Executives from Wynn Resorts answered questions from the state's Gaming Commission for the third day today, with testimony wrapping up. The commission is evaluating the company's response to rape and sexual harassment accusations against the company's founder and former CEO, Steve Wynn. WGBH Radio's Craig LeMoult has been at the Gaming Commission hearings this week. He spoke with WGBH All Things Considered anchor Barbara Howard about what happened at today’s hearing. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Barbara Howard: So remind us again what the commission is looking to get out of these hearings.
Craig LeMoult: Well, they're re-evaluating their original decision that Wynn Resorts is suitable to open and run its new casino in Everett. That's in question, of course, because of multiple allegations against Steve Wynn, who founded the company — he was the CEO — and they became public last year after they were detailed in a Wall Street Journal article.
On top of that, the commission also has to decide whether to approve key executives and board members. That’s what they call qualifiers. So they've been calling them up to testify and sometimes asking some pretty hard questions.
Howard: Well, the executives are on the hot seat. What do they have to say?
LeMoult: From the very beginning, they tried to make it clear that this is a new and transformed company. Steve Wynn resigned after that article came out. He sold all of his stock. And since then, most of the board and the executive positions have been replaced. They say that includes removing anyone who knew about the allegations and failed to investigate them. But the new CEO, Matt Maddox, he's been testifying — he’s really been on the hot seat, as you said — and this week he's trying to present himself as a real reformer.
But he was also there at the company as all this stuff was going down, and he was Steve Wynn’s own pick to succeed him as CEO. And apparently, he was even the best man in Steve Wynn's wedding. So the commission has had a lot of questions about why the company never investigated allegations and why they didn't disclose any of this information to the commission in 2013, when the company was initially approved for this license.
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Howard: OK. That new CEO, Matt Maddox — what did he have to say about all that?
LeMoult: He's consistently said he did not know about the incidents or the settlements. There was a $7.5 million settlement that Steve Wynn made to an employee who said she had been raped by him and that she got pregnant by him in 2005. Maddox testified that the executives who knew about those allegations hid them from him, and he said he learned that after their own investigation, after it all became public. He was asked about that by the commissioner Gayle Cameron. Their exchange went like this:
"Gayle Cameron: What did you do when you went back to work after learning that so many of your senior people had failed to brief and/or given you partial information?
Matt Maddox: I think it's clear what I did. I just went back to make things better, look at our board, and our management team, and our processes.
Gayle Cameron: You continued to work with those senior people who had failed to brief you?"
LeMoult: Again, Maddox said now, those people are no longer with the company.
Howard: Steve Wynn's wife, Elaine, was sort of the star witness today. The commission heard from her — what did she have to say?
LeMoult: Yeah, that's right. Her name has kind of loomed over the last three days of hearings. She had a particularly nasty divorce with Steve Wynn, which was complicated by the fact that she was a co-founder of the company and owned a lot of the stock, and she was involved in a long legal battle with the company.
She testified that she found out about the $7.5 million settlement back in 2009 and she said it was clear when she found out about that that she had something of a double burden, saying, "I had to deal with this accusation, which had not been verified in any fashion, but was horrendous enough in and of itself, and how I would contemplate dealing with this with my daughters and my grandchildren. At the same time, I understood the burden placed upon me as a director of this public company and what would be required of me in that regard."
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LeMoult: She did talk to people at the company at the time. Again, she did not disclose it to the state Gaming Commission in 2013, though. And it came up as part of another lawsuit filed by a different shareholder in 2016, when she filed about that in that lawsuit.
Another interesting note: It came out today that the company actually surveilled Elaine Wynn about that time, actually following her around and spying on her. And the commission did not seem to like the sound of that, or another surveillance mission that was described against someone who had been bad-mouthing the company.
Howard: Well what happens now?
LeMoult: Well they just wrapped up the hearings, and now the commission is going to take some time to make a decision about what to do. Some of the options they're considering include revoking the gaming license of the company, or they could just choose to issue a fine. In Nevada, gaming regulators fined the company $20 million. They might also allow the company to keep its license, but they could require them to drop someone, like CEO Matt Maddox. Meanwhile, the company is on schedule to open their more than $2 billion casino in Everett in June.
Howard: That's WGBH Radio's Craig LeMoult, giving us the latest on the Massachusetts Gaming Commission's hearings into Wynn Resorts' response to sexual assault allegations leveled against its founder and former CEO Steve Wynn.
