BURST
All five players in the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial were found not guilty following an hours-long decision read in court in London on Thursday.
Superior Justice Maria Carroccia telegraphed early on in the day, as she began reading from her decision assessing the evidence heard in an eight-week trial, where she was headed.
Carroccia indicated she did not believe the testimony of the 27-year-old complainant and that the Crown had not proven its case.
“I have found actual consent was not vitiated by fear. I do not find the evidence of (the complainant) to be either credible or reliable,” she said. “I cannot rely upon the evidence of (the complainant) and then, considering the evidence in this trial as whole, I conclude the Crown has not met its onus.”
The comment prompted gasps and sobs from the relieved members of the players’ families who were in the courtroom where the trial was held.
After that Carroccia launched into an exhaustive review of the evidence heard at the trial where five members of the 2018 Team Canada world junior hockey team pleaded not guilty to sexual assault.
Michael McLeod, 27, Carter Hart, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, Dillon Dube, 27, and Cal Foote, 26, were each charged with one count of sexual assault. All were found not guilty.
McLeod also faced a second count of sexual assault for being a party to the offence, which was dismissed.
The central issue in the case was subjective consent and centred on what happened in Room 209 of the Delta Armouries Hotel in the early morning of June 19, 2018, when the team was in London for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament celebrating their gold medal win months earlier in Buffalo.
McLeod had brought a 20-year-old woman back to the hotel room for consensual sex after meeting her at Jack’s bar on Richmond Row, where a large group of players had gone to keep the party going after the gala.
The woman, 27, whose identity is protected by court order, testified that after having sex with him, she saw McLeod dressed and on his phone, then found herself faced with at least 10 members of the team arriving in the room.
The woman told the court she was extremely intoxicated and believed she had no choice but to engage in sexual activities. The woman said she was mocked, slapped and there were comments about using golf clubs. She said she wasn’t consenting but believed she would not be able to leave unless she did what the men wanted.
She agreed she told the Crown and police in the weeks before the trial that she took on “the persona of a porn star” to get through the incident and that she “disassociated”, explaining that she felt that her mind detached from what her body was doing during the sexual activities to cope.
However, the defence pointed to the woman as the aggressor who invited, coaxed and even taunted the players to have sex. The judge heard evidence that most of the men in the room, while curious, weren’t interested. Those who agreed, the defence argued, believed they had obtained proper consent from the woman.
The sexual activity described included brief oral sex with Hart, Dube and McLeod and sexual intercourse in the bathroom with Formenton. Later, after the men had left, she had sexual intercourse again with McLeod.
Dube was also identified as spanking the woman. Foote was accused of doing the splits – described in court as his well-known party trick – on the woman’s face.
The Crown’s case included surveillance and security videos from Jack’s bar and the hotel and two cell phone videos recorded by McLeod, one showing the woman saying she was “OK with this” and the other with her wearing only a towel and saying “it was all consensual” while calling McLeod “paranoid.”
The London police heard about the incident within hours of it happening when the woman’s mother and her friend contacted an officer. The woman gave an interview within days, and initially only wanted the men spoken to and not charged. She later instructed the police to pursue charges.
The investigating officer was concerned that the woman was being pressured by her family. After reviewing footage from the hotel that appeared to contradict the woman’s claim that she was too drunk to consent, the consent videos and text messages, plus voluntary interviews with four of the players, the police closed their investigation in February 2018 because there were not sufficient grounds to lay charges.
Three years later, in April 2022, the woman filed a $3.55-million civil claim against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League and eight “John Does”. Hockey Canada quietly settled the claim for an undisclosed amount a month later without informing the players or their lawyers they had been sued.
The statement of claim contained hair-raising descriptions that inferred gang rape in the hotel room. Parliament got involved and both Hockey Canada and the London police re-opened their investigations in July 2022. The woman gave a statement to Hockey Canada for the first time, despite attempts to contact her in 2019 and 2020.
During the trial, Carroccia heard that the police did not interview the woman or her friends with whom she went to the bar that night before she returned to the hotel with McLeod.