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from www.wsj.com – Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis has put his risqué empire into bankruptcy protection to keep Steve Wynn’s Las Vegas resort from picking at those assets to satisfy a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
Francis put GGW Brands LLC and other companies related to the brand under Chapter 11 protection Wednesday in California, listing a $10.3 million debt as disputed in the 12-page bankruptcy petition.
Wynn’s resort has been chasing Francis, 39, for years after he failed to pay a $2 million gambling debt to the hotel during a February 2007 trip. In 2012, the resort got a $7.5 million judgment for defamation “stemming from Francis’s public attack falsely accusing Wynn of deceiving customers,” according to the resort’s lawsuit.
Attorneys for Girls Gone Wild couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Thursday morning.
Attorneys for the Wynn Resort recently shifted strategies to target the assets of his Girls Gone Wild company, held in affiliates called GGW Direct LLC, GGW Brands LLC, GGW Events LLC and GGW Magazine LLC.
“Such entities were not named in the domesticated judgment,” an attorney for those companies said in court papers, noting that Wynn had also asked for a receiver to take over those companies.
“Francis has effectively evaded meaningful collection by making it appear that he has virtually no income or assets, despite his publicly lavish lifestyle,” Wynn attorneys said in the lawsuit. “Wynn has confirmed what it has long suspected, namely that Francis has avoided Wynn’s collection efforts by, among other things, not taking any income and using accounts held by various entities that do business under his ‘Girls Gone Wild’ brand to pay all his personal expenses.”
The bankruptcy filing halts the resort’s collection efforts and will make Judge Sandra R. Klein of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles the dispute’s new referee.
Wynn lawyers said that the soft porn mogul, who once pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of filing a false return and bribery, has skipped lawsuit-related appointments.
“Francis claims to know nothing about his finances, despite living a luxurious lifestyle that includes living in a multi-million dollar home in Bel Air, regular use of a multi-million dollar estate in Mexico, while regularly being seen at expensive restaurants and clubs,” resort attorneys said in court papers.