Former NHL players Cal Foote, Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Michael McLeod and Carter Hart, accused in a sexual assault following the World Junior Hockey Championships in 2018, arrive at the Court House in London, Ont., on April 23.The Globe and Mail/The Canadian Press
The sexual assault case against five former world junior hockey players will challenge expectations about what constitutes the offence, Crown attorney Heather Donkers said at the start of the trial in London’s Ontario Superior Court on Monday.
In her opening statement, Ms. Donkers told the jury, “this case is about consent, and equally what is not consent.”
She said the Crown’s anticipated evidence in the case “may not match up with expectations you have about what a sexual assault is or looks like.”
Justice Maria Carroccia also instructed the jury, which was selected on Friday, to keep an open mind.
“Jurors must decide cases based on evidence,” the judge told them. She said that the Crown’s opening remarks are not to be considered evidence.
Michael McLeod, Dillon Dubé, Carter Hart, Cal Foote and Alex Formenton are each accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room after the Hockey Canada fundraising gala in June, 2018. Mr. McLeod also faces a second charge of being a party to sexual assault.
Each player has pleaded not guilty.
The case has served as a reckoning for Canada’s beloved game.
Ms. Donkers told the court on Monday that the five accused hockey players were celebrating a world championship win in London on a June 2018 evening with a night of drinking and dancing at a bar.
One player invited a then-20-year-old woman, known publicly as E.M., from the bar back to a hotel room. The woman’s identity is protected by a publication ban.
Soon other players were invited into the room, Ms. Donkers said. “Before long more and more men began arriving in room 209,” she told the jury. She added that that there were up to 10 people in the room.
The five accused are charged with engaging in sexual activities with the woman that she did not consent to. “She was going along with what the men in the room wanted and what they expected of her,” Ms. Donkers said.
The prosecutor said that the Crown will seek to prove that each of the accused did not seek consent for specific sexual acts and that the woman did not feel she could leave the room.
The trial is scheduled to run as long as eight weeks and could include testimony from a number of NHL players – men who were also part of the 2018 junior team.
An initial police investigation into the incident was closed without charges in 2019, but three years later, TSN reported that Hockey Canada had quietly settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by the woman relating to that night. Hockey Canada entered the settlement without the players’ knowledge or involvement. A Globe and Mail investigation then revealed the existence of the National Equity Fund, a special multimillion-dollar fund built through player registration fees that Hockey Canada has been using to settle sexual-assault lawsuits.
Amidst national uproar about the case, London police reopened their investigation in the summer of 2022.
At the time of their arrest in January, 2024, all five of the accused were playing professional hockey.
Mr. Dubé was a member of the Calgary Flames, Mr. Hart was with the Philadelphia Flyers, and Mr. McLeod and Mr. Foote were playing for the New Jersey Devils. Mr. Formenton, who had previously been a member of the Ottawa Senators, was playing for the Swiss club, HC Ambri-Piotta.