Everybody's afraid of Frank

WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.

Standing before a sold-out crowd at a college gala, Frank Stronach the billionaire founder of the auto parts giant Magna International revealed the simple secret to his success.

"I think the reason I've done well is I treated the employees as partners," the then 91-year-old said as he spoke in May at the Keystone Awards for Job Creation in Peterborough, Ont.

It was vintage Stronach, presenting himself as a big business savant and friend to the working class, extolling as he has for years the virtues of a corporate culture that shares profits with employees.

"Constantly, every day, I thought: 'What I do I have to do so that the employees respect me?'"
 

A video clip of his address was posted to his official Instagram page on June 6.

A day later, Stronach learned how some of those employees view him.

They claim he was their rapist.

It started with five sex crime charges, but police would lay more in the following months. By October, Stronach's charge sheet ballooned to 18 criminal counts, placing his case in the same spotlight as other high-profile sexual assault cases involving wealthy Canadian businessmen, including those of Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard and Quebec billionaire Robert Miller.

• Watch the full documentary, Power and Silence, from The Fifth Estate on YouTube or CBC-TV on Friday at 9 p.m.

The charges involve 13 alleged victims and range from sexual assault and rape to forcible confinement and span 47 years, back to the heyday of his leadership of Magna.

"It was rape. It happened. It was happening to me. I saw it happening," said a 65-year-old woman whom The Fifth Estate is calling Leigh because she asked that her real name not be published to protect her privacy. She says Stronach raped her in a Toronto waterfront condominium when she was 20.

Women who allege they have been assaulted by Stronach, then and now, say they were afraid of his wealth and influence.

I was really scared, Leigh said. Him being a rich guy, [I thought] he couldn't afford to have people say things about them and stuff like that. I thought I was going to be dumped in the harbour.

Some of the alleged victims, including Leigh, worked for Stronach at his various ventures.

While the number of allegations, largely historical, against him grew, an investigation by CBCs The Fifth Estate found stories of Stronachs alleged sexual misconduct continued into 2024.

Employees of his Aurora, Ont., restaurant, Frank's Organic Garden, 50 kilometres north of Toronto, claim he has made unwanted sexual advances toward young female staff in the last few years, including asking a female staffer for oral sex while she was in a locked car with him.

Everybody's afraid of Frank, one restaurant employee told The Fifth Estate. He can pay off anyone he wants. So, it's like, having worked for him, you learn the things he gets away with and everybody's afraid of it.
 

Stronach denies all of it. 

My friends know me, and a lot of people which worked for me, they know who I am, Stronach said in an interview with The Fifths Estates Mark Kelley. That's totally against what I stand for.

Some of the women who alleged he abused them want money, he says. Or they are scorned because he didn't hire them. 

Or, as in the case of the restaurant employee in the car, they came onto him, he says. And all of it, he says, could be part of a conspiracy opposed his ideas about profit sharing with corporate employees.

I knew this would happen, Stronach, now 92, said. Any time you change the system I would be attacked.

The charges against Stronach have not been proven in court, and he has not provided evidence of his counterclaims.

Over nearly five decades, although some of the victims would go to police, there was a persistent silence around the allegations.

No charges were laid until this year. No whistleblowers came forward, although in the wake of Stronachs arrest, a former female employee of the Magna golf course told The Fifth Estate that Stronachs behaviour toward female staff was an open secret among employees.

Some women who alleged harassment or assault were given cash settlements. Other employees were compelled to sign non-disclosure agreements when they left Stronachs employ.

Even now, as the criminal case against Stronach grinds forward, that silence remains. The Fifth Estate reached out to several current and former Stronach executives, managers and employees across several of his ongoing or past businesses. Interview requests were often unanswered or aggressively rebuffed.

Hints of what was to come are found in a 2006 biography of Stronach by the late business journalist Wayne Lilley, who said his subjects behaviour toward female staff extended beyond Canadian shores to Magnas business interests in Europe.

Females employees discreetly warned younger women on staff to beware the bosss behaviour at events such as the office Christmas party, to the point of describing, from experience, the moves to expect from the boss, Lilley wrote in Magna Cum Laude: How Frank Stronach became Canadas Most Well-Paid Man. Even male managers would sometimes alert new female staff hires about the chairmans louche tendencies.

Outwardly, at least, Stronach appears unfazed by the charges and the prospect of spending his twilight in prison. He should not be under a microscope, he said. Its society and the legal system that need to be examined.

"My thing is, I'm above everything," Stronach said. We got to improve the law we got away from what a free society means.
 

In public, he has done what he has for several years: attending events, giving talks, building vehicles and running businesses.

But this is not the Frank Stronach of old, who commanded the attention of presidents and prime ministers and who could boast the workforce for the company he founded was in the hundreds of thousands.

Long removed from Magna's boardroom and stockholder meetings, Stronach gives talks about his economic ideas to small audiences in his organic food restaurant in Aurora, located in a strip mall next to a Walmart. His wife of 60 years, Frieda Stronach, died in March.

When The Fifth Estate toured his Aurora electric vehicle plant, which has produced a handful of prototypes, in September, only a single employee was present.

And now, Canadas onetime auto parts king faces the possibility that he will spend the rest of his life in a prison cell.

How did it come to this? 

WATCH | Stronach denies allegations made against him:

The story of Stronach's rise is the archetypal tale of the immigrant who made it big.

Born Franz Strohsack in Austria in 1932, he arrived in Canada in 1954 and changed his name to Frank Stronach.

The name Stronach was the version he adapted believing it might mitigate the foreignness conveyed by his distinct Austrian accent, and smooth his integration into Canadas mainly English-speaking business community, Lilley wrote in his biography of Stronach.

A few years later, he started a small tool-and-die company, Multimatic Investments, in a rented Toronto garage.

By 1973, the company merged with another Toronto firm, Magna Electronics. Stronach and his business partners, with a majority share in Magna Electronics, took over the company, restructured its operations and renamed it Magna International

For the next three decades, Magna was defined by astronomical growth. According to the company, its sales of auto parts increased from $119.6 million in 1980 to $1.4 billion in 1990 a nearly 12-fold increase.

The Canada-U.S. Auto Pact, forged in the 1960s, required 60 per cent of the parts in cars sold in Canada be Canadian-made. The deal created a path to riches for Magna, which was known for high-quality, proprietary work. By the time the pact ended in 2001, Magna was doing $10 billion in annual sales, according to company figures.
 

As its leader and majority shareholder, Stronach became one of the wealthiest, most influential business leaders in Canada. Those riches fuelled Stronachs philanthropy. His business savvy and community contributions earned him accolades, including being named to the Order of Canada in 1999 and being inducted in the American Automotive Hall of Fame in 2018.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton said he was proud to know Stronach.

Im proud of our friendship. Im proud of the vision youve displayed throughout your business career, he said in a 2012 campaign advertisement when Stronach briefly held an elected post in the Austrian parliament.

Even in Ontarios York Region, where his businesses remain headquartered to this day, his influence is acknowledged with a recreational centre, a park, a town street and a cancer centre that bear his name.

Stronach made his fortune through auto parts, but business interests expanded as his wallet grew.

He created subsidiaries of Magna International that had little to do with cars. This included Magna Entertainment, through which he invested in horse racing. When that company collapsed into bankruptcy 2010, he and his daughter, Belinda Stronach, created the Stronach Group, which focused on horse racing, breeding and online gambling.
 

In the early days of Magnas expansion, there were other less well-known and less profitable ventures. They included a glitzy disco club on Yonge Street in Toronto that catered to high-end patrons, including Hollywood stars and professional athletes.

It was there, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, that Stronach held court on Thursday nights from a reserved corner table, partying with business leaders, politicians and young female employees.

"We had celebrities one night I see this big, tall Black guy. And I said, 'Wow. You're as tall as [former NBA star] Wilt Chamberlain.' And he says: 'I am Wilt Chamberlain, said Phil Mowat, the clubs first DJ, known as Disco Phil.

For some women in Stronachs orbit, the club was anything but dazzling. It was where, they say, a night of horror began. Yet what happened under the colourful strobe lights at Rooneys would go publicly unnoticed, even by Stronachs biographer, for nearly 40 years until police detectives started to dig.
 

Stronachs star began to show signs of tarnish long before he faced rape charges in a Ontario courthouse.

Magna, of course, was an undisputed success and his family company, the Stronach Group, also did well operating major horse racing tracks in the United States, sometimes featuring a beauty pageant, Miss Racing Queen, with a $100,000 grand prize.

But not everything Stronach touched turned to gold.

He developed a penchant for off-beat ventures in the 1990s and 2000s, most of which failed.

There was a "Frank's Energy Drink," billed to be a competitor to Red Bull that was to be marketed by a winner of Donald Trumps NBC game show, The Apprentice. Stronach told the Globe and Mail that Magna sunk a few hundred thousand dollars into the drink, but it vanished almost as fast as it appeared.

He announced plans to build an $800-million amusement Park in Vienna called The World of Wonder using Magna resources. But shareholders balked and the park was never built. Stronach also wanted to build a luxury airliner, but it never got off the ground.

In 2009, with Magnas stock price sliding, Stronach attempted to buy Opel, a German carmaker owned by General Motors. But the American auto giant scuttled the billion-dollar deal at the 11th hour, and Stronach went home empty-handed.

The next year, Magna pushed him out. His exit wasnt cheap, however, with Magna buying his controlling shares for more than $800 million and paying him consulting fees until 2014.

The Associated Press reported that within five years of Stronachs departure, Magnas stock nearly tripled.

Cut loose from Magna, Stronach tried to cross from business to politics, making a bid to become Austrias leader in 2011 with a political party he named after himself Team Stronach. He had tried politics once before in a failed bid to win a seat for the Liberals during the 1988 Canadian federal election.

Stronachs party won some seats during the 2013 Austrian election, including his own. But he abandoned his post after three months as Austrian elections authorities examined his campaign spending. Team Stronach was all but dead by the time of the next election in 2014. 
 

It's not a big deal. I dont get elected, I re-elect myself as the chairman of Magna, Stronach said in a video trailer he produced for an unfinished documentary about his horse racing ventures that was posted online in June.

There was no prospect of returning to Magna short of a hostile takeover,  but there was still the Stronach Group. He had turned control of the company over to his daughter, Belinda Stronach, when he made his political gambit in Austria.

When that ended, he sought to reassert control and continued to invest in extravagant projects. Belinda Stronach would not surrender the company. Her father sued her for $500 million in 2018, claiming she was mismanaging the family fortune and trying to force him out of the company.

Belinda attempted to accommodate Franks desires with respect to his idiosyncratic business pursuits, but over time this became increasingly difficult and detrimental to the financial condition of the Stronach Group, said Belinda Stronachs counter claim against her father, which accused him of mismanagement and excessive spending costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Among the projects she cited were two 34-metre tall bronze statues of a pegasus killing a dragon built in 2012. One was installed at the Stronach Group-owned Gulfstream Park horse racing track in Florida, and become the tallest statue in the United States save for the Statue of Liberty. The other is in storage in China.

Frank has spent over $55 million US of the Stronach Group funds to build these statues as part of his vision for Pegasus Park, court documents say. Belinda and other members of TSG management stopped Franks further expansion plans for Pegasus Park, which was to include a roller-coaster, a carousel, a lavish pony barn, horse museum and multi-purpose exhibition arena.

Ultimately, the family settled in 2020, with Belinda Stronach taking the lion's share of the Stronach Group's business. Frank Stronach walked away with his Florida cattle ranch, horse breeding operation and the family's European assets. He later formed another company, Stronach International, to build electric vehicles.

The settlement was not the end of the drama for Stronach. 

While walking the winding road of his business career, Stronach accumulated a long list of women who accused him of sexual misconduct and assault, including several who found themselves in his glitzy disco club in downtown Toronto.
 

Rooneys was not Leighs kind of place, and it was not filled with her kind of people.

In 1980, she was a 20-year-old horse groomer working at Stronachs stables in Aurora. She wanted a life spent in barns and pastures and in the saddle. Leigh says she didnt drink, and had little interest in going to a disco where the wealthy and the famous were rubbing shoulders.

But it was her birthday, and two other stable hands convinced her to celebrate at Rooneys, the bar owned by their boss.

Tucked away just outside downtown Torontos strip of bars and restaurants, Rooneys cultivated an atmosphere of excess.

"At Rooney's, the drinkers and dancers ooze money. Some 19-year-old customers have their own house accounts, billed monthly to daddy," Toronto Star columnist Terry Beflord wrote in 1978. "You can buy champagne from the waitress, Monte Cristo cigars from the bartenders and, on one night last week, cocaine in the washrooms."

Regular patrons were issued a special gold membership card that looked like a mock credit card and got them past the lineups on busy nights.

Thursdays were Stronachs nights.

"Frank would sometimes just go in for dinner and meet somebody in politics or whoever," said DJ Phil Mowat.

When he wasn't doing business, Stronach was often on the dance floor with young women, Mowat said. At his table, Dom Perignon flowed freely.  

"He just had a big personality, he was a charming guy and he was a good-looking guy," said Dana Joon, a makeup artist and Rooney's regular. "I think that, yes, he was a player."
 

It was in this frenetic atmosphere that Leigh says she came to the attention of Stronach.

She told him that she didnt drink, but he brushed her concerns aside and filled her champagne glass anyway. Her recollections of the night are fragmented, but she says she was on the dance floor with Stronach.

I'm out on the dance floor and he's holding me really, really tight, she told The Fifth Estate. I was trying to get loose. And then he shoves up in my skirt and he punctures my pantyhose, and he sticks his fingers right inside of me.

She said the assault continued at Stronachs table in view of other people, who said nothing.

Leigh later woke up in a Toronto harbourfront condo, with Stronach on top of her.

"I remember waking up, lying in bed. I was on my back, looking up at the ceiling, and I could see myself in the ceiling," said Leigh, who had no recollection of how she got to the condo from Rooney's. "I could see him on top of me. He was having sex with me. Raping me."

Leigh said she was disoriented, frightened and unsure of where she was. Stronach drove back to Rooneys, where her car was waiting.

For Leigh, the trauma from the incident was life-altering. She said she was suicidal for a time. She quit her job at the stables and walked away from horses, never to return.

"He took away my joy in working with horses because at that time it would always keep coming back to me and back to me and back to me," Leigh said. "It just didn't have the same lightness and energy about it. He took away my fire."

WATCH | Remembering the trauma of a life-altering incident:

Another woman, not a Stronach employee, also says she was sexually assaulted by Stronach during an evening that started at Rooney's and ended in the condo, The Fifth Estate has learned. Like all the alleged victims, her name is protected by a publication ban.

Stronach denies the allegations, but told The Fifth Estate he was part of a board that had a harbourfront condo ostensibly to entertain European guests.

Rooney's was also part of Jane Boon's experience with Stronach while she was a 19-year-old Magna intern.

Boon says Stronach invited her to attend a party at the disco in 1986. After a night of dancing and drinking, Stronach declared Boon was too drunk to drive, and instructed her to give her car keys to his driver, who would take the vehicle to a corporate guest house.

"It dawned on me that I'd been caught in a trap."

She said Stronach took her to the house in Gormley, south of Aurora, where Magna owns a large recreational area called Simeon Park.

They had sex, and while Boon says it was not rape, it certainly wasn't right.

"It was a horrible abuse of power. To put it bluntly, a 54-year-old CEO should not be hitting on 19-year-old co-op students in their employ," she said.

While strongly denying the charges and allegations, Stronach has said he cannot discuss them in any detail because of the ongoing court case.

However, in a late September interview with The Fifth Estate, Stronach revealed that two women claimed he molested them in a parking lot near Rooney's. Those accusations never became public.

So I said to my lawyer 'What do you want me to do?' He said: 'You have such a high profile, riding high, I want you to pay the thing here and it's over,' said Stronach, who did not disclose how much he paid the women.

The latest charges against Stronach include sexually assaulting two women on Jan. 4, 1983, in Toronto. Court documents do not provide specific details of incidents related to the charges and it is not clear if they are connected to the incident in the parking lot.

It is also not clear if the payoffs were made by Stronach personally or through one of his companies. 
 

There is at least one other known payout related to harassment allegations aimed at Stronach.

Court records show that in 2002, Nicole Will, a young bartender at the Magna golf course in Aurora, filed a $250,000 lawsuit against Stronach for harassing her. Stronach claimed he was merely asking her to play tennis, and that Will was trying to humiliate him in a cash grab. The case was settled out of court by Magna without a statement of liability by Stronach and with terms that have never been disclosed.

Since the charges against Stronach were made public, Magna International has launched its own internal probe, hiring two law firms to comb through company records to determine if any other payouts were made to women as a result of Stronach's behaviour.

"This review process is complicated with the passage of time (going back 40-50 years), but should relevant information be located, we will follow a strict protocol to respect the legal rights of all and co-operate with authorities," Magna spokeswoman Tracy Fuerst said in an email.

"Out of respect for both the criminal process and the personal privacy of the various complainants who have raised claims against Mr. Stronach, we are unable to comment further."

To date, the company says the Will case is the only record of a payout it found.

Fuerst did not answer questions about the investigation and Stronach's access to company guest houses or condos. 
 

While seven of the 18 charges against Stronach date back to the 1970s, 80s and 90s, three are more recent two in 2023 and one in 2024 long after Rooneys shut down.

The Fifth Estate interviewed three women who described the work environment at Stronachs Aurora restaurant, Franks Organic Garden, as uncomfortable and predatory. At least one employee went to the police earlier this year, claiming she was sexually assaulted by Stronach.

Frank, with one of the girls, took her aside and then gave her a hug goodbye and grabbed her ass, said one former employee who asked her identity be concealed for fear of reprisals from Stronach. With the one girl who was taken into the private dining room when she came out, I could see on her face immediately that something happened to her.

She also said another employee was invited to dinner with Stronach to discuss future job opportunities. Once in his car, Stronach drove them to the nearby Walmart parking lot and demanded oral sex.

She was resisting and pushing back, the former employee said. He tried to force his hand down her pants in the car as well, but the doors were locked she couldnt get away.

Afterwards, Stronach drove the woman back to the restaurant, where she ran inside crying, the ex-employee said.

When The Fifth Estate asked Stronach about the incident, he acknowledged there was an incident involving himself and a restaurant staffer in a car, but said it was the other way around.

The criminal investigation into Stronach is being handled by Peel Regional Police, after detectives there were handed case files from York Regional Police. Included in that investigation are reports from women who say they were assaulted in Toronto, including Leigh, who broke her silence and went to police there in 2015.

Because she was a stable hand and Stronach was a billionaire, she worried no one would believe her story. But she eventually came to believe it was important to speak out. 

"I've been thinking of that for a long time. You are a survivor, but you're not letting anybody know you're a survivor," she said. I was like, It's time. It's time to come forward and say something. And I started with the police."

She said she was interviewed by two Toronto police officers, but nothing came of it, until charges were laid against Stronach by Peel police this year.

I never heard another word back from the police. Not a phone call, not an email. Nothing. 
 

Peel police are not talking about their investigation. And York and Toronto police services are not discussing why they have turned their files over to another service, nor why those complaints have resulted in charges being laid in 2024 if complaints were made a decade ago.

A police chief can decide to move a case to another jurisdiction to avoid even an appearance of conflict of interest, said Scott Blandford, a 30-year policing veteran who now teaches policing and public safety courses at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ont.

In York Region, Stronach, his family and his companies have a long history with the local police service.

In 1997, then York Regional Police Chief Bryan Cousineau was forced to resign after a $125,000 personal loan from Magna.

A York deputy chief worked as Magna's chief of security from 2005 to 2007 and in 2020, the Stronach Group and Magna donated $25,000 each to a chief's retirement dinner.

The current head of Magna's security is a former York police superintendent.

Beyond policing, the Stronachs are everywhere in the region. Belinda Stronach was MP for Newmarket-Aurora from 2004 to 2008. A recreation centre and cancer centre carry the family name.

WATCH | Changing the venue of the court case:

In that environment, investigating Stronach could be a fraught endeavour for York police, Blandford said.

"You simply have to look at the current environment, both in Canada and south of the border, and the perceptions that certain people in certain groups are above the law and they're able to commit crimes with impunity," Blandford said. "So the public perception is very, very important."

The crown's case against Stronach will include victim accounts and footage from security cameras, a Brampton court heard in the summer.

However, in October the Crown said the case was being moved to Toronto because the smaller Peel Region courthouse does not have the resources to manage a prosecution of this magnitude.

LISTEN | Responding to the allegations:

Stronach says the truth will come out when the case goes to trial and the charges against him will be proven false. He says he is not worried about going to prison.

The one thing I am most sure of is I haven't done anything improper, Stronach said. I created a system, which will be very difficult to prove that I did anything improper.

He says there may be a conspiracy behind the criminal charges against him. He claims the mud started to fly when he began to write newspaper columns about sharing corporate profits with employees.

Lets find out. Lets find out, he said when asked who could possibly be co-ordinating the women who allege he assaulted them.

It will be some time before the charges against Stronach will be tested at trial. His next court date is scheduled for Nov. 4, and will confirm the change in venue from Peel Region to Toronto.

Cases of this magnitude can take several years to resolve. Billionaire Peter Nygard, for instance, was arrested in 2021, convicted of sex assault in late 2023 and sentenced to 11 years in prison last month. The charges linked to his original 2020 arrest have yet to go to trial.

Stronach says he is not worried about going to prison because a higher power than the courts knows he is innocent.

Those are very serious charges and I realize that. But on the other hand, I am who I am, he said. Because when you go to heaven, if you meet God, he knows. He knows: Did you do the right thing or the wrong thing.

Leigh says she is finding some solace in the fact that other women have also come forward.

"I just wanted justice. And I didn't even realize how many women this might have even happened to," she said in an August interview, when Stronach faced 13 charges linked to 10 alleged victims.

"That nine other women had come forward and that I wouldn't be facing this alone was a relief. And it made me think that, perhaps, something can change this time."

If you would like to share information with The Fifth Estate, reach out to associate producer Grant LaFleche at grant.lafleche@cbc.ca or by phone at 416-205-6692. Producer Shelley Ayres can be reached at shelley.ayres@cbc.ca. Tips to the show can also be sent to fifthtips@cbc.ca.

With additional reporting by Thomas Daigle and files from Katie Nicholson

Illustration: L.J. Cake/ CBC; Photo: Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail/The Canadian Press; Province of Ontario/CBC | Editing: Janet Davison

Support is available for anyone who has been sexually assaulted through crisis lines and local support services via this Government of Canada website or the Ending Violence Association of Canada database. If youre in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911.