Monday, November 13, 2023

RAPE IS ABOUT POWER
Former Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard convicted of sexual assault

Peter Nygard, the founder of one of Canada's largest clothing brands, was found guilty Sunday on four counts of sexual assault, a court announced in Toronto.

Issued on: 13/11/2023 
Cormer fashion executive Peter Nygard, seen through a police vehicle window, arrives at a courthouse in Toronto, Ontario, Tuesday, October 3, 2023. © Cole Burston, AP

By:NEWS WIRES


The jury, which deliberated for five days, also acquitted the Finnish-Canadian Nygard on one count of sexually assaulting one of the women who testified at the seven-week trial, and one count of forcible confinement, according to Ontario's Superior Court of Justice.

The charges against the onetime fashion mogul, now age 82, involved four women and a 16-year-old girl, and date from incidents that occurred between 1988 and 2005.

The trial addressed the first in a series of charges he faces for sex crimes against multiple women over several decades in Canada and the United States.

"I know it's been a long and arduous case for you," Justice Robert Goldstein told the jury

On leaving the courthouse, Nygard's lawyer Brian Greenspan did not rule out the possibility of appealing the verdict.

During closing arguments Greenspan had said the case was built on "contradictions and innuendo" and he panned the prosecution's portrayal of his client.

"To describe Peter Nygard as an evil predator, a Jekyll and Hyde personality who, through wealth and power, lured women to his den of iniquity and forced women to comply with his sexual demands... is neither fair nor accurate," he said.

Greenspan said the complainants' testimony was at times "painfully absurd," and he suggested that four of the women were motivated by financial gain or "gold-digging," as they had admitted to being involved in a US class-action lawsuit against him.

Prosecutor Ana Serban, on the other hand, said Nygard on the stand was evasive and inconsistent, and that his memory was unreliable and selective.

Serban pointed to "remarkably similar accounts" of his five accusers, independent of each other, about how they met Nygard, were invited to his office building and "how he sexually assaulted them in his private bedroom suite."

"The similarities defy coincidence," she said. "It's a pattern of behavior."

Testifying in his own defense, Nygard did not recall meeting or knowing four of his accusers, and insisted he never raped any of the five.

"The type of allegations that were said and were described is the type of conduct that I know that I have never done, I never would do," he told the court, even while admitting that his memory had become "very fuzzy" with age.

He will return to court on November 21 for sentencing.

Nygard, who in 1967 founded the firm that was to become Nygard International, has been held in detention since his arrest in 2020.

He must now face similar charges in Quebec and Manitoba, as well as extradition to the United States, where he has been accused of sexually assaulting dozens of women and girls, racketeering and trafficking.

(AFP)

Peter Nygard, Former Fashion Mogul, Convicted of Sexual Assault

The verdict in Toronto concludes the first of Mr. Nygard’s criminal trials in Canada. The 82-year-old also faces charges in the United States.

Peter Nygard leaving a Toronto courthouse in a police vehicle in September. Mr. Nygard faces several more pending trials.
Credit...Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Vjosa Isai
NYT
Reporting from a downtown Toronto courthouse
Nov. 12, 2023

A Toronto jury on Sunday found Peter Nygard, the high-profile executive behind a fallen fashion empire, guilty of four counts of sexual assault after just over three days of deliberation at the end of a six-week trial.

He was found not guilty of one count of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement. His sentencing date will be set later this month.

The verdict represents the first criminal conviction against Mr. Nygard, 82, who has been in jail for the last two years. He is also expected to stand trial on charges of sex crimes next June in Montreal, and in Winnipeg, where a trial date has not been set.

At the conclusion of the Canadian proceedings, Mr. Nygard will be extradited to New York to face sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other charges in a nine-count indictment. Mr. Nygard appealed the New York extradition ruling in Winnipeg — his hometown and the former base of Nygard International, his clothing company — citing poor health, but the court has not yet issued its decision.

Five women, whose testimony makes up the bulk of the prosecution’s evidence in the Toronto trial, testified that they were lured by Mr. Nygard to a personal bedroom suite in his Toronto headquarters under false pretenses, such as receiving a building tour, and sexually assaulted. The complainants were between the ages of 16 and 28 during the attacks, which they accused Mr. Nygard of committing between the 1980s and 2005. Their names are protected by a court-ordered publication ban.

“It’s something that has tainted my life,” said one complainant, now in her 60s, who first accused Mr. Nygard in 1998 of raping her nearly a decade earlier. She dropped her complaint to Toronto police soon after, fearing reprisal from the fashion mogul after she learned that his chief security officer flew to Toronto to canvass for information about her identity, she said.

Another woman, a former employee, broke into tears while testifying that Mr. Nygard had sexually assaulted her during a party at the Toronto office, where he had hired her to work as a hostess.

“I don’t know why somebody would hire me and just do that to me,” she said, adding that she did not tell anyone what had happened. “He’s so wealthy and so powerful, who would believe me?”

A picture of Mr. Nygard displayed in one of his stores in New York in 2019.
Credit...Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Lawyers for the prosecution and the defense spent much of their time mining the memories of the people on the stand, including Mr. Nygard, who testified in his own defense for about a week.

He persistently denied the accusations and said that he did not remember ever meeting four of the complainants, but said that he recognized his former employee. Mr. Nygard’s testimony was marked by frequent bouts of what he called “short-term memory loss,” though prosecutors questioned his ability to remember, in great detail, other facts.

Where his memory failed him, Mr. Nygard told jurors that the sexual assaults and rapes described by the women were not in his character.

“My position is that I would not have conducted myself in that kind of manner,” Mr. Nygard said, responding to the prosecutors’ assertions that he had sought out contact information from some complainants and offered to help their careers.

“I would not have been taking numbers from some female who was trying to be approaching me,” Mr. Nygard said. “This is a suicidal kind of thing in front of the media, and that’s a total no-no.”



Ana Serban, a prosecutor, characterized Mr. Nygard’s testimony as evasive, inconsistent and wrong.

“His memory was unreliable as well as selective,” Ms. Serban said in her closing argument to the jury. “You should have no difficulty rejecting his blanket denials.”

Records that would have assisted Mr. Nygard’s rebuttals, he said, had burned in “a mysterious fire” at a former warehouse in Winnipeg about 10 days before his arrest in October 2021. The building was put in receivership by a court after his company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

“The only thing that was lost was the paper records that the receiver had put into this shed under their control,” Mr. Nygard said, adding that a hacking incident that year had compromised his electronic records as well. But he insisted that he tried to help the police investigation by participating in an 11-hour interview with a Toronto detective.

Brian Greenspan, Mr. Nygard’s lawyer, center, in Toronto, Canada, in September.
Credit...Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The guilty verdict comes after Brian Greenspan, a lawyer for the defense, urged the jury during closing arguments on Tuesday to reject the “revisionist histories of events” told by the five women and the prosecution’s narrative of Mr. Nygard’s “Jekyll and Hyde personality.”

Four of the women are involved in a class action against Mr. Nygard in the United States, a point raised by the defense during cross-examination to suggest that the women were fabricating their stories for a shot at financial gain. “Gold digging runs deep,” Mr. Greenspan said of one complainant’s testimony.

The civil action is yet another legal battlefront for Mr. Nygard. In May, he was ordered by a New York State judge to pay $203 million in defamation suit damages to Louis Bacon, a hedge fund billionaire whose feud with Mr. Nygard began over a property dispute in the Bahamas and spiraled into two decades of legal sparring.

Mr. Nygard attributed the stamina he kept throughout his high-octane way of life — glamorous parties, trips around the world in his private plane, being in the company of dignitaries — to his obsession with health. He told jurors that he avoided sugary and starchy food, didn’t take drugs or smoke, and maintained an active lifestyle that left him flush with energy despite often working 18-hour days.

Mr. Nygard wore a black suit and orange-tinted glasses, and his signature long hair was in a low bun for the duration of the trial. He was visibly relaxed for most of his testimony, sometimes laughing at his own remarks, and spoke with confidence about his effort to learn one new word per day.

But he said he didn’t know the word “Cognac,” the type of brandy that the youngest victim testified Mr. Nygard served to her before he raped her when she was 16.

“I certainly would not want to learn a liquor word,” Mr. Nygard said during his cross-examination.

In her closing argument, Ms. Serban, the prosecutor, cited the exchange as an example of why the jury should not rely on Mr. Nygard’s testimony.

“Here’s a man who enjoys the finer things in life,” she said. “Someone with a taste for luxury. He wants to give his guests the best experience, and he will have you believe that he doesn’t know the word ‘Cognac’?”


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