A court in Toronto has found former Canadian fashion mogul, Peter Nygard, guilty of four counts of sexual assault.
82-year-old Nygard was on trial in the Ontario Superior Court for five counts of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement, charges connected to incidents that occurred between 1988 and 2005. The charges involved four women and a 16-year-old girl.
The jury gave the verdict on the fifth day of deliberations after a six-week trial.
The trial addressed the first in a series of charges filed against him for sex crimes against many women over many decades in Canada and the United States.
He was acquitted on one count of sexually assaulting one of the women who testified at the trial.
While testifying in his own defence, Nygard did not recall knowing or meeting four of his accusers and said he never raped any of the five.
Though he admitted that his memory had become “very fuzzy” with age, he said::“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.”
On the other hand, Prosecutor Ana Serban said Nygard on the stand was evasive and inconsistent, and that his memory was unreliable and selective.
The Prosecutor pointed to “remarkably similar accounts” of Nygard’s 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”.
She said: “The similarities defy coincidence. It’s a pattern of behaviour.”
Nygard’s lawyer, Brian Greenspan, did not rule out the possibility of appealing the verdict. During the closing arguments, Greenspan stated that the case was built on “contradictions and innuendo” as he panned the prosecution’s portrayal of his client.
He will be sentenced on November 21.
