Gov. Brian Sandoval to marry Las Vegas woman on Saturday

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval is getting married on Saturday to Lauralyn McCarthy of Las Vegas.

The governor, who is finishing his second and final term in office, announced the engagement and wedding on Tuesday.

“The happy couple requests privacy for themselves and their families during this special time,” the governor’s spokeswoman said in a statement.

The two will be married in Lake Tahoe.

McCarthy, a 1992 journalism graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno, works as the vice president of new markets at Aristocrat Technologies, a gaming machine producer.

This spring, McCarthy returned to UNR to deliver a commencement address, which Sandoval also attended.

McCarthy spoke to graduates about how “a well-rounded education can prove to be the difference in achieving professional success and in understanding a dynamic and ever-changing world,” according to the school.

“You see the world with a humanistic view looking for truth with an ethical core and weighing today’s decisions with a foundational knowledge of history: its greatest moments, its most turbulent times, and moments of pure evil against our fellow man,” she said in the speech.

A gaming executive for 24 years, she also serves as a board member of Global Gaming Women. In a 2016 article for Global Gaming Business Magazine, McCarthy detailed her rise through the ranks. At age 23, she worked at IGT as an international management trainee. Of the five trainees at the time, she was the only woman, she wrote.

She recalled being sent to Latin America to work, alone.

“I was once detained in Colombia and spent time in other unstable and unsafe countries with market potential. Three years later IGT had offices in Argentina, Peru and Brazil, and significant presence in new markets,” she wrote.

At 28, McCarthy started a slot machine route from scratch before she was hired by Scientific Games. She’s been with Aristocrat Technologies since 2017, according to her Linkedin profile.

McCarthy also is a board member of Opportunity Village, a nonprofit that serves Southern Nevadans with intellectual disabilities and a trustee with Desert Research Institute. She’s been on the board since 2013, she told Vegas Seven in 2016.

“I have two severely disabled siblings, and my family has spent our whole lives looking for the best quality of life for them. Opportunity Village is unique on the planet for the services it provides to the adult disabled. And it’s all grassroots, started by Las Vegas families,” she said at the time. “Every year … it is changing the way disabled adults live.”

She has received the Great Women of Gaming Proven Leader Award and University of Nevada, Reno Alumni’s Professional Achievement Award.

Sandoval, 55, and first wife, Kathleen, finalized their divorce this year after 27 years of marriage, citing demands of life in the public eye. The two were college sweethearts who married in 1990 and have three children together.

Sandoval’s predecessor, Jim Gibbons, was the first governor in Nevada history to get divorced while in office.

A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the location of the wedding.

Contact Meghin Delaney at 702-383-0281 or mdelaney@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MeghinDelaney on Twitter.