Toward the end of January, a Wall Street Journal report detailed decades of alleged sexual misconduct by Republican National Committee finance chairman Steve Wynn against his casino employees. While the RNC as a whole is reserving judgment — and keeping Wynn’s money — several Republican politicians have already distanced themselves from Wynn. A new report now reveals that the claims nearly surfaced in the Las Vegas Review-Journal two decades ago, but the report was mysteriously killed following contact with the paper by Wynn’s attorneys.
According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal itself, the 1998 story would have detailed some abuses by Wynn but was spiked and deleted from the newspaper’s computer system. According to Carri Geer, the reporter who wrote the original story, two waitresses at Wynn’s Mirage casino filed a lawsuit against Wynn and the company for sexual harassment, among other things. While researching the story, the newspaper paid for the two women to undergo a polygraph test with this followup:
After the polygraph results came back, Geer, who is now the Review-Journal’s metro editor, said she was ordered to delete the story she had written. But she saved a printout of the story, the court records from the case, the polygraph results and the $600 bill for the polygraph examinations.
However, Geer doesn’t remember who ordered the story to be stopped and deleted. According to files she kept personally, an attorney for the paper reviewed the article and suggested multiple edits and cuts, including changes made to a waitress’ claim that Wynn had pressured her into sex. Geer also said she was called into a meeting with the newspaper’s publisher and attorneys representing Wynn. The story was killed shortly thereafter, and Wynn has continued to deny any wrongdoing.
(Via Las Vegas Review Journal)