Content notice: This article contains allegations of sexual assault
Five former team members Canada Junior in 2018 were acquitted from all the charges Thursday in a very publicized sexual assault trial, which rocked the world of hockey and which has given birth to many important debates on consent across the country.
Michael McLeod, Alex formenton, Carter Hart, Dillon Dube and Callan Fote had all been accused of sexual assault related to an incident in a London hotel in Ontario, in June 2018, following a Hockey Canada gala. McLeod also faced a second accusation of participation in the offense.
In a decision read at the helm, judge Maria Carroccia of the Ontario Court of Justice invoked the lack of evidence beyond reasonable doubt and criticized the credibility and reliability of the complainant in this case.
“In this case, I found a real consent,” said Carroccia at the start of a hearing that lasted several hours. “I don’t find that EM’s testimony [la plaignante dans cette affaire] either credible or reliable.
When Mr. Carroccia made this comment, the members of the family of players present in the public gallery of the courtroom pushed sighs and we heard at least one person say “yes”.
Several members of the players of the players got into their arms and started to cry. Some players, who were sitting next to their lawyers, closer to the judge, turned around and looked at the members of their families.
Judge Carroccia of the Ontario Court of Justice read her decision on Thursday, almost six weeks after the end of the trial.
A woman, whose identity is protected by an order of non-publication and who was called EM in the court, allegedly allegedly allegedly accompanied McLeod at the hotel after a night of dance and alcohol consumption in a bar in downtown London, McLeod invited his teammates to her room and then joined other players to assault her repeatedly for hours.
The judge said the complainant’s consent had “not been influenced by fear”.
The notion of consent, central in the arguments of the crown, did not allow to prove that the complainant had acted against her will, the judge stressing in passing that EM often referred to “her truth”, rather than “the truth”.
“Given all of the evidence presented in this trial, I conclude that the crown cannot pay its burden of evidence on any of the charges,” she said.
During the hours that followed, the judge recapitulated proof and detailed the reasons for her non-culpability verdict. She pointed out what she described as multiple inconsistencies between the complainant’s testimony, her statements to the police and a civil pursuit against Hockey Canada, settled amicably before the players were charged in the criminal.
The criminal trials of the players began in late April in London and was marked by repeated delays, a procedural defect and the dismissal of a second jury.
“The accused are free to leave,” said Carroccia judge after delivering her last verdict.
The Crown has 30 days to file an appeal notice, in which it will have to expose the legal flaws of the reasoning of Judge Carroccia.
The five accused did not first react when Judge Carroccia returned a verdict of non-culpability for each charge. The accused, family members and lawyers then hugged their fists and gave themselves the hug.
Consent
The court learned that the complainant had had sex with McLeod, whom she had met in a downtown bar earlier in the evening, in her hotel room. This meeting was not part of the trial.
The accusations focused on what had happened after the entry of several other players in the room, consent being at the heart of the case.
The prosecutors allegedly alleged that McLeod had orchestrated a “campaign” to bring his friends into the play so that they engage in sexual acts with the woman without her knowledge and without her consent – an accusation that the judge rejected in her decision.
The woman had not voluntarily consented to the sexual acts which took place in the play, supported the crown, and the actors did not take reasonable measures to confirm this consent, despite circumstances which would have demanded increased caution.
Defense has advanced that the woman had actively participated in sexual activity and that she had sometimes encouraged men to do so, but that she had then invented a false story to get out of all responsibility.
She argued that the complainant had presented herself in court with a preconceived plan and that she had exaggerated her degree of intoxication that evening to support her story and explain the inconsistencies.
McLeod, Hart and Dube were accused of having obtained oral sex from women without her consent. Dube was also accused of having slapped her buttocks when she was having sex with another person.
Form would have had vaginal relationships with the complainant in the toilet without her consent, and Fote was accused of having made the big gap on her face and having “touched” his genitals without his consent.
The court learned that McLeod had sent a text to a team’s discussion group shortly after 2 a.m., asking if someone wanted a three plan and indicating their room number. Hart replied that he was ready, according to screenshots presented at the trial.
He also sent a message to another teammate, Taylor Radady, telling him to come to the room if he wanted a “gummer”, which, according to Raddys, meant a blowjob. McLeod made a comment similar to Boris Katchouk, another player who had briefly stopped in his room, we learned in court.
McLeod did not mention any of these police interactions during an interview in 2018, saying rather that he said to “a few guys” that he commanded to eat and that a girl was in his room, and that he did not understand “how these guys continued to arrive”.
The woman was naked and drunk when strangers started entering the room, she said in court for more than a week of testimony.
Men seemed to make fun of her while they were talking about the sexual acts they wanted her to perform, she said. She explained that she felt her mind “turn off” while her body was putting itself in “automatic pilot” mode.
A series of testimonies
Two teammates called as witnesses of the crown, Brett Howden and Tyler Steenbergen, testified that the woman had asked the group if someone would accept to have sex with her, like Hart, the only player accused of testifying for his own defense.
When this point was presented to her in a counter-examination, the woman mentioned that she did not remember having made such remarks, but that, if she remembered it, it was because she was drunk and that she had adopted the character of a “porn star” to defend herself.
In her decision, the judge stressed that several people had testified that the woman was the one who initiated or encouraged sexual activities in the play and that the complainant’s testimony was not credible.
“In my opinion, the complainant exaggerated her intoxication,” she said.
Judge Carroccia also said that the woman did not seem to be intoxicated in two short videos recorded that night, in which she claimed to be “OK” with what was going on and that “everything was consensual”.
The trial began at the end of April and was first heard by a jury, but the judge revoked it twice and the trial finally continued before the judge alone in order to avoid having to start again.
Nine people testified, most of them at a distance, including the complainant, who testified by video surveillance from another room in the courthouse.
Protesters gathered at the London courthouse on Thursday, brandishing the complainant’s support signs. Others gathered to support hockey players.