to employ factcheckers, Fox News is right there.
Unfortunately, if SCOTUS takes this up, there are already at least two justices who would like to overturn Sullivan. One is Neil Gorsuch. The other is Clarence Thomas, who has previously said that the Court should revisit the case. Is there anyone anywhere in America who wonders why Clarence fucking Thomas would want to make it harder for the media to report on salacious stories that might cast a person in a bad light?
Of course, if you’re a public official who manages to not violate a bunch of ethics rules by taking vacations paid for by billionaires or hitting on your employees by gabbing endlessly about your extensive porn collection, then you wouldn’t have an issue with the news media reporting on it. Just a thought for the future.
Steve Wynn is 83 years old, retired in Florida like all old rich men, and has more money than he probably knows what to do with. And he’s spending those precious golden years chasing after the AP because a journalist informed the public that there was a police report with his name on it. Shouldn’t he be playing golf or losing money at a greyhound track in Hialeah or something?
What a legacy Wynn has a shot at leaving behind, though: a string of tacky casinos to hoover money from the pockets of gambling degenerates, a reputation as an arrogant sex pest, and weakening free speech protections against journalism outlets. Whew, he’s going to need an extra-large tombstone to fit all that on there.
[Supreme Court / Nevada Independent]
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