← This Is Actually Happening
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- [00:00]
Whit Nisteldine
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.
- [00:19]
Kai Zen Bickle
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.
- [00:43]
Whit Nisteldine
From wondery. I'm wit misseldine. You're listening to this is actually happening. Episode 392. What if you were a whistleblower against your own father?
- [01:09]
Kai Zen Bickle
That's another amazing run by Team usa. And you too can go for glory with the Xfinity five year price guarantee. One Internet price five years guaranteed Xfinity. Imagine that.
- [01:20]
Whit Nisteldine
Proud partner of Team USA Restriction Supply Select Plans only.
- [01:40]
Kai Zen Bickle
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 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 complement 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 tree house, 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 a 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 a 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 4 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 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 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 people, big Great Dane 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 lake 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. He 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, 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. And 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 a 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, complimentary 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 a hundred 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. Like it was this magical, beautiful spring break. And we stayed really close after. And 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. Because 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. 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 start getting asked to go to these special events or I'll get like 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's 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 of 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 going to have this future with, she left me, which was a massive wake up call for me. And I called 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 wanted to go my way when I was a young man and I, I appreciated that. I ended up finding a little smoothie bar that was going out of business. And I talked to the two you 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, and I hit the marks. You know, I got the, the sales up, I think 1600% in like three months. And a lot of it was just because I had such an interest in health and wellness. 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 some 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 bulb 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 gonna 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, I was in the mountains for six months and a part of it was really just to get away from Nygaard 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 and honest. He was someone who wanted to have consensual non monogamy and how he has to be on his best behavior or highly conscious of the fact that he has wealth and 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 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 Nygard 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 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 buddies there, he'll have his volleyball friends. So the. 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. And we. We went over to the dinner party and I had 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, 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 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 just. It felt like the walls were shaking around him. Almost like the walls were crumbling down in some way. I could see. 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 happen? 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 police positive rapport with my dad and a position of trust because he knew that I had his best interest in 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 to 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't do the good stuff, then he could take it from them. I had told Tina that I didn't 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. Through debt. 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 X, Y, Z 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 a. 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'm 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, thanks for the talk. And then I get some texts later, heard you talk to your dad and that everything is great now. Smiley face. He. And I'm just like, man, this is 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 didn't. 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, 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 had 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. It'll all 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. That my dad was not who he claimed to be. This dinner party was May 19, 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 MeToo 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's coming your way. And he said something like, oh, yeah, that they've been trying to get me on that for years and there's nothing there. You know, it's like I'm a choir boy in my. I have no skeletons in my closet. Then I believe it was Valentine's 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. Da da da da. Well, of course I want to read it. I mean, it was vile. It was vile. Being accused of drugging women and children. You know, 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 that, 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 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 is 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 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. Because if you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, 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 Niagara had had in Finland, and that she met him at a club and had a drink and then basically started to feel impaired and that he took her 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. Fu Kai Fu 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. He had. 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 night guard 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 out 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 Naggard 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. How does anyone stop him? 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, 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, like 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's going to flee the country and just live in Russia and be out of jurisdiction. So it was a real tough struggle there. Couple months later, there was a lot of promotion on the NYGARD side about how this is all propaganda. Well, two Canadian women who decided to not be Jane does 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. And 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 Naggart's son said his dad's gonna flee the country. That was my 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 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 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 and 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. And of course, I started breaking down a little bit crying and like, just heavy. Just one thing after another. And playing out public like that, it's really. 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 14, if I'm not mistaken. He was in Canada. The USA did it. That was a big sense of relief because it had 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. Honored my mom, you know, like, I 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, 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 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 to be able to use it in the United States. That's what the loophole that was exploited with Nygaard 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. The defamation lawsuits, civil lawsuits are structured to silence them because they had no way to defend themselves and pay for lawyers, deal with all that stuff. We ended up drafting this jurisdiction reform, what this document that we worked on with Child USA is. It would empower the US 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 and that you were getting something meaningful done. Because I feel that if we could 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 gonna give me this. They were gonna honor me, this Voice of the Voiceless award, 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 and that they were gonna 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 Dorina 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 news story and thought that if his own son could do it, that she was gonna do it. And she came forward and went to Peg 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, 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 gonna piss a lot of people off and you're gonna 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 gonna 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 torch 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, 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, 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. Nukai is emerging as 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, 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 who 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 Nygard thing, I would also gain on the survivor front when I was working with ChildUSA. Those moments, I love those moments, those. It makes me feel empowered. I went up and was in dc. I was actually meeting leadership there. I felt alive. So I think taking those actions and really helping and 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 chapters, hopefully soon. Completely closing this chapter with Peter Nygaard and creating the life and imagery and associations with what I want to be.
- [55:11]
Whit Nisteldine
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 US 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 Nisteldine. 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 Actually Happening on the show's website, this is actually happening.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 thisisactually happening dot com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com happening even 2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening.