BURST
They were concerned, but uniformly convinced they did nothing wrong in the London hotel room.
“The truth is we didn’t do anything stupid,” player Maxime Comtois said in a group text message to 2018 Team Canada world junior teammates who were in the room where a woman alleges she was sexually assaulted. “We had her consent. We didn’t force her to do anything.”
The text chain came to police via Tyler Steenbergen, one of the players who started testifying at the trial of five teammates Wednesday.
“I think it’s important to understand. No one did anything wrong. Just tell the truth,” wrote player Jake Bean in the lengthy text stream.
Michael McLeod, 27, Carter Hart, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, Dillon Dube, 26, and Cal Foote, 26, all of whom had National Hockey League careers, have each pleaded not guilty to sexual assault stemming from events at the Delta Armouries hotel when the world championship team was in London for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament June 18 and 19, 2018.
McLeod has pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to the offence.
The Crown has argued that after the woman, then 20, went to the hotel with McLeod for consensual sex after meeting him at Jack’s bar on Richmond Row where the team was partying. After the sex and unbeknownst to her, McLeod invited the men to the room for “a three-way” where she was sexually assaulted.
The woman, whose identity is protected by court order, maintained in her lengthy testimony that she was extremely drunk and has large memory gaps about the night, telling the jury she went on “autopilot” and switched her mind off once the men were in the room.
The defence has argued she was the aggressor, suggesting McLeod to invite the men to the room for “a wild night,” then encouraging men to have sex with her once they gathered in the room.
Steenbergen testified he was in McLeod’s hotel room after some team members closed down Jack’s bar and returned to the hotel, where he said he was told there was food in McLeod’s room.
He and two other players went to the room, where several others had gathered, and a naked woman sat down on a bedsheet laid out on the floor and asked who wanted to have sex with her. He described how she performed 30-second to one-minute sex acts on Hart and McLeod.
Steenbergen picked up his account Thursday, when he resumed his testimony via Zoom from Alberta, where he works in the family construction business.
Steenbergen said after the woman performed the sex act on Hart, “I remember Dillon (Dube) slapping her butt.”
He said he was trying to have a conversation with Bean, near a desk in the room, and “we just looked up and saw a slap. It wasn’t hard, but it didn’t seem soft, either.”
Under questioning from assistant Crown attorney Heather Donkers, Steenbergen said he heard no conversation between the woman and Dube, but did hear “a small slap, but I didn’t hear a reaction from her.”
“I was just trying. . . not to pay attention to too much of it because I had a girlfriend at the time,” now his wife of almost three years, he said.
The room was “kind of quiet,” then Foote entered the room, Steenbergen said. There were people around the woman, who was on the floor, and “I remember partially seeing the splits, but I couldn’t see because there were people on the beds in front of me.”
Foote had his clothes on when he walked in, but Steenbergen couldn’t say if they were on at the time of the splits because his view was obscured and he was still talking to Bean.
Donkers asked about the mood in the room when Foote did the splits. “I think it was just kind of awkward and in disbelief a little bit. That was for me how I felt,” Steenbergen said.
Immediately after the splits, Foote left, he said. “She gets up and goes to the bathroom and that’s when me and Jake decided we had a clear path to leave the room, so we left.”
They couldn’t leave earlier because “she was lying on the floor . . . I just didn’t want to step over a naked girl and, I don’t know, I was trying to avoid the situation and when there was a clear path to leave, that’s when they decided to leave,” Steenbergen said.
He and Bean were only in McLeod’s room for 10 to 15 minutes before returning to their room, he said.
He was “pretty sure” there were golf clubs in McLeod’s room because they were all golfing the next day, he said. At the tournament, if events of the night before were discussed, it “might have been a quick brief one, just saying how crazy it was.”
In the days after, Hockey Canada emailed the team to say there would be a code of conduct investigation of what happened in McLeod’s room.
Team members had an hours-long text conversation, started by team captain Dube, on June 26, 2018, court heard.
Steenbergen confirmed he’d saved the text chain on his phone and provided it to London police.
Dube informed the team “there are no criminal charges. It’s Hockey Canada code of conduct, and they are investigating on what happened that night so it won’t happen again.”
“Could we get in trouble or no?” Bean asked. Dube didn’t think so, but wanted his teammates to call him.
“No, boys, we don’t have to make anything up. No one did anything wrong. We went to that room to eat. The girl came. She wanted to have sex with all of us. No one did. She gave a few guys (oral sex). And then we got out of the rooms when things got crazy,” Bean added.
“All we have to say is someone brought the girl back to the room. We were all in there ordering food and then this girls started begging from everyone to have sex with her. Nobody would do it,” player Brett Howden said. “But then as time went on, she gave three guys (oral sex). Once things got out of hand, we all left.”
Added McLeod: “We all need to say the same thing if we get interviewed by Hockey Canada, can’t have different stories or make anything up.”
Steenbergen said when he read the messages, he thought they were “pretty accurate.”
They discussed McLeod having videos in which the woman appeared to give full consent to sexual activity and showing it to Hockey Canada officials. They talked about keeping each other in the loop on developments.
“Let’s not make her sound like too crazy, because if she gets wind of this and then she can get even more angry and we don’t need that, so just be good about it, but the truth with it,” Dube wrote.
Howden then wrote, “Nobody forced her to do anything. If anything, we should . . . put allegations on her.”
McLeod reminded the team he had sex with her before they got to the room.
“She’s the one who got naked and started begging everyone,” Howden replied.
McLeod told the group the women’s mother had gone to police and in text messages with her, she had said she was sorry.
“So we don’t mention names, right?” wrote Foote.
Dube said if the boys got consent it was OK to say their names. “If you were in the room, don’t lie and say you weren’t,” McLeod wrote.
They discussed receiving calls from Hockey Canada officials, their frustration at being expected to attend interviews in Toronto in person, and whether they needed to get lawyers or talk to their agents.
Steenbergen said Dube and Foote called him later.
Dube told him to “say what you saw,” but not what Dube did and he would explain himself. Steenbergen, thinking he meant the slap, didn’t mention it in his Hockey Canada interview and investigators didn’t bring it up.
He had a similar conversation with Foote, who asked Steenbergen not to say what he did.
The trial continues Friday.
jsims@postmedia.com
Tyler Steenbergen, a member of the 2018 Canadian world junior hockey team, continued his testimony Thursday at the sexual assault trial of five teammates from the gold-winning squad. See coverage from the London courthouse below.