The son of Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard is working behind the scenes to help the FBI investigate allegations that his father sexually assaulted dozens of girls and women in the US over decades.
Kai Bickle, 38, one of three children born to Nygard and longtime ex-girlfriend Patricia Bickle, has spent the past 18 months not only offering support to authorities but also lending a hand to victims and their lawyers, the Daily Mail reported.
The 79-year-old Nygard is behind bars in Winnipeg, Canada, on US federal charges of sex abuse. He is fighting extradition.
Bickle turned on his father in 2019 after he claims he saw Nygard behave inappropriately with the 8-year-old daughter of one of Nygard’s many girlfriends.
At a dinner party in Los Angeles, Bickle believes he watched his father try to molest the girl.
“He’s got (the 8-year-old) sitting right next to him at dinner, which is usually his girlfriend chair,” Bickle told the Mail. “He’s trying to act like the Papa. It was just weird. I’m noticing that he’s telling her little secrets at dinner. Putting his hand close to her ear and going all hush-hush.”
At the end of dinner, most of the guests left the table to play cards, but Nygard and the girl stayed – as did Bickle.
“Her chair gets pushed back. He brings her round to him. She was on his right side. He brings her to his left side, with his arm around her waist, and I see his elbow change and start moving as if — it looked to me, I couldn’t see, but it looked like his hand was on her upper thigh, and rubbing,” he recalled. “Everything in my body told me he was doing something terrible.”
Bickle immediately alerted the girl’s mother. Then, he looked into his father’s eyes.
“At that moment, for me, it was like all the walls were crashing down around him,” Bickle told the Daily Mail. “And I realized that, yeah, he’s probably trying to groom that girl.”
Nygard denied any wrongdoing and called Bickle “sick, but the son had seen enough and left.
Bickle knew enough was enough when a friend texted him about a visit to Nygard.
“He said he’d brought a female friend with him, who had one or two drinks and had started to feel very high. Nygard took her up to his room and aggressively had sex with her, not using a condom,” Bickle told the Mail.
“When I heard that, I knew he was not only as bad as people said he was, but was a dangerous criminal and had to be stopped,” he said.
Bickle told the Mail that he has used his influence over various Nygard companies to block two apparent efforts to move assets offshore because he fears his father might flee.
“He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father,” Bickle told the Mail. “He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.”
Bickle also helped two younger brothers sue Nygard for hiring women to rape them. The men claim they were raped by the same woman 14 years apart, with the alleged crimes both occurring at one of their father’s properties, court papers show.
“We all spoke and decided the best course of action was to file a lawsuit publicly in the hope that other survivors would feel safe to come forward and also file criminally against Nygard,” he told the Mail.
Bickle renounced his inheritance and is working on “making the world a better place” by campaigning to close legal loopholes exploited by sex offenders.
‘I’m very happy earning my own money, as I have all my life,” he told the Mail. “We’ve never had a trust fund or an allowance, and since his money has been made through pain and suffering, I won’t accept a potential inheritance.”