Supreme Court Rejects Trump Donor’s Defamation Lawsuit Against the Associated Press

The Supreme Court doomed a lawsuit from Trump donor Steve Wynn Monday, declining to revisit the defamation case New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).

Wynn, a casino developer, resigned as CEO and chairman of the board of his company Wynn Resorts amid sexual assault allegations in 2018—allegations he denied. He had previously served as vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee and as finance chair of the Republican National Committee. The allegations came amid the #MeToo movement.

Wynn sued the Associated Press in 2018, after the AP published an article about the sexual assault claims of Halina Kuta, now 78. She had claimed that Wynn, now 82, raped her and she gave birth to their daughter in a gas station restroom in the early 1970s.

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The Supreme Court did not give any explanation for refusing to take up the case Monday.

The case traces back to a police report Kuta filed against Wynn in January 2018, and The Associated Press’ article about the claim, published a month later. Police said that too much time had elapsed for them to examine Kuta’s claim that Wynn had assaulted her in 1973 or 1974.

Wynn sued the AP, a reporter, and Kuta for defamation. The casino magnate claimed that the story failed to include details that undercut Kuta’s claims, The Hill reported. The AP did not name Kuta in its original reporting, but she agreed to be named in later reporting.

Clark County District Judge Ronald Israel ruled in 2020 that Kuta had defamed Wynn, and the judge awarded him $1 in nominal damages.

“I find that Mr. Wynn’s testimony is credible and Ms. Kuta’s testimony lacks veracity in numerous areas,” the judge said, the AP reported at the time. He found that Kuta, who represented herself in the trial, “knowingly made a false report” to police.

Kuta acknowledged in court that she asked Wynn to pay her $150 million to settle the case.

Wynn testified that he never met Kuta. The accuser claimed that she—rather than Wynn’s then-wife, Elaine Wynn—was the mother of Wynn’s daughter Kevyn. Kuta also claimed that she was the model for Pablo Picasso’s painting “Le Reve,” or “The Dream,” which Wynn owns.

“You’d have to be delusional not to understand that they were lies and fabrications of the worst order,” Wynn testified in the 2020 trial. “What I’m asking for is to have this miserable fiction finally called for what it is, a miserable fiction.”

The judge noted a birth certificate showing that Kevyn Wynn was born in 1967 to Steve and Elaine Wynn at a Washington, D.C., hospital—several years before Kuta claimed she had been raped.

Picasso painted “Le Reve” in 1932, more than a decade before Kuta had been born.

However, the Nevada Supreme Court cited the state’s anti-SLAPP law—which protects people from defamation claims in order to promote public debate—in dismissing the suit in February 2024, which Wynn then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s dismissal comes after Trump and multiple Supreme Court justices have called for revisiting the key defamation precedent New York Times v. Sullivan.

Justice Clarence Thomas publicly dissented when the Supreme Court refused to hear a defamation case against the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2022, writing that the case of Coral Ridge Ministries justified reconsidering the precedent. Justice Neil Gorsuch has also called for the precedent to be overturned.