By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian
In November 1993, a twenty year old woman flew from Vancouver to Winnipeg. Peter Nygård had told her it was a modelling opportunity. Instead, she was held against her will at his Notre Dame Avenue warehouse and sexually assaulted.
She got out. She called a friend, who came and drove her away. She stayed there for about a week, working out what to do next.
Two Winnipeg police officers came to check on her, along with a social worker. Whatever she was carrying privately, what she told them out loud was careful. “I am safe. I am fine. I will be fine.”
When she got home to Vancouver, an RCMP officer followed up. He would later say he suspected there was more to it than what she was telling him. He took no formal statement.
Nothing happened. Somewhere in the years that followed, the file was cleared out. Twenty seven years passed.
In 2020, she came forward again, and Winnipeg police reopened the case. Investigators went looking for the 1993 file. It was gone. When they went back to the two officers who had been there in person, neither one had kept anything. Two different police forces, two different retention rules, and nobody left who could fully explain why either set of records no longer existed.
In October 2025, a Manitoba judge stayed the charges. Destroyed records, she found, do not meet the standard a fair trial requires. The case that came closest to holding Nygård accountable in the province where he built his empire ended not on the facts, but on paperwork that no longer existed.
The woman asked, afterward, that the publication ban protecting her identity be lifted. She wanted her name attached to what she had survived. Her name is April Telek.
That much of the story you have likely already heard, in pieces, across three years of headlines. What is harder to see, because it is scattered across five decades and three cities, is that 1993 was not the beginning.
The Pattern Before Her
In 1968, a young Winnipeg police detective named Des Depourcq took a report from a teenager who worked in Nygård’s factory. He arrested Nygård and laid a charge. The young woman later declined to testify, and the charge was withdrawn. Nygård was in his twenties. Depourcq had never told the story publicly until a CBC investigation found him decades later.
In 1980, it happened again. Another rape charge in Winnipeg. The outcome was the same: the woman would not testify, and the case died before it reached a courtroom.
By 1984, the pattern already had a paper trail, and at least one Winnipeg police officer knew it. An eighteen year old Nygård employee, being sexually harassed at work, went to an officer she knew to ask about pressing charges. He told her he had looked into Nygård’s file. It ran about ten inches thick, he said. “Nothing sticks to this man,” she remembers him telling her, and that she should get out while she could. She gave her notice. Before her last day, she says Nygård raped her at his apartment, and one of his employees handed her two weeks pay in an envelope and told her to collect her things and go. She never told police any of it. CBC is protecting her identity.
Sometime in the 1990s, a fourteen year old girl told her family Nygård had raped her. They turned to Joy Smith, then a schoolteacher working with trafficking victims and later a member of Parliament, for help deciding what to do. According to Smith, Nygård offered the family money to stay quiet and eventually paid them 250,000 dollars. The family never went to police. That case does not appear in any court file, because it was never allowed to become one.
That same year, 1993, a different fourteen year old girl named Nadine Moostoos was living on the street in Winnipeg when she says Nygård picked her up and assaulted her. Unlike the others, her case eventually reached the system, just decades late. In 2020, Winnipeg police reopened their investigation into Nygård and took her statement along with seven others, Telek’s among them. Police referred all eight cases to Manitoba prosecutors, who declined to charge in every one except Telek’s. “It’s like a slap in the face,” Moostoos said of how it ended. Her case and Telek’s ran through the exact same investigation, reviewed by the exact same prosecutors, referred to the exact same outside province, and came out the other side with two different results.
That is a lot of different women, hitting a lot of different points where the system could have stopped him, and watching it fail every time in a different way. A witness recanting. A witness recanting again. A family paid to stay silent before police ever got involved. An officer waving a woman away from her own complaint. A fully investigated case that still didn’t survive contact with prosecutors. Different mechanisms. Same result, for twenty-five years, before Telek ever got on a plane to Winnipeg.
A note on sourcing, because this series holds itself to the same standard it applies to everyone else: everything before 2020 in this section traces back to one investigative source, a Fifth Estate documentary broadcast in December 2021. That reporting checks out against everything obtained independently for this series so far. Moostoos’s case sits inside the same eight file review as Telek’s, a detail confirmed separately through the Manitoba court record. It has not yet been corroborated by a second outlet or a surviving police file, which for events this old may simply no longer exist to find.
None of that changes the argument. It just means you should hold the 1968, 1980, and 1990s accounts as strongly sourced but not yet doubly confirmed, while the 1993 through 2025 record, everything from Telek’s case forward, rests on primary court documents this series has in hand.
That is the argument the rest of this series is going to make in detail: that what protected Peter Nygård for half a century was not the absence of complaints. It was a system, corporate and institutional at once, reliable enough that complaints kept failing to become convictions.
Built For It
The pattern in the last section was a pattern across time. This one has an address.
At 1 Niagara Street in Toronto, the headquarters of his fashion company, Nygård kept a private suite on an upper floor. Employees had their own name for it: the Finland Suite. Two of the women who later testified against him said pornography was playing there. The building itself was never zoned for residential use. Whatever Nygård treated that room as, on paper it was something else entirely.
The same arrangement shows up again in Winnipeg, at the same address where Telek says she was held in 1993. A court examining the Nygård companies’ finances years later looked for any record connecting him to 1340 Notre Dame Avenue as a residence and found nothing: no lease, no rent paid, no renewal terms, nothing in writing at all. The court’s own description was blunt. Whatever existed there was a temporary accommodation, not a tenancy. Two cities, two private rooms inside two commercial buildings, and in neither case does anything on paper say either room was ever meant to be lived in.
When prosecutors in Toronto later asked a court for permission to let one complainant’s account support another’s at trial, part of what persuaded the judge wasn’t just that the stories sounded alike. It was that getting into that private space followed the same design each time: a meeting, a tour of the building, then a room built so that who could get in, and who could get out, was never really up to the person who’d just walked through the door.
There was a second structure running alongside the physical one, and it was built out of money. A family was paid 250,000 dollars to keep a fourteen year old’s assault away from police entirely, according to Joy Smith. In 1968 and again in 1980, cases collapsed when the women involved chose not to testify. And years later, in his own police interview, Nygård confirmed a version of the same mechanism himself: he had paid 20,000 dollars to each woman who filed a human rights complaint against him in Manitoba. That’s not an allegation. It’s an admission, on the record, to the people investigating him.
None of this was the work of one man improvising. At its peak the company employed roughly 1,550 people across an operation that spanned continents. A room with no lease. A payment ready before anyone had to ask twice. Set those two structures beside the twenty five years of pattern from the last section, and “machine” stops sounding like a figure of speech. It starts sounding like a description of an actual design: get someone into the room, and two separate systems were already standing by to make sure whatever happened there never became anyone’s problem but hers.
Part Two of this series goes inside a different system: the police, the prosecutors, and the records that kept disappearing at the exact moments they mattered most.