Multiple complainants in the trial have alleged they were taken to Nygard’s Toronto headquarters under pretences ranging from tours to job interviews, with all encounters ending in the top-floor bedroom suite that featured keypad-operated locks, where they allege they were sexually assaulted. She said when the two of them got to the end of the displayed clothing, Nygard fiddled with a switch on the wall and suddenly a wall slid open to reveal a private bedroom suite. “Finally, at last we’re going to talk business,” she remembered thinking. Instead he probed her about her sexual activity, she testified, until he started getting agitated and annoyed with her coyness.Īfter a brief walk toward his office, she said Nygard walked her through the building, viewing some collections that were showcased. She tried to steer the conversation in a business direction, she said, but Nygard wasn’t interested in answering her questions or discussing his fashion empire. “It was very odd and very uncomfortable,” she testified. After some small talk, he mentioned that oysters are an aphrodisiac and are “like having a vagina in your mouth,” she said. When she arrived, she said Nygard was already in a booth and ordered oysters. She testified that she met Nygard, per his instructions, in the evening for a drink at a bar near his Toronto office. “It seemed extremely outlandish that someone I had met for a few minutes would be wanting to fly me from Los Angeles to Toronto for a meeting,” she said. After a brief chat with the complainant on the phone, Nygard booked her a flight to Toronto and put her up in a hotel, she said. “He said to her along the lines of … ‘I am in fashion and I have a lot of connections, I want to help your daughter,”‘ she said. After she had turned 21, she was on a work trip to Los Angeles when her mother called and told her Nygard had phoned the family home and invited her out to his Toronto office for what they thought would be a business meeting, she said. She told the jury that “quite a long time” went by before she heard from Nygard again. “He said something along the lines of ‘I’m sure I can help you,”‘ she said, telling the court she provided her family’s home number. Nygard asked for the woman’s number after hearing about her clothing designs, she testified. She said a colleague introduced her to the famous fashion figure. The woman, in her late teens or early 20s at the time, was living with her family in nearby Ottawa, where she worked in television and sold hand-painted clothing on weekends. The case’s fifth and final complainant - whose identity is protected by a publication ban - said she first met Nygard in the late 1980s at a popular nightclub in Gatineau, Que. The 82-year-old has pleaded not guilty to five counts of sexual assault and one count of forcible confinement in alleged incidents ranging from the 1980s to mid-2000s.
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