Peter Nygard Victims

Case background and investigation

Peter Nygard, the founder of the Winnipeg-based clothing company Nygard International, was arrested in Winnipeg on Monday, December 14, 2020, at the request of U.S. authorities, according to NBC New York's report on the announcement by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. A nine-count indictment from the Southern District of New York charged him with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and related offences. Prosecutors alleged that over roughly 25 years he used company employees and resources to recruit and keep adult and underage women for sexual purposes in the United States, the Bahamas and Canada. Nygard denied the allegations.

Canadian police later laid their own charges. In Toronto, Nygard stood trial in the Ontario Superior Court on five counts of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement involving five women. According to Global News, a jury found him guilty on November 12, 2023 of four counts of sexual assault and acquitted him of the fifth sexual assault count and the confinement charge. The offences took place between the 1980s and the mid-2000s at his company's Toronto headquarters, and one complainant was 16 at the time.

Nygard was sentenced in September 2024 to 11 years in prison. His lawyers appealed, arguing among other things that expert testimony on the effects of trauma should not have been admitted. On May 15, 2026 a three-judge panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed the appeal, Global News reported, describing the admission of that evidence as harmless error. With credit for time already in custody, about seven years of the sentence remained.

In Winnipeg, a provincial court judge stayed charges of sexual assault and unlawful confinement on October 8, 2025. According to Global News, the judge found that records of police interviews with the complainant from 1993 had been destroyed without a justifiable reason, which violated Nygard's right to a fair trial. A stay is not an acquittal or a conviction.

In Quebec, Nygard admitted to sexual assault and forcible confinement shortly before a scheduled judge-alone trial in Montreal in July 2026. The Associated Press, as published by the Press Democrat, reported that the case involved an 18-year-old aspiring model who was held in a bedroom of his Montreal penthouse between November 1997 and November 1998. Sentencing was put off pending a medical assessment and was scheduled to return to court on October 2, 2026.

As of September 2026, Nygard, then 84, remained subject to extradition to the United States, where he has pleaded not guilty to the federal racketeering and sex-trafficking charges. Those charges have not been tried.