On Monday Wynn Resorts Ltd. filed suit against an unidentified entity for libel in Suffolk Superior Court. The lawsuit contends that someone leaked subpoenas to the media that were related to the City of Boston suing the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC). The allegations include reference to former state police officers who were allegedly given information about a former owner of part of the property that the $1.7 billion Wynn Everett resort is to be built on. The person reportedly had ties to organized crime and the papers claimed that Wynn representative attended a meeting in 2013 where that assertion was made known.
The filing says that the subpoenas were not meant to gather information, rather to spread lies to defame and damage the company’s reputation along with that of Wynn president, Matthew Maddox. It claims the documents were delivered to media before they were served on the people named in the subpoenas.
The Boston Globe is reporting that a spokesperson for Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh claims to have not seen the documents and denies providing them to the press.
The suit does not name the mayor or city but in July Wynn referred to the documents in a letter to the City and indicated his company could sue.
“No individual or company who presents themselves honestly in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by any measure of fair play, should be subjected to the defamatory political abuse that we have experienced, and it is our intention to finally deal with it,” Wynn is said to have asserted in a statement to The Globe.
Lawsuits in the matter of Wynn Everett are not new nor unexpected. Rivals bidding for the license have tried to pull?back Wynn’s success in procuring the license, as happens often when companies gamble millions of dollars to win a casino license. Mayor Walsh has filed to suits attempting to block Wynn’s project – suing the MGC in January for allegedly corrupt licensing practices and again in September seeking to overturn an important environmental approval.