THE EPSTEIN CLASS
Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard pleads guilty in Quebec sex assault case
Associated Press
Mon, July 13, 2026
FILE - Former fashion executive Peter Nygard, seen through a police vehicle window, arrives at a courthouse in Toronto, Oct. 3, 2023. (Cole Burston/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
MONTREAL (AP) — Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard pleaded guilty Monday to sexual assault and forcible confinement in Quebec, the latest conviction in the downfall of the founder of the once-global Nygard International clothing company. Nygard also faces U.S. racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
The 84-year-old appeared by video from an Ontario prison, where he is serving an 11-year sentence after a Toronto jury convicted him in 2023 of sexually assaulting four women. He also faces extradition to the United States on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
Quebec Crown prosecutor Jérôme Laflamme said Nygard's plea came unexpectedly ahead of what had been scheduled as a 10-day judge-alone trial.
"Mr. Nygard's change of heart was quite sudden," Laflamme told reporters, adding the complainant had been prepared to testify.
Evidence presented by the prosecution, which the defense did not contest, showed Nygard took advantage of his position as a renowned fashion designer to lure young women.
It says the victim, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, met Nygard in a bar when she was 18. She wanted to be a fashion model.
They met for lunch at her workplace to discuss her career, and he invited her to his Montreal penthouse, saying he had forgotten his keys. Once in the penthouse, he locked her in the bedroom and sexually assaulted her.
According to the court documents, Nygard told the victim she could move to the Bahamas and promised her a life of luxury under the condition that she would have sex with him and other women.
The events took place between November 1997 and November 1998.
Quebec prosecutors charged Nygard in 2022 with one count of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement.
Nygard, who immigrated to Canada from Finland as a child, built a global fashion empire and hosted lavish parties at his Bahamas estate, Nygard Cay, before his business collapsed amid sexual assault allegations that led to investigations in Canada and the United States.
Judge Nathalie Fafard accepted evidence of Nygard's Toronto conviction after finding similarities between the two cases.
Defense lawyer Gerri Wiebe said Nygard chose not to contest the Quebec charges before his pending extradition to the United States. She said he is in frail health and argued that transferring him now could endanger his life.
U.S. prosecutors allege Nygard spent about 25 years using his fashion company, employees and financial resources to recruit women and underage girls in the United States, Canada and the Bahamas for sexual exploitation. He has pleaded not guilty to the U.S. charges.
Sentencing was postponed pending a medical assessment. The case returns to court Oct. 2, when lawyers are expected to present a joint sentencing recommendation.
Wiebe said the United States can only extradite Nygard once his legal matters in Canada are settled. She added that postponing the sentence ensures that Nygard can remain in the country.
Disgraced Canadian mogul guilty of additional sexual assault
AFP
Mon, July 13, 2026
Disgraced Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard has been convicted of several sexual assaults spanning decades (Cole BURSTON)
Peter Nygard, the founder of one of Canada's largest clothing brands, was found guilty on Monday of sexual assault, an additional conviction for the disgraced ex-mogul who victimized women and girls over decades.
Nygard, 84, built a retail empire hawking blouses and slacks across Canada and the United States but used that status to perpetrate sexual violence, sometimes luring women with a false promise of modelling work.
Nygard was given an 11-year sentence after being convicted in a Toronto court in November 2023 of sexually assaulting three women and a 16-year-old girl between 1988 and 2005.
He was found guilty of a separate crime in a Montreal court on Monday after his lawyers did not contest allegations of sexual assault and forcible confinement.
Prosecutor Jerome Laflamme told reporters the scheduled 10-day trial over the Montreal charges "will not take place" and that Nygard had been "found guilty by the court," with sentencing to be decided at a later date.
The criminal acts occurred at Nygard's Montreal penthouse between November 1997 and November 1998, court records show.
The Nygard case has drawn some parallels to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as both men were accused of committing abuses at lavish Caribbean properties.
Nygard threw parties at his home in the Bahamas -- a Mayan-inspired playground with fake volcanoes.
US prosecutors are seeking to extradite Nygard to stand trial over a range of alleged crimes, including the hosting of "pamper parties" where minor girls were drugged and women assaulted if they did not comply with his sexual demands.
bs/jgc
How US commerce secretary's Epstein links were uncovered by British whistleblower
Andrew Verity - BBC News Investigations correspondent;
Rob Byrne - File on 4 Investigates; Ben Milne - BBC News
Mon, July 13, 2026 at 11:02 PM MDT
Howard Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary by President Trump in 2025 [Getty Images]
A British man has told the BBC how he unearthed evidence indicating that his former employer, Howard Lutnick - now US commerce secretary - failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.
Simon Andriesz, previously a managing director at a Wall Street firm, discovered an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein had discussed the prospects of a start-up business they were both involved in.
Andriesz shared his findings - from the millions of released Epstein files - with US politicians on the influential House Oversight Committee, ahead of an appearance there by Lutnick in May.
Lutnick told the committee that, to the best of his knowledge, he had only learned this year that Epstein had been an investor in the firm. Speaking on his behalf, the US Commerce Department told us there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
Andriesz also discovered in the files that one of Lutnick's firms had made plans in 2013 to go into business with another figure linked to Epstein, the then-Prince Andrew, by commercially exploiting the contacts the former UK trade envoy had made.
"What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m... to basically buy a prince," he tells File on 4 Investigates.
Searching 3.5 million documents
"I was completely shocked," says Andriesz, describing the moment when he discovered his own name in the Epstein files - a massive collection of documents, photos, video and emails relating to the notorious sex offender, released by the US government in the past year.
The specific files in which Andriesz appeared related to interviews he had given to the FBI while in dispute with his former employer, BGC Partners - a financial brokerage firm, part of Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald group.
In 2016, Andriesz had raised concerns internally about accounting irregularities at the firm. He was sacked in 2017, but some of his allegations later led to BGC being ordered to pay a $3m (£2.24m) penalty by the US derivatives regulator for "numerous supervision, reporting, and record-keeping violations".
Simon Andriesz, now living in Cornwall, has been in dispute with his former employers in the US for several years [BBC]
BGC told us that Andriesz's allegations lacked credibility and were "categorically false". It said the claims had been investigated by authorities in several jurisdictions which, according to BGC, had not substantiated the allegations.
Andriesz spoke to the FBI about BGC, and about the firm's ultimate boss, Lutnick, in 2020-21 - after Epstein had killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The Epstein files show Andriesz alleged that Lutnick had had undeclared business ties with Epstein. The FBI did not investigate these accusations.
Andriesz tells the BBC he was disappointed that few had seemed interested in what he had discovered: "I'm exposing Howard Lutnick's relationship, financial links, with Jeffrey Epstein, and there's no interest."
Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges [Getty Images]
In 2025, Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary, at which point he sold his shares in Cantor Fitzgerald and passed control of the firm to his sons.
On a podcast later that year, he claimed he had only ever met Epstein once, 20 years earlier, when they had been neighbours in Manhattan, and that he had found his behaviour "gross".
However, with the Epstein files' release, inconsistencies began to appear in this version of events. A photo showed Lutnick with Epstein on the sex offender's Caribbean island, Little St James, in December 2012.
Four years earlier in Florida, Epstein had been sent to prison for two charges of soliciting prostitution - including one with a minor.
Andriesz suspected there was yet more to find in the Epstein files that could back up his claims - if only people knew where to look in the 3.5 million pages of documents.
"Everyone was searching 'Lutnick'," he says. He knew, though, that Cantor Fitzgerald executives preferred to use initials rather than full names in their emails.
Andriesz searched for "HWL" (Howard William Lutnick) and found emails sent to and from Epstein in 2018. Epstein had talked directly to Lutnick about a digital advertising company called Adfin, in which he and Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had both invested.
Andriesz spotted correspondence where Epstein had directly asked the HWL account: "what do you think the prospects for adfin are?"
Lutnick responded: "Producing revenue finally. This is their year. Next 12 months they need to become economically self-sufficient."
Andriesz then shared this information with US politicians on the House Oversight Committee, the US Congress's main investigatory committee.
Lutnick agreed to appear before the committee in an off-camera hearing in May.
He has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and he told the committee: "I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities. The survivors of his crimes deserve our respect and support."
Lutnick repeated his claim to the committee, that he did not know until this year that Epstein had been a co-investor in Adfin. However, Democrats on the committee accused him of lying and all 21 signed a letter demanding his resignation.
The US Commerce Department told us the allegations against Lutnick were "a desperate partisan distraction from the historic work of this Administration", adding that the commerce secretary has answered hundreds of questions before Congress and there is "no evidence of wrongdoing or legitimate cause for concern".
'To buy a prince'
Another discovery Andriesz made in the Epstein files concerned Lutnick's association with two other people who knew Epstein well - the then-Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson.
Lutnick had been friends with Ferguson since the 1990s and was a guest at Princess Eugenie's wedding in 2018.
Documents in the files revealed his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had a plan in 2013 "to buy a prince", as Andriesz puts it, and exploit Andrew's contacts with wealthy individuals and sovereign institutions.
Sarah Ferguson and Howard Lutnick pictured in 2014 [Getty Images]
Under the proposed terms of the deal, £1m would be loaned to a firm controlled by the prince, which would then be bound to do business exclusively with Cantor Fitzgerald.
Epstein warned the prince's business aide, David Stern, against the deal, the files reveal. One of his concerns was about the exclusivity of the deal - under its terms, Andrew could only introduce wealthy clients to Cantor Fitzgerald and no-one else.
The files indicate that advisers to both Lutnick and the former prince discussed the deal for four months, from August to November 2013, but it came to nothing.
Asked about the deal, Cantor Fitzgerald did not deny the talks took place but told the BBC it did not go into business with the former prince. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles in November 2025 [Getty Images]
A world away
Andriesz, now 57, lives in a quiet Cornish seaside village, a world away from Wall Street. He says the litigation of the past decade has had a devastating effect on his career, his finances and his health.
Despite winning a financial award of $420,000 (£313,000) for his whistleblowing from the US regulator, Andriesz says authorities in the US and UK have failed to hold BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald properly to account - or protect him from retaliation by his former employer for his reports of wrongdoing.
BGC says it has strong policies protecting whistleblowers from retaliation and denies retaliating against Andriesz. It says it has had no involvement with him since his departure other than responding to litigation he has initiated.
It maintains Andriesz's employment was terminated after he refused to follow medical advice, declined to perform essential job duties, rejected reasonable accommodation, and ultimately abandoned his role.
Speaking on behalf of Lutnick, the White House said: "The BBC's pathetic and desperate attempt to slander Secretary Lutnick will do nothing to change the fact that he has been the most consequential Commerce Secretary in modern history."
