New York hedge fund tycoon Louis Bacon must have been on island time.
A Manhattan judge on Friday ruled that Bacon took too long to file most of the salacious claims in his $100 million defamation suit against his Bahamas neighbor, Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard.
In a blow to Bacon, the court dismissed more than three-quarters of the alleged defamatory statements as being “time-barred” for having happened more than a year before he filed his complaint.
Bacon, who’s been in a decade-long sand fight with his billionaire neighbor in Bahamas’ luxurious Lyford Cay community, finally filed a suit against Nygard in January after their property-line dispute escalated into what Bacon claims was a full-blown campaign to smear his name.
Bacon, the head of hedge fund giant Moore Capital Management, accused Nygard of falsely portraying him as a racist, drug-trafficker and murderer. His complaint contained 135 statements that he alleges were part of Nygard’s war of words.
They range from signs posted along their swanky seaside stretch (“It’s time to throw the trash out! … Say no! to Moore Capital Management Louis ‘KKK’ Bacon”) to stories supposedly planted in the local paper (“This is the same Louis Bacon who had a dead man found in [his] house. A dead man the FBI and DEU was investigating for running guns and drugs out of Bacon’s home.”)
Of course, no defamation suit can call itself modern these days unless it also incorporates social media. Bacon had this covered, too, claiming he felt Nygard’s wrath in Twitter feeds that falsely maligned him as a KKK member and, if possible, worse.
He also charges his image has been uploaded at Nygard’s direction on YouTube, where he’s depicted as a white supremacist, multiple murderer and — ouch! — a trader of inside information.
Nygard has insinuated in response to Bacon’s charges that his neighbor may be behind a “suspicious fire” that destroyed Nygard’s estate after he rebuffed Bacon’s overtures to buy the property.
He also claims to being victimized by “illegal ultra-sonic speakers” — so loud as to precipitate heart palpitations — that Bacon purportedly aims from his premises to undermine Nygard’s fashionable parties.
That’s a lot of dirty tricks, even for the Hatfield and McCoy of the 1 Percent.
Yet their animosity has been so time-consuming that Bacon missed the deadline for 105 claims — or 78 percent — to count as documentary evidence.
Nygard’s legal team hailed the order as “a significant victory” and predicted the remaining claims “will be similarly disposed.”
Bacon’s counsel countered that the 30 claims still within the statute of limitations will more than suffice.
“We are confident that, when Mr. Nygard’s egregious conduct is exposed in court, we will prevail,” a Bacon attorney told The Post.