- A hedge fund manager was awarded $203 million in damages after being defamed by former neighbor Peter Nygard.
- Disgraced fashion mogul Nygard accused Louis Bacon of arson, insider trading and links to the KKK.
A hedge fund billionaire has been awarded $203 million after a New York court ruled he was defamed by his former Bahamas neighbor Peter Nygard following a decade-long feud ignited by a shared driveway.
Nygard, a disgraced fashion mogul facing several sex trafficking charges, was ordered by a New York court-appointed judge to pay the biggest defamation settlement in the state's history to Moore Capital Management founder Louis Bacon after peddling several wild allegations.
Arguments between Bacon and Nygard began when the two were neighbours in the gated Lyford Cay community on Clifton Bay in the Bahamas.
Bacon complained that Nygard, who used a driveway owned by Bacon, held several disruptive parties at his residence, while Nygard accused Bacon of scuppering his redevelopment plans after a fire, per the Financial Times.
This gradually escalated into increasingly vicious attacks by Canadian fashion mogul Nygard, with Bacon's lawyers saying he personally spent $15 million on a smear campaign against Bacon.
In the initial complaint filed in 2015, Bacon said Nygard had hired journalists to peddle conspiracies about the hedge fund manager, including that Bacon had participated in insider trading, that he was linked to the death of his house manager, that he was responsible for a fire at Nygard's property, and that he was involved in the Ku Klux Klan.
"Nygard and his sidekicks have alleged on a number of occasions that ancestors of mine living in the 19th and 18th centuries, whom I of course, never knew, were associated with racist groups or slaveholding," Bacon wrote at the time.
According to the FT, Judge former U.S. District Judge Layn Phillips said the "overwhelming" and "truly stunning" nature of the evidence brought forward warranted the record sum.
"Any one of these would have been a significant assault on his character; the combination of all four depicted him as an evildoer of the highest order," the referee said in his ruling, per the Wall Street Journal.
Lawyers told the court Bacon had spent more than $50 million in legal fees bringing several defamation cases against Nygard.
The settlement is a massive figure for an individual defamation case. By comparison, Fox News recently settled its mammoth defamation case brought by Dominion for a comparable $787.5 million.
Nygard was accused by the Department of Justice in 2020 of using his Bahamas property to carry out "pamper parties" targeting dozens of victims. The allegations have wiped out his business empire.
Nygard's lawyers didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.