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Billionaire Rivals Locked In Insane $100 Million Defamation Feud

Ben Yakas

Published Dec 6, 2015

Modified Dec 6, 2015

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Ben Yakas

Published Dec 6, 2015

Modified Dec 6, 2015

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You're not really living up to your potential as an eccentric billionaire until you have an arch-enemy. Sheldon Adelson has his Steve Wynn. Rupert Murdoch had Silvio Berlusconi. Mark Cuban has a lot of them. And now, Canadian fashion magnate Peter Nygard is locked in mortal combat with hedge fund tycoon Louis Bacon in a rivalry turned smear campaign turned $100 million defamation lawsuit.

The Post has all the details of the very personal-sounding dispute, which has been going on for eight years now. Nygard is the founder and chairman of women's fashion house Nygard International who may or may not have unlocked the secret to immortality. He's lived in the Bahamas since 1987 in a 150,000-square-foot mansion "replete with Mayan-inspired statues, a helipad, fake smoking volcanos, a glass ceiling weighing 100,000 pounds, a casino, a disco" and, allegedly, a human aquarium.

Nygard has become known for his debaucherous parties there (including his regular Sunday-afternoon “pamper parties”), which has royally pissed off his neighbor Bacon, who bought an adjacent property in the Bahamas in 2007. Bacon is a married father of seven who founded the hedge fund Moore Capital Management. After years of complaints, Bacon decided to fight fire with fire, purchasing "four Meyer Sound speakers in October 2009 and [blasting] ear-shattering music over the edge." Nygard in turn called police on Bacon, claiming he was in possession of terrorist-grade weaponry (which was never found).

And thus began years of lurid accusations and preposterous lawsuits. When Bacon claimed Nygard had "recklessly overbuilt and artificially extended his shoreline" causing ecological damage (and got fellow Bahama resident Sean Connery to join in a lawsuit to stop Nygard from expanding even more), Nygard countered that Bacon was a white supremacist with familial ties to the KK, and that he staged hate rallies on the island. Nygard even flew in Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to give a speech denouncing Bacon.

This is but the tip of the iceberg: Nygard claims that Bacon was involved in burning down part of his house at one point (“The burn was complete and instantaneous and of suspicious origin,” a Nygard rep told The Post), that Bacon hired his groundskeeper to plant $67,000 worth of cocaine on Nygard’s beachfront, and that Bacon was involved said groundskeeper's death (he was found dead in Bacon’s pool, which Nygard asserted in one lawsuit was "suspicious given that he was an expert swimmer who had previously survived a plane crash in the ocean, miles offshore"). The coroner found that the groundskeeper, who had a history of coronary disease, died from a heart attack.

In his $100 million defamation lawsuit, Bacon accuses Nygard of altering CBS and ABC news footage to depict Bacon as guilty of insider trading, turning his beachfront estate into a “mini-brothel,” and paying for billboards depicting Bacon as a racist.

After years of legal tussling in the Bahamas, Bacon demanded last year that his case against Nygard move to NY (because both men’s companies are headquartered here). This has led, inevitably, to more bickering an accusations being thrown around over the last year.

And this week, Nygard published an open letter to Bacon in two Bahamian newspapers asking for a “global resolution” to years of “bickering, fighting and suing," warning that the legal war could go on for years because "if we are all being honest with ourselves...this is at least partially fueled by pride and a clash of egos." A rep for Bacon told the Post settling was out of the question: "Louis Bacon has no choice since his name has been dragged through the mud and Nygard is unrepentant."

So much for fellow billionaire Richard Branson's advice that you should invite your enemies for lunch.

Tagged

billionaires

lawsuits

louis bacon

peter nygard

rich people problems

Ben Yakas

Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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