A U.S. appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a $1 million Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuit brought against Steve Wynn, Wynn Resorts Ltd. and several other Wynn affiliates by a former Wynn Las Vegas employee.
Angelica Limcaco, a former salon manager at Wynn Las Vegas who now lives in California, had alleged in her suit that she was coerced into silence by the company in 2005 after reporting to upper management that former CEO Steve Wynn had sexually assaulted one of her employees.
Wynn has repeatedly denied any and all allegations of sexual misconduct.
The recent dismissal was the latest in a multi-year, back-and-forth legal battle between Limcaco and Wynn—the former employee first filed the claim as a civil rights lawsuit in 2018 under the U.S. District Court in Nevada. That suit was tossed in 2019, as the statute of limitations had passed.
Limcaco then broadened her suit to include several new defendants and filed the RICO claim in December 2020 in California, which was also dismissed. Two of those added to the California suit were ML Strategies LLC and former Nevada Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley.
Boston-based ML Strategies was included because of its lobbying efforts leading up to the licensing of Wynn’s Encore Boston Harbor property in 2019, which has come under fresh scrutiny over the last six months.
With regards to Buckley, Limcaco and company argued that she exercised improper influence in getting former Wynn Resorts attorney Elayna Youchah elected to a magistrate judge position in Las Vegas. Youchah later ruled against some of Limcaco’s previous proceedings, which inspired her allegations of collusion between Buckley and Wynn.
The latest ruling, which was handed down by U.S. Circuit Judges Bridget Bade, Danielle Forrest and Ryan Nelson, affirmed the lower court’s decision, saying that Limcaco’s “complicated theory of causation” did not provide sufficient evidence for either her personal harm or the racketeering claim.
However, she and her attorney, Jordan Matthews, have vowed to continue the fight. Matthews told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he and Limcaco are “not deterred by the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,” and that they “look forward to addressing this matter with the United States Supreme Court.”
