Strangely, few people were willing to talk openly about him. They were scared.

Former employees quietly recounted how Mr. Nygard ran his business like a military unit. Employees were docked pay for arriving even one minute late. There was a “Nygard dictionary” and a Nygard manual on emails, which outlawed pleasantries.

They recounted stories of Mr. Nygard’s volcanic temper. One former employee showed me videos of him raging and swearing almost without breath.

“My two years at Nygard International was like a tour of duty in Vietnam,” said Timothy Grayson, one of the rare former employees willing to use his name.

They were also scared that he would sue them. Mr. Nygard is notoriously litigious, and is known to drag out lawsuits — exhausting his adversaries’ time and money. In 2009, he sued three former employees he suspected of talking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Those lawsuits are ongoing.

Another employee showed me the “cease-and-desist” letter she got from Mr. Nygard’s lawyer the morning after a former colleague dropped by her home for a drink. The letter accused her of making “malicious, false and defamatory statements” about Mr. Nygard to her friend. The two assumed her friend’s company phone was bugged. She was still petrified, a decade later.

Many people shut the door in my face. Others agreed to talk, but only on background, meaning we couldn’t publish their names.

Even the women who had gone public before, filing sexual harassment claims against Mr. Nygard in Winnipeg and agreeing to interviews with The Winnipeg Free Press in 1996, refused to be identified again. Mr. Nygard had settled with all of them, but maintained his innocence. One told me she received threatening calls after the articles ran. “It’s not part of my life I ever want to revisit,” she said.