Fashion mogul Peter Nygard to be sentenced for sex assaults

Former fashion mogul Peter Nygard, once the head of a lucrative global apparel empire, will be sentenced in a Canadian court this week for sexual assault.

He was convicted last November by a Toronto jury of assaulting four women, having denied the charges.

The sentencing will not be the end of the 83-year-old's legal challenges.

He faces separate sexual assault and sex trafficking charges in Montreal, Winnipeg and in the US. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Nygard has been accused of using his influence and wealth to systematically assault and traffic women in both countries over a number of decades.

For decades he was at the helm of an international clothing design, manufacturing and supply business - Nygard International - headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, with offices in New York City and California.

In his six-week criminal trial in Toronto last autumn, prosecutors argued that Nygard - once estimated to be worth at least $700m (£542m) - used his “status” to assault five women in a series of incidents that occurred from the late 1980s to 2005.

His defence lawyers argued that four out of the five women, who are also part of a US class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of his alleged victims, were motivated by financial gain.

Nygard also claimed during the trial that he did not recall four of the five women, and that he would have never acted “in that kind of manner”.

A jury found him guilty on four counts and not guilty on a fifth count of sexual assault and on one count of forcible confinement.

Nygard's sentencing, scheduled to take place on Wednesday and Thursday, has been repeatedly pushed back, with two of his lawyers resigning over ethical concerns and causing delays.

His current lawyer, Gerri Wiebe, applied to delay sentencing again - once in June to get up to speed on Nygard’s case and again in July to gather more expert testimony on her client’s medical condition.

Nygard had previously applied for the remainder of his hearings to be virtual, saying his health was declining.

But during a remotely held hearing last Friday, Toronto Superior Court Justice Robert Goldstein said he “simply will not entertain” any further delays unless Nygard “is in a coma”.

According to prosecutors in the Toronto case, Nygard lured the victims - aged 16 to 28 at the time - to a private luxury bedroom in his firm's headquarters in the city.

One prosecutor described the room as having "a giant bed … and a bar and doors, doors with no handles and automatic locks controlled by Peter Nygard".

Prosecutors alleged that Nygard would assault the women once they were trapped in the room.

Nygard will now face another sexual assault case in Montreal, where he has been charged with assaulting and forcibly confining a woman more than two decades ago.

A preliminary inquiry in that case is set to begin in January 2025.

Nygard is also facing charges in Winnipeg related to offences allegedly committed in 1993, involving a woman who was 20 years old at the time.

In that case, he is alleged to have held the woman captive and raped her after inviting her to a modeling job. He has denied the charges.

Once his criminal cases in Canada are completed, he is set to be extradited to the US, where authorities claim he engaged in a "decades-long pattern of criminal conduct" involving at least a dozen victims across the globe.

Nygard was charged in December 2020 by New York prosecutors with sex trafficking and racketeering offenses.

The US Department of Justice accused him of targeting “women and minor-aged girls who came from disadvantaged economic backgrounds or had a history of abuse”.

They alleged that Nygard remained close to certain victims, whom he called “girlfriends” or “assistants”, and used them to recruit new women for him to have sex with.

A separate class-action lawsuit has also been filed against him by 57 women in the US, though it was put on hold amid his criminal proceedings.

Nygard has been in custody in Canada since his 2020 arrest in Winnipeg.

In February of that year he stepped down as chairman of his firm shortly before it filed for bankruptcy after US authorities raided its New York headquarters.