BURST
Editor’s note: This story contains details some readers may find disturbing
The woman at the centre of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial has said several times she didn’t recall any conversation after having sex with a junior hockey player in a London hotel room.
But the player’s lawyer suggested she had a lot to say.
“I’m going to suggest to you that you said something to him along the lines of: ‘Get some of those guys back here. I want to have a wild night,’” said David Humphrey, the lawyer for Michael McLeod, one of the five players charged with sexual assault.
“That doesn’t sound like anything I would usually say and I don’t remember saying those words,” the woman replied calmly.
The exchange was part of a lengthy and intense cross-examination by Humphrey who drilled down on the details of what happened the night the woman said she was forced into sex acts with the players in McLeod’s room.
Humphrey, the first lawyer among the five defence teams to cross-examine the complainant, presented an alternative narrative that points to the woman wanting McLeod to invite the players to have sex with her and offering herself to them once they assembled in his room.
McLeod, 27, Alex Formenton, 25, Cal Foote, 26, Dillon Dube, 26, and Carter Hart, 26, all of whom had National Hockey League careers, have each pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to the offence.
The 27-year-old woman has repeated many times during her testimony she was drunk and some events of the early morning hours of June 19, 2018, at the Delta Armouries hotel after a flirty night at Jack’s Bar where she met McLeod and the rest of the world championship team, are “blurry.” The junior hockey team was in London for a Hockey Canada gala and a golf tournament to celebrate their gold medals.
The woman, then 20 years of age, whose identity is protect by court order, has insisted she was blitzed from a night of drinking – including drinking eight Jagerbomb shots, a shot of tequila, a beer and two coolers – before she went back to the Delta Armouries for consensual sex with McLeod and was shocked when members of the team showed up in the room while she was naked on the bed.
Humphrey’s cross examination began on Monday afternoon and exposed the woman’s background and her familiarity with the London bar scene. The woman had a steady boyfriend at the time of the Team Canada incident and he often would pick up her and her friends after a night out downtown.
She agreed it was common for her to have six to eight drinks when out at the bar and to pre-drink with her friends. Sometimes she would throw up from drinking.
On Tuesday, she testified that after having sex with McLeod, she went into the bathroom to clean up and returned to the bedroom naked, to find McLeod dressed and on his phone. The jury also has seen McLeod’s text to the team asking if anyone wanted to come to his room for “a three-way, quick.”
Humphrey asked the woman “if there was any discussion with him about him looking for food options from Uber Eats?”
“I don’t recall if we had discussed that. I feel like I knew later that he had gone down for food, but at that point I didn’t know what he was doing on his phone,” she said.
That’s when Humphrey suggested the woman had a conversation with McLeod “that he get some of his friends or teammates to come to the room.”
“No, I don’t see that as a suggestion that would come from my mouth,” she said.
Humphrey suggested McLeod had his friends show up “because you were interested in having sexual interactions with some of his friends.”
“No, I don’t think that would have been something I would have said. I’m just knowing how I am and I am shy,” she said.
Humphrey suggested McLeod asked her “if you were serious and if that was what you really wanted. And then you said, ‘Yes it was.’”
“No, that doesn’t ring any bells at all,” she said.
Humphrey noted it was at least 13 minutes after McLeod sent out a text at 2:10 a.m. about the “three-way” before the first two men came in. All that time, she said she was on the bed and naked.
“I was still really drunk and probably just lying there. I could have even been falling asleep. I don’t think I was saying anything,” she said.
Humphrey said she was wide awake and naked when all the men came in because “you were waiting to see if others would come in the room in response to your invitation.”
Humphrey said she could have put on her clothes and gone home. “That could have been a good opportunity for that,” she said. “But I think I was just surprised with what was happening and not really able to think clearly and figure that out.”
In her earlier testimony, she told the jury she felt she was having an out-of-body experience to cope, once the men started to come into the room. She said she felt threatened when they suggested they put golf balls and golf clubs in her. She felt she had to perform sexually.
She described in her testimony giving oral sex to three players and having vaginal sex with another player. She had sex with McLeod again before McLeod made a video of her saying everything was consensual, them she left the room and went home, crying and traumatized.
The next day, her mother called police, and started what has been a long, legal journey to a criminal courtroom in front of a Superior Court jury, including settling a civil lawsuit in May 2022, a month after she filed it.
But Humphrey has suggested, based on videos from the bar security system, the woman was happy to hang out with the players at the bar, dance provocatively with them, even touch McLeod’s crotch on the dance floor and she was willing to head back to the hotel for sex.
Humphrey suggested, once the men were in the room, she ended up on a bed sheet spread out on the floor and she put on “a masturbation show” for the men.
“My body just automatically started complying,” she said. “I didn’t know how they would react if I didn’t … I was scared. It was intimidating lying on the ground naked and drunk and vulnerable and having the rest of the men standing, towering over me, telling me to do these things.”
But Humphrey pointed out – in her first police statement to London police Det. Stephen Newton on June 22, 2018, during the first investigation that lasted eight months and ended without charges because there were insufficient grounds to show she was too intoxicated to consent – she was “liking the attention a little bit.”
The woman said she was “confused” when she was giving the statement and she “hadn’t fully processed what happened to me.”
Humphrey also referred to when she told Newton the men were “joking” about the golf references, which was a direct contradiction to what she said in her lawsuit. He also said his review of her police statement showed she never said she was scared or frightened during the night.
The woman recalled McLeod leaving the room and when he returned, eating on the bed, And she agreed, when one man dropped his pants, she gave him oral sex. Humphrey suggested McLeod asked her several times “if this is what you wanted, if you were all right with what was happening.”
“I have no memory of that. I only remember at the very end that he was asking,” she said.
But Humphrey went further, suggesting “after the oral sex on that one boy, you were asking others in the room to have sex with you.”
“Do you recall saying anything like: ‘Come on, you got a girl here. Someone have sex with me. You guys are (expletives)?’” Humphrey asked.
“That doesn’t sound like how I usually speak. That doesn’t sound like something that would come out of my mouth,” she said.
Humphrey said the men were saying to each other she was “… crazy” because she was wanting them to have sex with her. Some of them declined her offer and some said they had girlfriends. She eventually had a sexual encounter with one in the bathroom.
The night ended with her giving McLeod oral sex in front of the men, then having sex with him again in the shower, before he took a video of her saying everything was consensual.
Then, McLeod wanted her to leave because he and roommate Formenton were playing golf in the morning and asked her, “Are you going anytime soon?”
She agreed she thought he was “being disrespectful and rude” because he didn’t walk her out of the hotel or call her an Uber. She left and came back to look for a ring “because I didn’t want to leave a part of me behind.”
She didn’t find the ring and McLeod didn’t help her. She agreed she thought he was “rude and awful.”
The trial continues on Wednesday.
jsims@postmedia.com
The complainant whose allegations are at the heart of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial faced cross-examination from defence lawyers on Tuesday. See coverage of her testimony below
