Mazzeo levels harsher claims against Gibbons

By Jeff German

Saturday, April 25, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Chrissy Mazzeo has filed court papers seeking to amend her civil rights lawsuit again, this time to directly name Gov. Jim Gibbons as a participant in a cover-up conspiracy she alleges occurred after her October 2006 encounter with the governor outside a Las Vegas restaurant.

Mazzeo also says she was “blacklisted” as a cocktail waitress by the casino industry after a crush of publicity over her claims that Gibbons had assaulted her outside McCormick & Schmick’s three weeks before he was elected governor.

She has submitted an eight-page affidavit in federal court saying that she had an impeccable work record and was in demand as a waitress on the Strip before the late-night incident, but was pressured in the days afterward to quit her job at the Bellagio and was turned away by more than two dozen other casinos.

Mazzeo and her attorney, Robert Kossack, have asked a judge to allow them to amend the complaint to allege that she was blacklisted after Gibbons and his high-powered political strategist, Sig Rogich, mounted a campaign to make her out to be an opportunist and a liar.

In her amended complaint, Mazzeo seeks to tie Gibbons to several aspects of the alleged cover-up. Prosecutors ultimately decided against charging Gibbons after reviewing the evidence gathered by police.

Previously, Mazzeo alleged that Rogich and her former friend, Pennie Mossett-Puhek, conspired, through “threats and intimidation,” to get her to back off the assault claims in an attempt to derail the criminal investigation. But now she wants to add Gibbons, his attorney Don Campbell and former Sheriff Bill Young, who oversaw the police investigation, to that alleged conspiracy. All five are defendants in the lawsuit and have denied wrongdoing.

Mazzeo also is now alleging that Gibbons, Campbell and Young conspired with Rogich to persuade Mossett-Puhek and others present during a night of drinking at McCormick & Schmick’s to lie about what took place so as to discredit Mazzeo’s version of the events.

And Mazzeo wants to add Rogich to an alleged clandestine effort by Campbell and Young to destroy parking garage videotapes that she contends should have shown physical contact between her and Gibbons that night. Rogich had hired Campbell to defend the governor and served as Young’s top political strategist.

Attorneys for all five defendants have filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that it has failed to back up the allegations of a cover-up with any facts and that the lawsuit doesn’t point to any specific conspiratorial acts committed by the defendants.

In court papers Friday, the governor’s attorneys opposed Mazzeo’s move to file the amended complaint on similar grounds.

“Mazzeo’s proposed amendment alleges no facts establishing an agreement or meeting of the minds between Gibbons and any other named defendant to violate Mazzeo’s constitutional rights,” attorneys Pat Lundvall and Carla Higginbotham wrote.

But in her affidavit, Mazzeo referred to a set of intriguing circumstances in the hours after her 2006 encounter with Gibbons that she contends bolsters her case.

Mazzeo alleges that Mossett-Puhek tried to persuade her to stop pursuing charges against Gibbons and tell police the incident was nothing but a “misunderstanding.”

The afternoon after the incident, Mazzeo wrote, she did tell police she no longer wanted to press charges, and the next day Young was quoted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal as saying, “No crime occurred. It’s just a misunderstanding.”

Mazzeo attached a transcript of her interview with a detective that shows she never even implied the incident was a misunderstanding.