BURST
The Crown will not appeal the not-guilty verdicts in the Hockey Canada trial.
That was confirmed Thursday afternoon by Daniel Brown, lawyer for former Ottawa Senators forward Alex Formenton, one of five members of the 2018 Canada world junior championship squad who were acquitted of sexual assault after an high-profile eight-week trial in London.
The Crown contacted the defence teams on Thursday and “confirmed that they will not be proceeding with an appeal,” he said.
“It means that verdict will stand. … This means that this will be the end of the road as far as the criminal case goes.”
The Crown had 30 days from the July 24 verdict to file an appeal.
Messages have been left with the attorney-general’s office for comment.
Local’s women’s groups reacted with disappointment to the Crown’s decision not to pursue an appeal of the verdicts.
In a joint lengthy statement, Anova and the London Abused Women’s Centre said the decision “is another painful reminder of how deeply the legal system fails survivors of sexual assault over and over again.
“The reality is we expected the ‘not guilty’ verdict to come from this deeply flawed legal system. What we did not expect was to see rape myths, victim blaming and shaming repeated in a Canadian courtroom, or to hear a judge say that ‘believing women’ had no place in the legal system.”
The organizations said that the decision sends a message “that once again the system is not built for justice.
“For once, it would have been powerful to see a part of the legal system stand up for women and all victims of sexual assault. That’s what an appeal would have represented.”
Michael McLeod, 27, Carter Hart, 27, Formenton, 25, Dillon Dube, 27, and Cal Foote, 26, were each charged with one count of sexual assault stemming from what happened inside a London hotel room on June 19, 2018, when they, along with the rest of the gold-medal winning team, were in London for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament.
McLeod faced a second charge of sexual assault for being a party to the offence.
All five men were cleared of the charges in a 91-page decision by Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia on July 24.
The allegations came from a now-27-year-old woman whose identity is protected by court order. She met McLeod and others at Jack’s Bar on Richmond Row where they were celebrating. She returned to the Delta Armouries Hotel with McLeod for consensual sex.
She testified that after their encounter, she found herself facing as many as 10 men in the hotel room and went along the sexual encounters. However, she said she was drunk and terrified, and described how her mind disassociated from her body to cope.
But the players countered saying the woman was a willing participant in the sexual activities. They described she begged them to have sex with her while naked on a bed sheet on the floor and taunted them when they did not.
Some of the sexual acts described were brief in nature, but all of them, the judge ruled, were consensual. In the case of Foote, there was no clear evidence he even touched the woman when he did the splits over her.
The defence case was bolstered by videos from the bar and the hotel lobby and two “consent videos” filmed by McLeod that appeared to show the woman was consenting to all the sexual activity that went on.
The woman testified for eight days. Carroccia said in her decision that she did not find the woman to be credible or reliable in her evidence.
All five men had played in the NHL. Formenton was playing in Switzerland at the time of the charges that were laid in 2023. The other four players were suspended by their NHL teams and currently have no contracts.
McLeod and Dube played in the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia, while Hart and Foote continued to train in the period before the trial was held. Formenton has left hockey.
After the verdicts, the NHL said it would not be making a decision about the players returning to the league until it had reviewed the judge’s decision closely.
The London police originally investigated the events in 2018 but closed the case in 2019 because they did not have sufficient grounds to lay any charges.
The woman told police that she was intoxicated at the time of the incident, but investigators closed the case based on the hotel videos, the consent videos and voluntary interviews with some of the players.
The matter resurfaced three years later after the woman filed a $3.55-million civil claim against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League and eight “John Doe” defendants who were on the team. Hockey Canada quietly settled the claim within a month for an undisclosed amount of money and without notifying the players about the suit or the settlement.
The lawsuit was publicized, sparking a public outcry and a Parliamentary committee investigation. Hockey Canada, which had closed its parallel investigation at the time of the incident, reopened their probe in 2022.
The London police also reopened its investigation before laying charges.
The trial drew outsized media interest both nationally and internationally. There were unusual developments, including two mistrials that forced the dismissal of two juries before Carroccia continued to hear the case as a judge-alone trial.