398: What if you were a whistleblower against your own father?

This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode, and for more information about support services. I really believed a lot in what he would tell me as far as the type of person he was. But that night, the Nygaard part suffered a mortal wound because I had the realization that my dad was not who he claimed to be. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldine. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 392 What if you were a whistleblower against your own father? My dad was born in Helsinki, Finland. In Finland, they were doing pretty well financially, but there was pressure because of potential war with Russia, and his parents wanted the opportunity for him to have a better life. So they migrated over to Canada when he was a young teenager. And when they did that, he went into more of an extreme poverty scenario. The story that he's told about his upbringing was that they essentially lived in a converted coal bin with no running water and outhouse 20 meters away that you have to go out to the snow to use freezing temperatures. But his family was a very close unit. He had a sister and the four of them essentially tried to protect each other and help each other. Once he got through university, he got into the retail space in Canada. Eventually, he met someone who offered him some equity in exchange for his services, and that was very appealing to him. During that time, there was some type of power struggle that happened in there, and he ended up with the company. His version of how all that happened is really positive for him. I've heard other variations, so I'm not exactly sure how it all went down, but I know that he's had some pretty ruthless business practices in his life. So that was the beginning of his career in fashion of Nygaard International, which at one time was the largest manufacturer of women's clothing in Canada. his interesting angle that helped him build a successful company was that he identified women that were really career oriented and maybe didn't have the ideal figure that they once had. So he made clothing that was fit to compliment their figures and still stylish, professional. and because he was using polyester he was also able to make it cheaply and he became known as the polyester king and he was an innovator in a lot of these things a pioneer going out to other parts of the world to outsource and nygaard international was one of the first companies in canada to really embrace the internet and that was part of his success was just this determination to create systems that made his products more efficient than his competitors and market to women that were really being underserved in the fashion industry. On the flip side of that too, he had a very flamboyant personality and was very successful financially in creating fashion empire along with unique home slash offices. As a boy, being in the cold and not having access to wealth and abundance, he dreamed of having a treehouse mansion on the beach. So eventually he ended up buying some property in the Bahamas. There, over the course of 20 or 30 years, he built his dream home. kind of an extraordinarily unique resort, thatched roof cabanas with beautiful views. His other properties, whether they were offices in Toronto, properties in Los Angeles, eventually downtown Times Square, New York, and to his credit, he's a very talented designer. There was a lot of flash and a lot of glamour that he projected out there. So that's how I knew him. I knew him as an entrepreneur who worked extraordinarily hard, who was a tough guy in business. He certainly had a reputation for yelling. And within the company culture, that was always talked about how if you can take it, if you can handle it, then you're with me for life. My mom grew up on a farm. She was a farm girl. She got up at four in the morning every day to go milk the cows. And she left home at an early age. And she decided that she was going to travel the world. And at the time, it was quite glamorous to be a flight attendant. And that's where she ended up meeting my father. They met on a beach in Hawaii. My name actually comes from that story, Kai, which is in Hawaiian connected to the ocean, the essence of the sea, the essence of the ocean. My father was very assertive and she originally was blowing him off. So he booked the flight that she was on. He was very charming. He was very good at being charismatic and they fell deeply in love. And this was before he had really made it to where he was financially wealthy. They ended up having three children. I was the youngest of the three. She played an instrumental role in some of his properties that he acquired. She was by his side and they were the loves of each other's lives. But she realized that he was lying. When you really love someone and you think you know them, and then you're finding out that you're being misled in different ways, and then he would always come back, he would be crying, he would be apologizing or promising never to do this again or that again. And ultimately, he would break those promises. And when they ended up separating, I was three years old. So we left him and we left the Bahamas and we moved to Los Angeles. I went and visited my dad sometimes when he was in town in LA. He'd visit there for a few days, a couple of weeks. He had a jacuzzi on his third floor. So I would hang out in the jacuzzi at a sauna. He had parrots, different animals, these big, great game dogs. So I thought my dad was pretty amazing. Eventually, my mom made the decision to go to Washington State. Now I'm surrounded by nature and more of a small town community. My time growing up was really these two vastly different environments. One, I'm with my mom. I'd say we're probably a lower middle class household. And then I would jump on a plane to visit my dad. And in those scenarios, I'm stepping in as the prince to the palace, so to speak. I'm going to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world in Life for Key, Bahamas, this gated community, and then having of that community, by far the most interesting home, which was this extraordinary house that he had constructed over the course of, call it 20 years. He would put us to work and show us the value of hard work, which I appreciated. Nothing was ever handed out. There were no handouts. There was no allowance. There was no freebies. And I think that was good. Then I would spend a week, maybe two with him in Canada for his business meetings. So I got exposed to a lot of high level executive meetings at an early age. We would do a weekend at his late cottage with his mother. Those were incredible. We'd spend two or three days just going horseback riding, playing mini golf, playing cards, being on the boat, all that kind of stuff. It was my favorite thing. I loved family. I loved my family. It was extraordinarily loyal to him. And when I would be around him, I would try to be on my best behavior as a respectful son. So I was always positioned as a leader in the family or potentially the next person to take reins of business. So I tried to be a really good son. But it was always a little unusual because he would have at least one, maybe two or three girlfriends. Growing up, though, it didn't really seem that abnormal because that was what he celebrated. He celebrated that, hey, I'm this guy who loves women. I'm this playboy, consensual non-monogamy. This is me. Take me or leave me. I respect women. I'm into working hard, playing hard. And that was him. Later, as time went on, I found out that I had other brothers and sisters from different moms. So one time I went down there and I met a new brother. That brother was 10 and I was like 15. And so there was a part of me that was kind of frustrated about that because I felt like, why didn't you say something to me? How long have you known that I have another brother? Why not tell me? Over the years, there's a brother, then there's a new sister, then there's another new brother. Over the years, it grew to an extended family. And sometimes their moms would come down with them. Kind of an unusual experience. But you know what? This is how it is. and I can either embrace this and be positive or I can be upset. So I just chose to try to be a good brother and embrace any new sibling that came in and welcome them into the family and do whatever I could to be positive. When I was in seventh grade, I was 13 years old. My mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer. Stage four cancer is basically a death sentence. So I was processing that. I ended up turning to my dad pleading for help and he wouldn't help. He wouldn't help financially and he just told me I need to prepare for her to die. And I thought that was pretty cold and I didn't really understand that. My mom, she got on this program of alternative, complementary health things. She really started to detoxify her body. She changed her water. She changed her food. She made a lot of big changes. And over time, she survived. She became cancer-free. And it really inspired me to see that she went above and beyond and really became the CEO of her own health, essentially. The other people in her program didn't last. They all passed away. And she was really the lone survivor out of like, let's say, 100 people that were grouped together with stage four. So it really kind of led me on a kind of a path towards health and wellness being really important. I graduated high school. I ended up taking some courses at the local community college. I did do a couple of spring breaks in the Bahamas, and I ended up meeting someone, a girl then, and we kind of fell in love. It was this magical, beautiful spring break, and we stayed really close after. She was moving to Los Angeles to go to university. My dad was in Los Angeles. We had distribution centers in Los Angeles. And I just thought to myself, it feels right to go to LA now, go immerse myself more into the business world and learn from my dad. Cause that's what he would always talk about is that he wants to teach me how to be a man, a business leader, an adult when I'm ready. And so he was thrilled. I moved to Los Angeles when I was 21. So he had this compound and essentially I got my own room with my own entrance. I started working for him. I said, dad, lead me, set my schedule if you want. Like I trust you, show me what to do. And so he had me working at his distribution center in Gardena. And in my spare time, he carved out some windows where I could work on other skills or pursue other interests. And then I had my girlfriend there and life was pretty good. As a little more time went on, I started getting asked to go to these special events or I'll get a call, like he needs me in the Bahamas for something. I would have to leave at the drop of a hat if he needed me And that when I got more and more exposure to his work personality which was really tough A lot of things could go wrong And if something went wrong, and it could even be a small detail, he would really go over the top with it. And it could end up being an hour or two of him yelling. So whether it was me or it was others, just my spirit just started to break down. And so over the course of about three years, I changed. I began with all this life and enthusiasm and like a bright light. And then my light had dimmed. I was becoming more and more dependent on him, which is also a theme that my mom experienced. he systematically made her more and more dependent on him he isolated her there was all these tactics that happened that now i can see but when you're in it you don't notice it till all of a sudden your life is falling apart my girlfriend who i was really in love with i thought i was gonna have this future with she left me which was a massive wake-up call for me and i call that my quarter life crisis. I didn't understand how I was trying to do my best and do all the right things and that things just weren't working anymore. After she left, I went to my dad and I just said, look, man, I can't do this anymore. And he said, you don't need to go. He said, you can stay here, stay in your place that I set up for you there. But I understand you want to go your own way. I I wanted to go my way when I was a young man. And I appreciated that. I ended up finding a little smoothie bar that was going out of business. And I talked to the two young entrepreneurs there and I made them a sweat equity proposal that, hey, if I can get your sales up to a certain level, then I want to be an owner with you. And I hit the marks. I got the sales up by, I think, 1,600% in three months. And a lot of it was just because I had such an interest in health and wellness. And I got exposed to superfoods and raw foods, raw chocolate, maca, adaptogenic mushrooms, all these different things that now are trending. So it was cool. I did that for three or four years. And I was starting to kind of make my own way, my own identity. I wanted to find a way to kind of reconnect with my dad and maybe work with him, maybe help his health. And so when my father's mother started to get really sick and at the end of her life, that's when I was able to jump in and say, let's find solutions for your mom. He would bend over backwards, move the earth for her. And we started going to like longevity experts and the light bulbs started to go on for him. And so we had this connection, this thing in common. So at the time, I pitched him on this idea that why don't I just be like a full-time health and science scout for the family, build the team of experts, figure out what products are good, get on top of it early. And so he said, yes. And I got basically a green light to travel and go meet Nobel Prize winners or conferences. And I was at that point living my dream. probably 2007, 2008, he started to get into a conflict with his neighbor in the Bahamas and these kind of wild late night parties that Nygaard was having and the neighbor not liking that. And it became this theme, this obsession with Nygaard about this neighbor. And it reminded me how hard it is to work with him. And I was starting to also find that out because I was recruiting a lot of doctors and scientists and they were having trouble working with him. So I was starting to realize, hey, this probably isn't just going to work. I started to get really good at avoiding him because I didn't want the conflict. I did an ayahuasca journey to like bring me into adulthood and I was in the mountains for six months and a part of it was really just to get away from my garden and that whole world. By the time I came back to LA, by this time I'm like 29, I was already had a bit of a trajectory for myself because I'd gotten so much knowledge on the health and wellness side. And so I didn't really see my dad too much or interact with him too much. I kept things kind of cordial, but I was just pretty much done. So if you track Peter Nygaard and you look at whether it's the 70s, 80s, 90s, you're going to see somebody who surrounds himself with women. He wants to walk down with two or three women on each arm. These are my girlfriends. This is my thing. he admired the playboy lifestyle he would talk about how hey his lifestyle is not for everybody but he would also have the narrative that he respected women that he was upfront honest he was someone who wanted to have consensual monogamy and how he has to be on his best behavior or highly conscious of the fact that he has wealth that he could be a target for things so he's like a choir boy and that he was very anti-drug. That was his narrative that he would hammer home, you're not breaking any laws by saying, hey, I want to have consensual, non-monogamy, polyamorous kind of lifestyle. And I'm not here to judge people. But he was very, very insecure about other guys being around his prospective girlfriends or current girlfriends. He was always hyper sensitive about women. He'd always have a couple of girlfriends kind of around the house. And so there was one time when I was like in high school that there was like some sauna barbecue thing happening at one point of the property. Me and my friend, we were just hanging out on our own. And all of a sudden this young lady walks up to us, you know, she's probably 20 or 22 or something. and she's hanging out just talking to us and then all of a sudden the high guard shows up and is bringing her back to the party or whatever and then he tells me I want you out of here like I want you on the next effing plane out of here and I'm just shocked like what did I do I'm not trying to like get with this person and I had to basically talk him out of sending me home and he He then put me on the hardest job of picking up rocks off the beach and sifting through the sand with these big sifters all day from dusk till dawn. I did that for like a week. And that taught me, I just don't want to be involved with his romantic life. After I'd gotten back from six months in the mountains of Peru, I met a woman that I had a real connection with, and I didn't really want to be around my dad anymore. I didn't even want to have a place at the LA house. So about six years went by where I was living in Northern California, and I hadn't been to a dinner party in Los Angeles in seven or eight years. He did have these Sunday parties. He called them pamper parties where you pamper the guests with food and massages. He puts promotional videos on talking about his company and all his accolades. And he has that playing. He has his girlfriends at the table, usually at least two or three or four. He'll have a couple of buddies there. He'll have his volleyball friends. So the dinner is usually about 20 people. So this would happen in LA or this would happen in Bahamas. And sometimes I was there, especially in LA because I was living there. So sure, I'd be there for like the volleyball because he was insistent that I play volleyball. I'd go up, grab some guacamole, hang out a little bit. And then as the sun's starting to set, I'm out. The novelty of the dinner parties had worn off for me, but I had moved down to Southern California again, so I wasn't too far away. And I was with my brother and we went over to the dinner party and I'd found out that my old room was now one of his former girlfriends and she had a daughter that was staying there with her. When I went to the dinner party, I noticed that he had that daughter in his chair directly to the right of him, which normally when I look at these dinner parties, usually the girl he's trying to flirt with or win over is directly to the right of him. So I already thought it was kind of odd. And then I'm watching him like leaning over and whispering things into her ear. And I'm thinking that's pretty weird. So I'm getting more and more uncomfortable by the fact that he's got this little girl who's really very young. I'm going to say like 10 years old and the mom's sitting next to her and mom's just like, okay, dinner wraps up. And now it's this transition from dinner to cards. So everybody gets up, shuffles around and he pulls out the little girl's chair, brings her around to the other side of him. I see him reach behind her and I see her head kind of like going up and down. I know he's like groping her, touching her over her clothes in a sneaky way to where you would have to really be looking to notice it. And my heart just starts pounding. The adrenaline is coming and I'm witnessing what I feel like is him assaulting this child. So immediately I tell the mom to get her child away from him. and her eyes widen really big, and she does that. I go over to him, and he stands up, and my heart is just pounding, and I'm looking at him, and all kinds of things are going through my head. I can't even really think clearly. He started talking to me about something with this real estate project we were doing, and I remember it felt like the walls were shaking around him, almost like the walls were crumbling down in some way. I could see him clearly, but it just felt like things were shaking. I just took a step back and it's like, do you want to play cards? No, thank you. And I leave with my brother. And as we're walking out, I tell my brother, I think our dad is really sick. I think that I just saw him touch this child. And like, I don't know what to do. I don't know who I'm supposed to tell. and I decided that it'd be a good idea to tell his person that was super, super close to him and kind of I viewed as the head of HR almost and I didn't know what else to do. So I called her like immediately and I told her what I felt I just witnessed and she sounded shocked and horrified on the phone. And I told her like, Hey, I don't want to tell him this right now because I know how aggressive he can get. I went home and I just curled up in like the fetal position in my room and laid there and I like couldn't move. There was something in me that was really hurting, something that was dying. I put so much faith in my dad's character and so much faith in him as a man, but if you're going to abuse a child, I just felt really betrayed. I don't remember if it was that night or if it was the next day or two, but I ended up going back and because this person was staying in my old room, I knocked on the door and I'm like, yo, I need to talk to you. And she came out and I said, look, what happened? Did your daughter say anything happened? And she's like, oh no, no. And I talked to your dad and he said that you're just sensitive. And I talked to my daughter and she says nothing happened and nobody else has seen anything happen. So, you know, I just think that you're just sensitive. So I just felt completely alone. Like, what am I supposed to do? Go to the police and tell them I saw him do this, but nobody else did and even the kid didn't. Keep in mind, over the years, I had built up really strong, positive rapport with my dad and a position of trust because he knew that I had his best interest at heart. He knew that I wanted him to be healthy and that I wasn't out to extract things from him. So because I was also doing good work and helping things happen, I was getting my name on a lot of assets, but he described that as the golden handcuffs. He said that that was a strategy that he used with his executives and stuff where he's got them highly incentivized, but they have to keep doing good work That way they get sort of that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow But if they didn do the good stuff then he could take it from them I had told Tina that I didn want him to know that I saw this and I need to think about everything And the next day, he's calling me, which is unusual. And it's, Kai, Kai, I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you. Call me back. Call me back. It's your dad. So it took me two or three months before I ended up actually taking that call with him. and so I told him, hey listen, it appeared to me that you were doing XYZ, this kid, and I want to tell you that because it's very troubling, but that's how it appeared, and his response was, there's 20 people there, and you are the only one that sees this, and you say the most disgusting, vile, horrible thing as if I would ever do something like that. What's wrong with your brain? You have something from your mother. You're sick. I didn't know what gaslighting was, but when I had this phone call with him and made to feel that I'm crazy, I was like sitting there thinking to myself, this is total BS because I know what I saw. so I'm like okay so just so we're clear I'm sick I'm mentally ill yeah yeah that's that's right oh okay all right well um thanks for the talk and then I get some text later heard you talk to your dad and that everything is great now smiley face and I'm just like man this is uh this is not good there was a period of grieving the loss of what i thought he was it's like imagine you have a hero and then you realize that your hero is actually capable of doing something that's like the most vile thing i had my dad on a pedestal in a lot of ways i accepted the fact that he was very difficult to be around and that he was tough and he was all those things. But I never thought that he was capable of that kind of stuff. The fact that his life was so centered around sex, then my mind is going towards all the opportunities he has to be bad. So my mind was spinning with all of that. And then the fact that really only I felt like I really knew. It's just what I saw. So I'm also grappling with what should I do with this information? How can I stop him? I'm really struggling with like what to do. I felt completely lost and powerless. It hurt because I care more than I think anyone really knows. Like I care. I care about my parents. I care about my mom. I care about my dad. I've always tried to be a good son. I'd built up an identity over the years I was proud of. I felt proud to be Kai Nygaard. I believed in Nygaard, the brand, all the things that he'd overcome, all of the times I'd seen him working late hours, all the good things that had happened. In a lot of ways, I was really his biggest defender when people would talk about how hard it was to work with him. I'd talk people off the ledge. Hey, he's just tough. He's this, that. Just do this, do that. Send him this email and I'll be okay. I really believed a lot in what he would tell me as far as the type of person he was. But that night, the Nygaard part suffered a mortal wound because I had the realization that my dad was not who he claimed to be. this dinner party was may 19th 2019 that's where kai nygaard kind of died and then i noticed that they're starting to take away some of my privileges and rights that i have in my business stuff with him i'm noticing that i'm being a little bit disempowered with some of the things that i'd earned and so i'm just starting to withdraw really like what is this so that time went on i skipped family weekend i skipped christmas get together with him which was another thing that i would often try to do in some way and we get to february of 2020 sometime in there i get a phone call from a socialite friend of mine in england and she's saying that hey kai i just want to let you know that i was at this fancy party and people were talking about how Nygaard is next on the Me Too movement. I just thought I'd give you a heads up. I actually took that opportunity to call him. We hadn't been speaking. And I said, hey, I just want to let you know that I heard that some kind of Me Too action is coming your way. And he said something like, oh yeah, they've been trying to get me on that for years. There's nothing there. It's like I'm a choir boy. I have no skeletons in my closet. Then I believe it was Valentine day, he gets hit with this civil suit. I think it was 10 women and children from Bahamas. And this creates a firestorm media about the billionaire fashion mogul getting hit with this civil suit. Well, the police come and raid his marina property and New York property. And I see this on the news. I asked him about the civil suit. He told me it's all just lies. Don't read it. Well, of course I want to read it. I mean, it was vile. It was vile. Being accused of drugging women and children. I'd say like 14-year-olds drinking something at one of his parties and then not remembering or having flashes or feeling immobilized or whatever. So here he is being now accused of druggings. Very extreme and what would really appear to almost be mentally ill kind of stuff. So at that point, I'm realizing that this is probably all true. He is still in LA for at least three or four or five days, something like that, before he actually leaves. During that time, he stays on his routine. He tries to have these dinner parties. I wasn't there for them, but a lot of people stopped showing up. But his friend brought over somebody that he liked. His friend confides in me later and says, Kai, your dad's such a dick. I brought over this girl I really like. She had one drink of wine, started feeling very sexual and high. Your dad aggressively took her up to his third floor, had sex with her without a condom. Now she won't talk to me and she's getting an STD check and she thinks that she got drugged and raped. Now this is more inside information for me that nobody else really has. And what that tells me is he has the civil suit happening publicly and that he still did something after that. And that just told me that he's out of control and that he is very sick and he needs to be stopped. So at that point, the civil attorneys had reached out to one of my brothers and my brother told him, Hey, I think Kai is very sympathetic to this and maybe you should talk to him. And they were reluctant to talk to me because they didn't know where I stood. And I ended up on the phone with the civil attorneys and they said, hey, we're actually about to do our next version of the civil suit. And it's jumped from 10 to 57, I think was the new number, which is extraordinarily high amount of new people on a civil suit within five weeks of it becoming public. Now it was people from LA, it was people from Winnipeg, it was people from Toronto, it was people from all his spots. And then I was asking, well, why didn't people say something? And the response I get is that most of these people were threatened with getting hit with a defamation lawsuit, which is Nygaard weaponizing the current system. Because if you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, it says, I'm going to sue you for $10 million. You now have to get a lawyer and defend yourself against it, even if you don't really can't afford a lawyer. And if you win, your reward is nothing. It's just that you didn't get sued. But he's fine to play that game because he's got the money to do it. He basically weaponized defamation lawsuits to silence people by having to go through that court. So there was almost this wall of silence that had been built and it came crashing down with these public filings of the civil suit. Then I think it allowed people to have a sense of safety in numbers. And I also go back to this point about what he was talking about, about being a choir boy, that he didn't have any skeletons in his closet. as I read this, I realized that he was right. He didn't have a skeleton in his closet. He had a graveyard. It's like a horror movie. It's like a horror movie for me. so the floodgates of information began to open and people began to reach out to me on social media because i think word was getting out that i was very sympathetic to the survivors in fact someone from finland reached out talked about a random trip that night yard had in finland and that she met him in a club and had a drink and then basically started to feel impaired that he took to his hotel room and raped her. So this pattern of using drugs and these vile acts. When I found out that his friend had said that he thought his girlfriend was drugged, I contacted the property managers and I told them and I got attacked. I got gaslit the same way that I was getting gaslit by him. F you, Kai, F you, never liked you. throwing all kinds of just stuff at me. I feel that a lot of the people that were in these spots, individuals that he had at different positions, I am very sympathetic to the fact that he also was abusive to them. He had them in their own little pieces of fragmented information. He probably had leverage on them. He probably threatened them. There's a lot of manipulation going on there. I've tried not to hold grudges or blame against some of the people in his inner circle as much because I think that he was a master manipulator and he also put people that were a bit malleable in positions where he knew they probably wouldn't be asking questions. But when I blew the whistle on this with his friend internally again, I was met with resistance, with gaslighting, trying to discredit me. I'd found out that that message had been spread around to other people in the Nightguard organization who now, when I reached out to them, were coming at me with F you, don't like you, just doing whatever they can to silence or attack me. And they're probably doing that of their own self-preservation, but it just showed that system that there are walls and layers of defenses that are coming against you. So if you want to talk about being a whistleblower and what it's like to be a whistleblower or any of that, just know that if you are somebody that wants to blow the whistle, that there probably are multiple layers of defense and it's not going to be fun and it's not going to be pretty. Talking to the civil attorneys, I then told them that I wanted to be connected to the police if possible because I'd like to share with them all the information that I've gathered because I knew that the most important thing was not necessarily to sue him for money it was to stop him it was to get him off the street and get him in front of his accusers to go through trial that was the right move to do that was the service that was the act that I could do to try to help this situation. And so I got in touch with the police, and I told them that I was concerned that he was going to flee the country. And they told me there were instances of people going to the Bahamian police and the police bringing them back to the compound, that essentially, Nagard had the police in his pocket. I always sort of knew that he was very friendly with government and police officers too. So it didn't really completely shock me when I heard that. And I just thought to myself, well, then what do people do? How does anyone stop them? Can't you bring back evidence to USA and they use it? And police said, no, you can't. It's out of jurisdiction. It's up to the Bahamian authorities. Well, it appeared that he had the Bahamians paid off. So there was no real way to go forward. it didn't seem like in the Bahamas. I mean, just think about that. If you have no ability to collect evidence from a foreign country, you have no, but even if you collect the evidence, but you have no ability to use good evidence in court of law back home, you're completely stuck. They had no path forward criminally. So every day I was waking up thinking he's going to flee the country today. And what I was doing was really working behind the scenes, just whatever I could do. I had all of these messages I was getting and people contacting me, hey, I should let you know something happened back in the mid 80s It felt like every day my day was dealing with stories of abuse and trying to connect it to either the civil attorneys or the criminal ones and thinking that he going to flee the country and just live in Russia and be out of jurisdiction So it was a real tough struggle there. A couple months later, there was a lot of promotion on the Nygaard side about how this is all propaganda. end up. Well, two Canadian women who decided to not be Jane Doe's came out in a story that said they were raped by him, allegedly in his Toronto office. And that brought more credibility to the authorities, which was really the main point of all this was that you were just looking for something that fit with the jurisdiction. As we got into September, that's when I felt like I needed to publicly whistleblow against him. In an act of desperation, I decided to call up one of the reporters that I was watching cover this, who I thought was a good investigative journalist. I think the interview was, Vagart's son said, dad's going to flee the country. That was my I first public whistleblow against him, and that severed my relationship with him completely. So that was really rough, actually. I really struggled with that. I had a lot of anxiety around that. And he said in there, he said, this is really hurtful because my favorite son has come against me, and my number one son. It was really the end of any type of connection with him in any way, shape, or form. As far as whistleblowing goes and stuff like that, it didn't really have a whole lot of effects. It's not like anybody celebrates you for doing that. It just cost me everything that I sort of had in that world that I'd built over the years. Anything that was left was gone after that. November comes along and I get reached out to from CBC News. and then I participated in a podcast called evil by design and I was the only family member to do it and I talk about the dinner party and I talk about some of these things they tell me on the episode that one time when I was in Bahamas that this woman was there who was being raped by him and that I'd gone up as like a little boy and like knocked on his window she was getting raped and how bad she felt because this like innocent boy was like knocking on the window trying to like see if his dad will come out and play with him. Of course, I started breaking down a little bit, crying, and just heavy, just one thing after another. And playing out in the public like that, it's really rough. So that was in November. And then December, turns out that actually he got arrested. They got enough people, and they put it in front of the crowd prosecutor. They arrested him, I think, on December 14th, if I'm not mistaken. He was in Canada. The USA did it. That was a big sense of relief because it would have been 10 months of basically this not knowing if he was going to stay or go. And I'm really advocating for no bail because he's trying to get bail. And now I'm getting out there a little bit with my name, image, likeness, Google search. And I'm realizing that this probably isn't so good after all because now I've got the association being Peter Nygaard's son. That's not something I really like following me around. I didn't want to carry Nygaard anymore. I felt like that was something I could do, an act that I could do. I decided I was just going to go ahead and do a legal name change. I moved Bickle to my last name. Honor my mom, you know, like, love my mom. She's been great. I settled on Zen, middle name. You know, Kaizen means actually good change. And that means something to me. I felt really bad about how he manipulated the system. And I ended up reaching out to this group called Child USA. They work on changing laws for kids. I met the CEO of Marcy Hamilton. She told me that she heard my story and that they were going to help me write something to change this jurisdiction loophole, like close that. and that felt really good because it felt like some kind of action that could help others in the future like maybe we could actually like correct some of these things in the system that he was exploiting currently it's it's very difficult to bring back evidence from other countries be able to use it in the united states that's what the loophole that was exploited with Neigart was. It was in a foreign jurisdiction that he had some influence over so that he didn't fear the law in that jurisdiction. It is a massive scale that he was doing this. So this was a system that he had perfected. And what it clearly showed was an intent to get people to the Bahamas, do whatever he wanted there without any fear of retribution from the police. And then when they came back to the USA, they had no path forward criminally. And then he would weaponize the defamation lawsuits, simple lawsuits are structured, to silence them because they had no way to defend themselves and pay for lawyers and deal with all that stuff. We ended up drafting this jurisdiction reform. what this document that we worked on with ChildUSA is. It would empower the U.S. courts and authorities to be able to use evidence that was collected even outside U.S. jurisdiction. I think the biggest thing about it was working on the legislation, feeling supported in that you're getting something meaningful done. Because I feel that if we can get something meaningful done, like actually change some things, then maybe in a way it's not all for nothing that it actually resulted in a good change and then she told me that they were going to give me this uh they were gonna honor me this uh voice of the voiceless word which meant a lot to me because it just felt i don't know i guess it just felt like it's been such a lonely hard road just to feel like they understood it In fact, they were going to do that, lifted my spirits a bit. So right before he was supposed to be extradited to the USA, Toronto hit him with like a handful of charges because people had come forward in Canada. He had assaulted them, allegedly, in his Toronto office. I also found out that because of my whistleblowing story in September, another survivor had come forward named Darina Hicks, who told me that she was on the brink. So she told me that she was on the brink of suicide and that she saw that new story and thought that if his own son could do it, that she was going to do it. And she came forward in Winnipeg and she was one of those people. I've become friends with her. That meant a lot to me because I kind of felt like when I did that, that it didn't mean anything and it cost me a lot. But to hear that it meant a lot to her, then it helped me a little bit. I understand people in the Nygaard family are mad at me. It's not easy to be a whistleblower. It's not easy to put yourself out there. You're going to piss a lot of people off and you're going to get attacked. the number one thing that they try to do is to discredit you and that's real so be aware if you're going to be a whistleblower of the long-term ramifications too people are pissed his falcon lake place got torched you got to be real careful how you throw out information out there because if people then think that oh yeah kai must have known oh he was there somebody could towards my house. This is all really highly volatile emotional stuff. And you might feel pretty darn lonely. You might find yourself isolated with people trying to discredit you. But also, some things are worth fighting for. In this case, I felt a moral obligation to do everything that I could. And the real point for me is not anything other than wanting to draw attention to some of these problems within the system. And that if we can use this as an example and figure out where the system was being weaponized or abused or where it failed us, and we can make some good changes so that it empowers citizens and doesn't empower abusers, then for me it doesn't matter if I'm a whistleblower that has some negative this or that what matters is the goal I played my role as best that I could a lot of people busted their butts on this my brothers deserve credit for being so brave everyone that participated in these civil suits. Everyone that came forward with their name, image, likeness, heroes, they should not be shunned or shamed or anything, really be celebrated. And then the questions are, what is going on with the fact that Nygaard can sue for defamation, for harming his reputation, and he is currently in jail, found guilty for raping and drugging women? Let's do something about it. Let's solve that. I want to move forward. I want solutions. I want to change the system and make a difference for people. I've gone through a period where my light has really dimmed. I feel a sense of shame around my name just kind of follows me. But I know that the best way around something is through it. I don't think it's too late to reinvent yourself ever. I don't have to have a sad story. I don't have to be impaired. I don't have to feel a certain way. I can take that and I can channel it into whatever I want. We get to create our lives. And so this is just another chapter. And I'm proud of the fact that I could look back and feel that I've done some things to help. new kai is emerging as uh you can emerge as the phoenix you can rise from the ashes you know the other cool thing about it was like for everyone that was my friend because they thought i had money because they thought they could get something from me this helped to kind of clear that for me the people have stuck around in my life i know they like me because of me I'm really into the health and wellness stuff. I'm into this Kaizen theme. That's really important to me. And certainly your emotional health is really important. And it's very important to connect with others that share your same values and find your allies. I knew that the family that I would lose in this night guard thing, I would also gain on the survivor front. When I was working with Child USA, those moments, I loved those moments. it makes me feel empowered. I went up and was in D.C. I was actually meeting leadership there. I felt alive. So I think taking those actions and really helping doing something helps a lot. We get to create and mold our futures. And so that's what I'm going to be focusing on the next chapter. Hopefully soon, completely closing this chapter with Peter Nygaard and creating the life and imagery and associations with what I want to be. Today's episode featured Kai Zen Bickle. Kai is proud of legislation drafted with Child USA to close jurisdictional loopholes, specifically to ensure that evidence of sexual crimes committed against children on foreign soil can be brought back and used in U.S. courts, preventing perpetrators from escaping accountability by abusing international boundaries. A link to their organization can be found in the show notes. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Whit Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Jason Blaylock, and Andrew Waits, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velasquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at actuallyhappening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, You can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's thisisactuallyhappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com slash happening. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. you