MIAMI _ A lawsuit aimed at Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard has grown nearly five-fold with 46 women now accusing him of sexually assaulting them at his sprawling estate in the Bahamas as well as in South Florida, New York and elsewhere.
The suit, originally filed as a class action in February with 10 women listed as "Jane Does," was amended with a longer list of accusers who say Nygard used executives in his clothing empire to help him lure underage girls and young women to his residences to have sex with him. It portrays the 78-year-old Nygard as a serial predator who recruited them at "pamper parties" under the ruse of modeling, plied them with alcohol and drugs, and then paid them thousands of dollars in hush money.
Among the 46 "Jane Does" listed in the amended complaint: A young woman who started working for Nygard in 2014 claimed "he repeatedly raped her and forced her to defecate on him" at his compound on Lyford Cay, aka as "Nygard Cay," as well as in Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles and New York City while she traveled with him.
Nygard's case _ not unlike the disturbing sex-trafficking allegations that engulfed New York financier Jeffrey Epstein before his suicide in federal custody in August _ has generated international coverage because of the flamboyant designer's notoriety as a playboy.
Nygard's spokesman, Ken Frydman, issued a statement Tuesday saying the embattled fashion giant "vehemently denies these baseless allegations and looks forward to clearing his name and the names of others who have been so recklessly and falsely accused."
Days after the original suit was filed in New York, FBI agents raided the global headquarters of Nygard's company in Times Square and conducted a similar search at his Los Angeles home as part of a federal sex-trafficking investigation, according to the New York Times and other published reports. Nygard also resigned as chairman of the women's clothing manufacturer, based in Winnipeg, Canada, and announced plans to divest his ownership interest, while Dillard's department store and other retailers stopped selling his line, leading to the company's bankruptcy filing last month.
One of Nygard's new accusers in the amended suit is a South Florida woman who came to know him in the late 1990s and agreed to talk with the Miami Herald in an interview arranged by the plaintiffs' lawyers.
A few months ago, Mary Jean Sassoon said her son sent her the link to a CNN online story about the sex-trafficking case against Nygard. She seethed as she pored over the article, recalling her own painful secret from a visit to his island home.
"I felt degraded even more by reading it, then knowing that there are so many other women that have gone through worse," Sassoon, 67, said in the interview Monday. Sassoon, a divorced mother who raised her two children in South Florida, said she did not meet him until she was in her 40s but their encounter took a sudden and dark turn.
She told the Miami Herald that in 1997, Nygard's teenage daughter had become friendly with her own daughter as both were starting college. At one point, the fashion tycoon invited her family to his compound on Lyford Cay to celebrate New Year's Eve.
It was during that trip, she said, that Nygard began talking with her about his art collection and then suddenly shoved her to her knees, violently grabbed her head and forced her to perform oral sex on him. These details are summarized in the amended complaint filed late Monday, though she is not identified by name.
Sassoon said she screamed and ran but told no one _ not her children, not her ex-husband, and not authorities.
"Our vacation turned into a nightmare," said Sassoon, a retired artist.
Decades later, after reading the CNN story, Sassoon said she could no longer remain silent, so she contacted the attorneys representing Nygard's accusers _ Greg Gutzler with the law firm DiCello Levitt Gutzler LLC, and Lisa Haba in Florida _ to see if she could join their sex-trafficking lawsuit filed earlier this year in New York federal court.
In news accounts, Nygard has blamed the federal suit and investigation on his neighbor in the Bahamas, hedge-fund billionaire Louis Bacon. The two wealthy men have been entangled in a legal battle for years over their Bahamian properties, with Bacon accusing Nygard of hiring hit men in a murder plot targeting the investor.
In court documents, Nygard's attorneys denied he committed any wrongdoing and revealed plans to seek dismissal of the class-action case based on a lack of jurisdiction in New York.
"This lawsuit _ which defendants understand is being funded by Mr. Bacon _ arises out of Mr. Bacon's efforts to pay witnesses to make up stories about non-existent sexual assaults," wrote attorneys with the New York law firm, Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason & Annello P.C. "If this case proceeds beyond our motion to dismiss, Mr. Nygard would prove that these allegations are a complete fabrication."
Nygard's spokesman, Frydman, said in a statement that the amended complaint "is the latest chapter in Louis Bacon's conspiracy to destroy Peter Nygard and the Nygard companies."
In the amended 247-page complaint, the various underage girls and women are listed as "Jane Does" to protect their identities. They accuse Nygard, a Finnish native who built his fashion empire in Canada over 50 years, of not only sexually assaulting them but also using his companies and senior employees to fund his alleged predatory behavior. The revised suit names various Nygard executives and associates in the narrative for the first time.
The plaintiffs' attorneys assert that the "heart of the conspiracy" is Nygard's relationship with those executives and other associates. The lawyers claim they collaborated to "facilitate and enable" his "sex trafficking of children and women in the United States, the Bahamas, Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world."
The amended complaint says Nygard instructed his employees to target certain females, "the younger, the better."
He specifically preyed on "young, vulnerable and impoverished Bahamian girls" because they were unable to defend themselves against his power and influence in their country, the complaint said. It accuses Nygard of paying off Bahamian police and government officials, including a few who came to his "pamper parties" attended by girls under 18 and young women.
During her family's holiday stay with Nygard at the end of 1997, Sassoon said that after she was sexually assaulted by the fashion mogul, she kept to herself and avoided the host but was required to eat dinner with him and his guests. She recalled seeing a beautiful teenage girl being presented to Nygard as if she were a gift, and hearing another girl who worked at his estate screaming behind closed doors.
Sassoon said she felt ashamed to talk about her own traumatic experience after all these years, until she read the CNN story about the sex-trafficking lawsuit. She finally told her son and ex-husband, a Miami lawyer who still supports her, about what had happened to her. She never got the opportunity to tell her daughter, because she died in 2017.
Deep down, Sassoon said she had to go public with the truth _ not just for herself but for other possible victims who endured "total degradation" at the hands of Nygard.
"I feel bad that I didn't do it way, way, way back," Sassoon said. "I don't want anything from it. I just want the madness to stop."
