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Convicted fashion mogul Peter Nygard on Monday was sentenced to 11 years in prison for sexually assaulting several women inside a secret bedroom suite at his company’s Toronto-based offices.
An Ontario judge denounced Nygard as a “sexual predator” and a “Canadian success story gone very wrong” during a hearing in a Toronto courtroom, the Toronto Star reported.
Nygard, the Finnish-born mogul whose family immigrated to Canada, where he built his affordable women’s clothing brand up from a store in Winnipeg into an empire that expanded throughout North America, was convicted in November on four counts of sexual assault.
The victims of the attacks, which spanned more than two decades, were as young as 16 years old.
Nygard, 83, invited the women to visit his custom-built office under pretenses ranging from tours to job interviews.
Prosecutors said he then lured the women into his bedroom suite and assaulted them — at times plying them with drugs and alcohol.
According to prosecutors, Nygard’s suite had “a giant bed, a stone jacuzzi, a bar and doors — doors with no handle, doors with automatic, keypad-operated locks controlled by Peter Nygard.”
Nygard, who in 2020 was reported to have an estimated net worth of $900 million, also faces civil and criminal charges in the United States.
He has been fighting extradition to the US since 2022, but earlier this year, a Manitoba court ordered the mogul to surrender to US authorities to face sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
In December 2020, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed a nine-count indictment against Nygard alleging that he enticed young and impoverished women to his estate in the Bahamas with cash and promises of modeling opportunities.
At least 10 women filed suit against Nygard in New York, alleging that they were as young as 14 or 15 years old when he gave them alcohol or drugs and then raped them.
Since then, 57 women — including 18 Canadians — have joined the lawsuit, which alleges that Nygard used violence, intimidation, bribery and company employees to lure victims and avoid accountability for decades.
The class-action lawsuit says Nygard used his company, bribery of Bahamian officials and “considerable influence in the fashion industry” to recruit victims in the Bahamas, the US and Canada.
Nygard has denied all allegations and blames a conspiracy caused by a feud with a billionaire neighbor in the Bahamas.
Last year, Nygard was ordered by a New York state court to pay a record sum of $203 million to the neighbor, billionaire hedge fund manager Louis Bacon, who sued the fashion mogul for defamation.
