Canadian ex-fashion mogul Peter Nygard convicted of sexual assault

Peter Nygard, the founding father of one in every of Canada’s largest clothes manufacturers, was discovered responsible on Sunday on 4 counts of sexual assault, a court docket introduced in Toronto.

The jury, which deliberated for 5 days, additionally acquitted Finnish-Canadian Nygard on one rely of sexually assaulting one of many ladies who testified on the seven-week trial, and one rely of forcible confinement, in line with Ontario’s Superior Court docket of Justice.

The fees towards the one-time vogue mogul, now 82, concerned 4 ladies and a 16-year-old woman and date from incidents that occurred between 1988 and 2005.

The trial addressed the primary in a collection of fees he faces for intercourse crimes towards a number of ladies in Canada and the US and spanning a number of a long time.

“I do know it’s been a protracted and arduous case for you,” Justice Robert Goldstein advised the jury.

On leaving the courthouse, Nygard’s lawyer Brian Greenspan didn’t rule out the potential for interesting the decision.

Throughout closing arguments Greenspan had stated the case was constructed on “contradictions and innuendo” and he panned the prosecution’s portrayal of his shopper.

“To explain Peter Nygard as an evil predator, a Jekyll and Hyde persona who, via wealth and energy, lured ladies to his den of iniquity and compelled ladies to conform along with his sexual calls for … is neither truthful nor correct,” he stated.

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Greenspan stated the complainants’ testimony was at instances “painfully absurd,” and he instructed that 4 of the ladies had been motivated by monetary acquire or “gold-digging,” as that they had admitted to being concerned in a US class-action lawsuit towards him.

Prosecutor Ana Serban, alternatively, stated Nygard on the stand was evasive and inconsistent, and that his reminiscence was unreliable and selective.

Serban pointed to “remarkably related accounts” of his 5 accusers, unbiased of one another, about how they met Nygard, had been invited to his workplace constructing and “how he sexually assaulted them in his non-public bed room suite.”

“The similarities defy coincidence,” she stated. “It’s a sample of behaviour.”

Testifying in his personal defence, Nygard didn’t recall assembly or realizing 4 of his accusers, and insisted he didn’t rape any of the 5.

“The kind of allegations that had been stated and had been described is the kind of conduct that I do know that I’ve by no means completed, I by no means would do,” he advised the court docket, even whereas admitting that his reminiscence had turn out to be “very fuzzy” with age.

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Nygard, who in 1967 based the agency that was to turn out to be Nygard Worldwide, has been held in detention since his arrest in 2020.

He should now face related fees in Quebec and Manitoba, in addition to extradition to the US, the place he has been accused of sexually assaulting dozens of girls and ladies, racketeering and trafficking.