How Kai Zen Bickle, son of convicted sexual offender Peter Nygard, supported dad's victims?

Peter Nygard's son Kai Zen Bickle was seated in the front row as the jury found him guilty of four counts of sexual assault, during the trial of the disgraced fashion entrepreneur in a downtown Toronto courthouse on Sunday. 

"Justice was served here," Bickle said soon after, outside the Toronto courthouse. "We are dealing with a systemic monster who used his business talents for evil, to prey on others."

Bickle has not seen his father since a 2019 dinner party, during which he claims to have witnessed Nygard improperly touch a female. This six-week trial was their first encounter.

"That's where Kai Nygard kind of died," said Bickle, who has since assumed his mother's last name.

Bickle claimed to have loved his father and added that the purported occurrence had shocked him. He told reporters, "I knew a different man." "Since then, it's been a massive effort to seek justice."

A request for a response from the BBC regarding his son's claim was not immediately answered by Nygard's attorney. Previously, he has refuted every accusation made against him.

Bickle, who has spent the last four years aiding others who claim they were victims of his father's abuse, has openly backed Nygard's remarkable fall from grace, ending a decades-long career at the head of a worldwide fashion company.

Following the 2019 dinner party, Bickle said he went to an official at Nygard's firm and reported his father, only to have him rejected and mocked, telling him he was "mentally unwell".

"I got a taste of what it was like to blow the whistle against a monster or a powerful predator," he said.

When reporters asked if Nygard would file an appeal, Nygard's attorney Brian Greenspan responded, "We will consider the options".

On November 21, there will be a sentencing hearing.

Nygard's defence team and the crown prosecution presented radically different portraits of the man who formerly mingled with celebrities and oversaw a profitable international clothing company during closing arguments earlier this week.

According to Canadian media, Greenspan informed the jury that the state's case was based on "revisionist history" that was "built on contradictions and innuendo."

In addition, he asserted that four of the five women—who are also parties to a class action case in the United States—were driven by greed.

Nygard said he could never have acted "in that kind of manner" and that he did not remember four of the five women during stressful five days of evidence and cross-examination earlier in the trial, according to CBC.

Prosecutors mostly relied on the testimony of the ladies testifying in court.

Following the verdict on Sunday, Crown Attorney Neville Golwalla commended the women who had come forward in an address to the media.

"This is a crime that typically happens in private and profoundly impacts human dignity," Golwalla said.

"To stand up and recount those indignities in a public forum such as a courtroom is never easy and takes great courage."