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Everyone's favorite pornographer, Joe Francis, is engaged in a court battle with The Wynn resort in Las Vegas over a disputed casino debt amounting to about $2 million. After being told by a Nevada Supreme Court judge that he has to pay it, Francis filed suit in an L.A. court yesterday claiming that he's being prosecuted maliciously.
The Daily News reports that Francis incurred the debt in 2007. In addition to filing the lawsuit, Francis' lawyer, David Houston, has said that he will ask the state Supreme Court judge to reconsider. The dispute has been in and out of the courts several times. A judge in the Clark County District Court system ruled that Francis hadn't committed a felony by not paying, and a state court judge dismissed criminal theft and bad check charges against Francis (an unpaid casino debt is essentially the same thing as a bad check in Nevada).
Francis' lawsuit alleges that The Wynn and Steve Wynn are out of line in asking him to cough up the money. He says that Wynn deliberately lied to prosecutors about the debt, and that The Wynn tried to collect the money from a bank account of Francis' that they knew to be closed.