Cat Girl Rape Sex Stories
How a Neighbors' Feud in Paradise Launched an International Rape Case
The style executive Peter Nygard has clashed for years with his neighbor in the Bahamas, the billionaire Louis Bacon. The latest development is a lawsuit saying Mr. Nygard sexually exploited teenage girls.
The fashion executive Peter Nygard has been defendant of rape, the latest in a boxing between two rich men in a small developing nation. Credit... Jonathan Becker
The Bahamian pleasance palace featured a faux Mayan temple, sculptures of smoke-breathing snakes and a disco with a stripper pole. The owner, Peter Nygard, a Canadian style executive, showed off his estate on Television set shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and threw loud beachfront parties, reveling in the visitor of teenage girls and young women.
Next door, Louis Bacon, an American hedge fund billionaire, presided over an blusterous retreat with a lawn for croquet. Mr. Bacon preferred hunting alone with a bow and arrow to attention wild parties, and if mentioned at all in the press, was typically described equally buttoned-upwardly.
The neighbors had lilliputian in common except for extreme wealth and a driveway. But when Mr. Nygard wasn't allowed to rebuild after a fire, he blamed Mr. Bacon. Since then, the ii have been embroiled in an epic battle, spending tens of millions of dollars and filing at least 25 lawsuits in 5 jurisdictions. Mr. Nygard, 78, has spread stories accusing Mr. Bacon of being an insider trader, murderer and member of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Bacon, 63, has accused Mr. Nygard of plotting to kill him.
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The latest accuse is particularly incendiary: Lawyers and investigators funded in part by Mr. Salary claim that Mr. Nygard raped teenage girls in the Bahamas.
This month, a federal lawsuit was filed by separate lawyers in New York on behalf of ten women accusing Mr. Nygard of sexual assault. The lawsuit claims that Mr. Nygard used his company, Nygard International, and employees to procure immature victims and ply them with booze and drugs. He also paid Bahamian constabulary officers to quash reports, shared women with local politicians and clean-cut victims to recruit "fresh meat," the lawsuit says. Through a spokesman, Mr. Nygard denied the allegations.
Over months of interviews with The New York Times, dozens of women and former employees described how alleged victims were lured to Mr. Nygard's Bahamian home by the prospect of modeling jobs or a taste of luxury.
"He preys on poor people's piffling girls," said Natasha Taylor, who worked there for five years.
But this is not just a story of abuse allegations. It's also a story almost the lengths two rich men can go to in a small developing nation where the minimum wage is just $210 a week. Together, Mr. Nygard and Mr. Bacon are worth shut to the annual budget of the government of the Bahamas, an archipelago off the coast of Florida with ritzy tourist resorts that belie the country's pockets of poverty.
Paradigm
Their battle became a cottage industry for opportunists.
Investigators and lawyers tied to Mr. Salary offered Nygard associates generous incentives to build an corruption case confronting the Canadian — Cartier jewelry, a regular salary or a year's rent in a gated community, according to documents and interviews. Smaller payments filtered down to some accusers, which could exist used to undermine their credibility in any court case or investigation.
Mr. Nygard used his wealth to intimidate critics and purchase allies. He had employees sign confidentiality agreements and sued those he suspected of talking. Multiple women said he had handed them cash after sex, helping to buy silence. And he paid tens of thousands of dollars to people providing sworn statements to use against Mr. Bacon in lawsuits, according to court records, interviews and depository financial institution statements.
Some women said they felt exploited by both men — by Mr. Nygard for sex activity, and past Mr. Bacon against his enemy.
"They're messing up people's lives in the centre of their fight," said Tamika Ferguson, who claims Mr. Nygard raped her when she was sixteen. She said she intended to join the lawsuit.
The Times interviewed all the women who eventually signed on to the suit, which identified them as Jane Does to protect their privacy. Reporters also spoke with v other women, who said Mr. Nygard sexually assaulted them in the Commonwealth of the bahamas when they were teenagers. 3 said they were under 16 at the fourth dimension, the age of consent at that place. But two afterwards recanted, saying they had been promised money and coached to fabricate their stories.
This isn't the first fourth dimension that Mr. Nygard, whose visitor sells women's clothes at his own outlets and Dillard'south department stores, has been defendant of sexual misconduct. Over the past four decades, nine women in Canada and California have sued him or reported him to the authorities. He has never been convicted.
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Mr. Nygard declined multiple interview requests. I of his lawyers said he had "never treated women inappropriately" and called the allegations "paid-for lies."
Ken Frydman, his spokesman, denied all the claims and said Mr. Bacon had spent more than a decade trying "to smear Peter Nygard by coercing women to fabricate and manufacture sordid stories about him." Mr. Nygard also defendant Mr. Bacon in a lawsuit of masterminding a conspiracy "to plant a simulated story" in The Times nigh sexual misconduct.
Mr. Bacon, who founded New York-based Moore Majuscule Management, said he felt obliged to take action later on hearing of possible sexual corruption by his neighbor. His associates have spent two years finding women to bring claims against Mr. Nygard.
"I of everyone knew what it was like to have this guy come at you," Mr. Bacon said in an interview. "And then my heart went out to these women."
'eighth Wonder of the World'
Paradigm
Mr. Nygard's property was unlike any other in Lyford Cay, ane of the most sectional communities in the Commonwealth of the bahamas. His estate looked like something out of Las Vegas.
He chosen it the "Eighth Wonder of the World": a lush retreat with sculptures of roaring lions and a human aquarium where topless women undulated in mermaid tails.
For one birthday, he flew in models who danced before him in trunk paint. His workers said they regularly lit torches at dusk and played the championship song from "The Phantom of the Opera." Michael Jackson and former President George H.Westward. Bush visited the belongings, which the Canadian man of affairs renamed "Nygard Cay." (He named many things subsequently himself: his jet, an electric shade of blueish, bottled water.)
An avowed playboy who in one case joked that his attempt at celibacy was "the worst 20 minutes of my life," Mr. Nygard wore his gray pilus long and shirts open up. He traveled with an entourage of models and women who described themselves as "paid girlfriends," dated tabloid regulars like Anna Nicole Smith and fathered at to the lowest degree ten children with viii women. Using himself equally a human guinea pig, Mr. Nygard tried to fight off aging with stem cell injections and talked of cloning himself, ane close friend said.
On many Sunday afternoons at his Bahamian estate, Mr. Nygard threw "pamper parties" that offered female guests free massages, manicures, horseback rides and endless booze. And he demanded a steady supply of sex partners, according to six former employees who said they recruited young women at shops, clubs and restaurants.
Paradigm
Epitome
"1 fourth dimension, he was like: 'I don't know where you detect these girls from, but there's pretty girls in the ghetto equally well,'" recalled Freddy Barr, Mr. Nygard'due south personal assistant in the early 2000s. "'Yous demand to find pretty girls in need.'"
Somewhen his staff compiled an invitation list, provided to The Times, with names of more than than 700 women. Quondam workers said they photographed guests when they arrived, uploading the images for their dominate'south perusal. Only those who were young, slim and with a curvy backside — which Mr. Nygard chosen a "toilet" — were supposed to be allowed inside, according to the ex-employees, including Ms. Taylor. (She asked to exist identified by her maiden name to continue people from knowing her connection with Nygard Cay.)
The extra Jessica Alba, who attended a Nygard party while filming "Into the Bluish" in 2004, later described it as "gross." "These girls are like xiv years former in the Jacuzzi, taking off their wearing apparel," she said on a press tour.
In one case the party got going, the former employees and girlfriends said, they coaxed teenagers and young women into Mr. Nygard'southward bedroom, sometimes with the aid of alcohol and drugs.
Mr. Nygard did not respond to nigh of The Times'due south questions. Instead, his spokesman, Mr. Frydman, sent affidavits from former employees who asserted that their boss had never abused women and that no underage girls were allowed at Nygard Cay. Ane even called Mr. Nygard the Bahamas' "about generous and honest expatriate."
Others cast aspersions on Mr. Bacon, claiming he had paid Nygard employees to dig up dirt and had objected to blackness Bahamians visiting Lyford Cay.
Mr. Nygard, estimated to exist worth roughly $750 million in 2014 past Canadian Business organisation mag, had long composite his professional and personal lives. He literally lived at work. A 1980 news commodity described an area of his office in Winnipeg — the city in Manitoba where he built his company — as a "passion pit" with a mirrored ceiling and a couch that transformed into a bed at the "push of a button."
Over the years, he was repeatedly accused of demanding that female employees satisfy him sexually. At that place were the nine women in Winnipeg and Los Angeles who accused Mr. Nygard of sexual harassment or assault. Just The Times spoke with 10 others who said he had proposed sex, touched them inappropriately or raped them. Merely one of them is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
Debra Macdonald, hired equally his secretary in 1978 when she was 19, said Mr. Nygard continually harassed her and tried to grab her breasts. Once, he summoned her into his Winnipeg office equally a pornographic moving-picture show played on telly, she said in an interview. "I was so disgusted," she said.
Ms. Macdonald quit in 1980, shortly after the Winnipeg police force charged Mr. Nygard with raping an xviii-year-quondam woman. The case was dropped after the woman refused to testify.
Some other sometime employee said that on a business trip to Hong Kong that aforementioned year, Mr. Nygard slipped into her hotel room while she slept. The woman, Jonna Laursen, then 32, told The Times that he raped her. A single female parent from Denmark, she said she worried the police force wouldn't take her seriously and she'd lose her reputation and job.
"I knew the correct thing would exist to report it," Ms. Laursen said, "but somehow I felt that I would come out the loser."
Simply over a year later, she said, she was fired without crusade. She so described the episode to a colleague, Dale Dreffs, who confirmed hearing it. When Ms. Laursen threatened to go to the press, a visitor managing director offered her $6,700 and a letter of recommendation for her silence, she said.
In 1995, a new hire was taken from the airport to Mr. Nygard's Winnipeg part-apartment, where he had sexual practice with her "against her volition," a lawsuit said. The woman's lawyer confirmed that the suit led to a nondisclosure understanding. And then, in 1996, Mr. Nygard'southward visitor settled sexual harassment complaints against him by three former workers — for nearly $15,000, according to The Winnipeg Free Press.
In 2015, some other onetime employee said, Mr. Nygard came into her locked room while she slept at his Los Angeles home and raped her. He after fired her, she said. Emails shown to The Times confirmed that she contacted a lawyer at the time about suing him. The woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, is the only not-Bahamian to join the new lawsuit.
Separately, 2 women sued Mr. Nygard last calendar month for sexual battery. I, who was not identified, said she was under 18 — the California age of consent — when she visited Mr. Nygard'due south Los Angeles home in 2012. Her lawsuit said Mr. Nygard knew her historic period "withal repeatedly had sexual intercourse with her."
In the other lawsuit, a former employee, Maridel Carbuccia, claimed Mr. Nygard drugged and sexually assaulted her at his Los Angeles dwelling in 2016. Ashamed to tell her family, she said, she connected working for him for more than 2 years before she was fired.
Clash of the Titans
In 2009, a blaze erupted at Nygard Cay, dissentious several cabanas, the and then-called yard hall and the disco. The fire department said it was accidental, probably caused by an electrical fault. But some Nygard Cay employees said their boss blamed Mr. Bacon, an ardent conservationist who had accused Mr. Nygard of illegally mining sand to create new beachfront.
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The authorities refused to let Mr. Nygard rebuild. Within days, the war began.
Mr. Nygard sued over changes his neighbour had made years earlier to their driveway. Then he sued the government, maxim it was colluding with Mr. Bacon to strength him off the island.
The allegations became more bizarre: One street protest in Nassau featured men in white hoods and placards proclaiming, "Salary Is KKK." New websites funded by Mr. Nygard claimed Mr. Salary was responsible for several murders, courtroom records show. A video made by Nygard staff, according to a former contractor, superimposed Mr. Bacon'due south face up on the collapsing Twin Towers.
"It was an assault on me, my reputation, my safety," Mr. Bacon said.
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Mr. Nygard was a formidable opponent. Police officers and local journalists dined at his home; one later admitted in courtroom that Mr. Nygard had paid him to smear Mr. Bacon. Mr. Nygard also had allies in the Progressive Liberal Political party, which he wanted to legalize stalk cell injections. He bragged he'd given the party $5 million during the 2012 election campaign — legally, as the Commonwealth of the bahamas has no campaign finance laws. After it won the election, a Nygard YouTube channel posted a video featuring six ministers visiting his estate.
He threatened — or sued — media outlets that investigated him. He slow-walked lawsuits, filing countless motions and requesting delays, exhausting his foes. A approximate referred to his "scorched-earth" tactics in a protracted fight over child support.
But Mr. Bacon was a rare adversary. His wealth was valued at more than double Mr. Nygard's.
He helped form a nonprofit chosen Save the Trophy to target ecology abuses, starting with Nygard Cay. Fred Smith, a prominent homo-rights lawyer, came on board.
Mr. Bacon and his older brother, Zack, hired a small ground forces of lawyers and private investigators, including veterans of the F.B.I. and Scotland K. They persuaded some of Mr. Nygard'south allies to provide testify for a defamation lawsuit, filed in 2015. They launched their own lawsuits. And they paid well.
Two self-described former gang members, Livingston "Toggie" Bullard and Wisler "Bobo" Davilma, told the Bacons' investigators that Mr. Nygard had hired them for dirty piece of work, similar torching his ex-girlfriend's hair salon and staging anti-Salary rallies, according to court records. The men claimed Mr. Nygard had given them a "hit listing" that included Louis Salary and Mr. Smith. Mr. Nygard has denied this.
Mr. Bullard and Mr. Davilma, working with the Bacon investigators, hatched a program to videotape Mr. Nygard. The private eyes acted like secret agents, using encrypted phones and dropping greenbacks for the two men in a box behind a post part. Somewhen, the Bacons paid the two most $1.5 million, mostly for secretly recording five meetings with Mr. Nygard.
The videos turned up no sign of Mr. Nygard'south plotting murder. "I can't get into killing," he said in footage obtained past The Times.
Instead, a video from June 2015 captured him on a favorite topic. Looking out a machine window, Mr. Nygard said in that location were many women with whom he hadn't yet had sex activity.
"Exercise you lot see those toilets?" he asked.
The Hunt
The Bacons said they were disturbed by stories they heard nigh Mr. Nygard having sex with teenage girls. In late 2015, they hired TekStratex, a new Texas security firm, to push American constabulary enforcement officials to investigate him for sex trafficking.
The firm's leader, Jeff Davis, told Zack Bacon that he'd worked for the C.I.A. for 10 years — including in something chosen "the ghost plan," Mr. Bacon recalled.
The F.B.I. looked into Mr. Nygard twice, but but briefly. In April 2016, the Department of Homeland Security dug in.
To help the inquiry, the Bacons moved five witnesses — two old Bahamian employees of Mr. Nygard and iii onetime girlfriends — to the United states of america and covered their living expenses. Mr. Davis told them that Mr. Nygard had "put out hits on them," several recalled in interviews. Burly bodyguards drove them to different houses and hotels, swerving through traffic and changing cars, saying they were beingness followed.
Despite the Bacons' efforts, the Homeland Security investigation fizzled after nine months, suspended because of "unforeseen circumstances" and "lack of prosecutorial testify," according to an agency email.
Mr. Davis turned out to be a fraud. Instead of being an ex-spy, he was a former motorcar broker with a string of debts and failed businesses. The Bacons had shelled out near $6 meg. "I fired him," Zack Bacon said.
He soon focused on a lawsuit, hoping to draw on the #MeToo movement and "the most aggressive lawyers in the globe," Zack Bacon said in a recording provided to The Times.
By last summer, Mr. Smith and the private investigators had introduced about 15 Bahamian women to American lawyers at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler house. They were planning to bring a lawsuit in New York, where Mr. Nygard'south company had its corporate headquarters. His portrait hung outside a flagship store near Times Square, golden muscles flexing.
At Mr. Smith'due south suggestion, 6 women went to the Bahamian police — a large step, as law enforcement is considered the about corrupt public institution in the country, according to a 2017 Transparency International study, and sex activity crimes are notoriously underreported. Only 55 rapes were tallied there in 2018, while Cleveland, with a like population size, had 585. The Bahamian law are notwithstanding investigating.
Paradigm
The stories echoed i another. The lawsuit would afterward merits that women were sodomized and forced into other acts they establish degrading.
I woman, now involved in the accommodate, told The Times she was fourteen when she met Mr. Nygard at 1 of his stores in 2015; she has a photo with him that twenty-four hour period. She said she was later invited for a modeling interview at Nygard Cay, where he assaulted her. She said she had never told anyone what happened.
Another woman in the suit said in an interview that she was xiv when she attended a pamper party in 2011, after her female parent asked Mr. Nygard to sponsor her in a beauty pageant. "Is this what my life can exist?" she recalled thinking of the models in the room.
Her glass of wine never seemed to empty, she said. Subsequently, she recalled, she swallowed pills Mr. Nygard told her models took. Then, she said, he took her upstairs and raped her. Fatigued by the money and promise of modeling gigs, she later returned, recruiting other women, she said.
Tamika Ferguson found her way to Nygard Cay in 2004 subsequently being kicked out of high school. An orphan from a poor neighborhood, she said a D.J. had invited her to a pamper party. She drank besides much and concluded up in a bathroom barefoot in her bikini, she said. When she emerged, her friends had gone. She said Mr. Nygard steered her upstairs and raped her.
Ms. Ferguson said she returned multiple times and had sex with Mr. Nygard because she felt she couldn't say no; he sent people to her abode to pick her upwardly. She gave The Times two photographs of herself at Nygard Cay; three people — a former Nygard girlfriend, an ex-employee and a invitee — said they remembered her in that location.
"He messed with my whole life," said Ms. Ferguson, at present 32. "And everybody knew what was going on except for me."
'A Souvenir From Our Boss'
For years, Mr. Nygard had insisted that Louis Salary paid people to lie well-nigh him. The hedge fund founder maintained that wasn't true.
Only his team created vulnerabilities, giving money and gifts to witnesses and accusers in the Bahamas, The Times found. Mr. Bacon and his brother said they were unaware of any gifts and payments, and expressed confidence in Mr. Smith'southward professionalism.
The Bahamian lawyers and investigators were not paid by the Bacons directly. Instead, they were paid past a nonprofit Mr. Smith created, chosen Sanctuary, to back up sexual assault victims; both he and Mr. Bacon donated generously to that.
"They are handing the defendant arguments," said Jeanne Christensen, a New York lawyer focusing on sexual harassment.
The private investigators and Mr. Smith compensated two witnesses who found alleged victims: Litira Fox, a former girlfriend of Mr. Nygard's who said she recruited for him, and Richette Ross, a quondam massage therapist at Nygard Cay who said she did the same. Through a spokesman, Mr. Nygard said that he did not remember Ms. Play tricks, and that neither woman recruited for him.
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Ms. Ross did well. After she told Mr. Smith that unknown assailants had shot upward her former home, killed her family domestic dog and broke into her car in different incidents, Mr. Smith moved her into a gated community, paying $5,000 a month.
The story was familiar: She had told a variation to Mr. Nygard two years earlier, emails bear witness. "I sent you money to buy a new canis familiaris," Mr. Nygard wrote after his company wired her most $x,000.
"Call police immediately," he said. "Put in a charge against Salary."
Mr. Smith also gave Ms. Ross $500 a calendar week to work on another potential lawsuit against Mr. Nygard, this one for workplace abuses.
Accusers received smaller payments. Ms. Trick, who earned $two,000 a month, said she passed some of that to the women she brought to meetings with lawyers and investigators — often $200 for a visit. Mr. Smith acknowledged giving about $one,000 collectively to four or 5 alleged victims, merely said that was for their time and expenses.
"I'k not going to give them $100 to lie, for goodness' sake," he said.
In that location were more substantial gifts. Deidre Miller said Ms. Fox invited her to the Baha Mar luxury resort in August 2018 to meet with investigators. She was a valuable witness — she would later tell The Times she had dated Mr. Nygard for years and had seen 2 teenagers in his bed, one in her schoolhouse uniform.
Afterward, Ms. Miller said, the investigators took her and Ms. Fox to the resort's Cartier store. There, she said, the men bought each woman a matching xviii-carat gilt bracelet and necklace for $ix,350. Ms. Miller provided a photograph of the receipt, though the human whose proper name was on it denied making the purchase.
"He was like, 'It's a gift from our boss,'" Ms. Miller recalled. "They said they were working for Louis Bacon."
The Lie
For more than a year, Marvinique Smith and her sister, Marrinique, were central to the developing lawsuit.
They told their stories repeatedly to lawyers, investigators and the Bahamian police. Marvinique said she was invited to a pamper party in 2010, when she was fifteen. There, she said, Mr. Nygard talked to her about modeling and had sexual practice with her. Her sister recounted a horrific tale: Mr. Nygard had raped her every bit cartoons played on Tv. She said she was x.
Simply in October, the sisters told a very different story to Times reporters: They had never been assaulted by Mr. Nygard. They had never fifty-fifty met him. They claimed Ms. Ross had paid them to make everything up.
Prototype
Marvinique Smith said Ms. Ross suggested she might collect every bit much as a half-million dollars in a settlement, and and so could requite Ms. Ross a cut.
She coached them on Mr. Nygard'south pickup lines, bedroom layout and sexual proclivities, the sisters said. Meanwhile, she gave them cash — $150 here, $350 in that location — for every meeting, they said.
Ms. Smith said she confessed to lying because Ms. Ross, who was dating her boyfriend'southward father, stopped paying her. She and her sister felt guilty and scared. "I couldn't do information technology anymore," Ms. Smith said, adding, "There might exist girls that it actually happened to, simply it didn't happen to me and my sister."
Ms. Ross denied paying anyone to fabricate stories near Mr. Nygard, and passed a lie-detector test to that effect, according to Robert Ennis, a polygrapher hired by her lawyers.
In an interview, she speculated that Mr. Nygard had paid the Smith sisters to recant — a notion they rejected.
Ms. Ross had undisclosed connections with other women she brought to the lawyers. Two were relatives. Two were related to a close friend. All were included as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
She had too sent a notation to a onetime Nygard employee, asking to talk about the instance. "Information technology will pay very handsomely," she wrote. When asked near that, Ms. Ross said she meant information technology would pay in "justice."
Paradigm
Since the American lawyers filed the suit, they said, they've received calls from more than three dozen women alleging abuse as far back as the 1970s. The new allegations, mainly from women in Canada and the United States, prove their case has cipher to practise with the neighbors' feud, the lawyers said.
"It'due south a good cause, regardless of what you lot think may have been the motivation," said Greg Gutzler, the atomic number 82 lawyer in the lawsuit. He said his firm, which operates on contingency and has no financial ties to Mr. Salary, had washed its ain investigation and never paid whatsoever accuser or witness. The lawyers hope the claim will become a class action.
Facing legal troubles over his property, Mr. Nygard hasn't been to the Bahamas in more than a twelvemonth. Even as he recently attended a mode evidence flanked past models in Canada, he insisted he was too ill to travel to the Bahamas for courtroom hearings.
Eric Gibson, a former Nygard employee and longtime friend, chosen The Times on his behalf. He said Mr. Nygard was a "kind, conscientious" man who would not have harmed anyone.
"Women in the Bahamas throw themselves at Peter Nygard," Mr. Gibson said. "He is the i that all the girls want to be with."
Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett, Johanna Lemola and Declan Schroeder.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/world/americas/peter-nygard-louis-bacon.html
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