Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has sued a Wall Street Journal reporter for libel over a December article in which the Republican financier was described as “foul-mouthed,” the newspaper detailed Monday.
The article was co-written by Kate O’Keefe and Alexandra Berzon but the suit, filed Feb. 22 in Hong Kong, only names O’Keefe and says Adelson is seeking “damages, including aggravated, exemplary and special damages.” O’Keefe reports for the Journal out of Hong Kong.
The article provided a breakdown of a wrongful termination suit filed against Adelson by a former executive.
From the Journal:
The article details the fight playing out in U.S. courts between Mr. Adelson, the chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., LVS +0.59% and Steve Jacobs, the former CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Macau operations, who filed a wrongful termination lawsuit in 2010. The company has denied the allegations made in the wrongful-termination suit. The article ran under the headline “Fired Executive Rankles Casino Industry” in the U.S. edition of the newspaper, but also appeared in overseas editions and on WSJ.com.
The article, which ran in early December, contrasted Mr. Jacobs, “a 6-foot-5-inch-tall Ivy League graduate who colleagues say rarely curses,” with Mr. Adelson, “a scrappy, foul-mouthed billionaire from working-class Dorchester, Mass.”
