Fashion mogul Peter Nygard is guilty of sexual assaults

A Canadian jury has found the former fashion mogul Peter Nygard guilty of sexual assault after a six-week trial.

In a Toronto courtroom, prosecutors alleged that Nygard, at 82 years old, exploited his position to perpetrate assaults on five women, with the incidents spanning from the late 1980s to 2005.

Nygard refuted these accusations, and his defense team suggested that the victims were motivated by financial gains.

He was acquitted on one of the counts of sexual assault and a count of forcible confinement.

During the announcement of the verdict, which came after five days of jury deliberations, Nygard displayed no visible reaction.

The prosecution argued that Nygard enticed the women, who were between 16 and 28 years old at the time, into a secluded, luxurious bedroom within his company’s Toronto headquarters.

Prosecutor Ana Serban described the room as equipped with a large bed, a bar, and doors without handles that had automatic locks controlled by Nygard himself.

Serban claimed that once the women were confined in the room, Nygard would then commit the assaults.

Nygard’s defense team and the crown prosecution presented radically different portraits of the man who formerly mixed with celebrities and oversaw a profitable international clothing company during closing arguments earlier this week.

Canadian media said that his attorney, Brian Greenspan, informed the jury that the state’s case was based on “revisionist history” that was based on “contradictions and innuendo”.

In addition, he asserted that four of the five women—who are also parties to a class action case in the United States—were driven by greed.

He declared, “Gold-digging runs deep.”

Nygard said he could never have acted “in that kind of manner” and that he did not remember four of the five women during stressful five days of testimony and cross-examination earlier in the trial, according to CBC.

Prosecutors mostly relied on the testimony of the ladies testifying in court.

According to CTV, Ms. Serban stated that the women’s testimony depicted “the same space and same behaviour” from the former mogul, and that the jury “should have no difficulty” finding Nygard guilty.

“It defies coincidence,” she remarked.

Nygard, whose estimated net worth was previously $700 million (£570 million), will still have to face assault and incarceration charges in Winnipeg in addition to a trial in Montreal the following year.

He is scheduled to be extradited to the US after his criminal proceedings in Canada are resolved. There, prosecutors assert that he participated in a “decades-long pattern of criminal conduct” involving a minimum of twelve victims worldwide. Right now, he is resisting that extradition.

The guilty decisions on Sunday mark the culmination of Nygard’s spectacular fall from fame. Nygard was formerly well-known for entertaining politicians and celebrities at his opulent homes.

He resigned from his position as chairman of Nygard International in February 2020, just before the company declared bankruptcy following a raid by US authorities on its New York headquarters.

Since his arrest in December of that same year, he has been incarcerated.