■ A judge has tossed out a lawsuit against Steve Wynn and Wynn Resorts executives.
Claims of corruption, bribery unsubstantiated
A California federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed that bribery and corruption sunk a previous case she brought against Steve Wynn and Wynn Resorts executives.
The lawsuit was brought by Angelica Limcaco, a former Wynn salon manager at the Wynn Las Vegas who claimed that she was blacklisted and intimidated into silence after reporting to her supervisors that Wynn had allegedly raped one of her salon workers in 2005.
In an Oct. 29 decision to dismiss the case, U.S. District Judge Ronald
Lew said that Limcaco’s case lacked standing in the state of California and that the claims of bribery and corruption relied upon circumstantial evidence and “implausibly speculative assumptions.”
The California case stems from a previous lawsuit filed by Limcaco in federal court in Nevada in September 2018 in which she said she was fired after reporting the sexual assault allegations to Wynn Resorts executives. Her attorneys said in the lawsuit that the incident that Limcaco reported involved the same employee whose allegations were revealed in a Wall Street Journal story published in 2018 that claimed Wynn pressured a manicurist into sex and later paid her a $7.5 million settlement.
The Nevada case was dismissed in April 2019 by Judge Miranda Du, who said the claims fell outside of the statute of limitations.
In the California case, attorneys for Limcaco pointed to a series of events in an attempt to paint a picture that Wynn Resorts used donations to a nonprofit law office as a way to influence Du’s decision.
In December 2018, a panel was convened to pick a replacement for a retiring magistrate judge. Former Nevada Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley was on the panel. Buckley also serves as the executive director of the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, which had received donations from Wynn Resorts dating back to 2017.
Before Du’s decision came down, Wynn Resorts lawyer Elayna Youchah, who had filed most of the briefs in the case for the company, had