What Was Left Unsaid in the Hockey Canada Trial

This story contains details about sexual assault allegations that some readers may find disturbing.

“One of these days, you’ll write a nice story about these boys,” Daniel Brown says to the group of reporters inside a London courthouse one morning this past May. “It’ll come.” He is the criminal defence lawyer for one of the aforementioned boys. It is day ten of the so-called junior hockey trial, where the five accused are charged with sexually assaulting a woman in a London, Ontario, hotel room in June 2018, following a night of celebrating their World Juniors team victory earlier that year, and it feels like a forgone conclusion that they will be declared not guilty, at least legally.

The players arrive in court like it’s game day. All five are outfitted in suits that are a bit too tight—in part because it’s the style for athletes, but also because hockey players are notorious for thick quads and glutes that strain off-the-rack seams—making them look more uncomfortable than they might already be. The accused are Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Cal Foote—names that sound pulled from a tween romance novel.

Sometimes they’re called “men,” other times “the players,” but mostly “the boys.” On the night of the alleged assault, they were between eighteen and twenty, and they’re twenty-five, twenty-six, and twenty-seven now. They are all big, teetering around six feet and 200 pounds. They’re being tried as adults.

And yet, it’s tempting to call them boys. (I, too, find myself repeatedly referring to them as boys.) They say celebrities are frozen at the ages they become famous, and for the players, this means the sweaty pubescent years when they achieved minor league stardom. To be the lead scorer of your local AAA team is to be the Justin Bieber of your hometown, complete with total insulation from rules or consequences outside of the penalty box. If you’re an Ontario Hockey League player, fans can buy jerseys with your name on them. There’s a never-ending stream of “puck bunnies” (groupies for hockey players).

Maybe it’s because of their hockey flow—heads of thick, long hair swept back so that it wings behind the ears. Or it’s their faces, still impish, with upturned noses. Maybe it’s the nicknames they still use for one another: McLeod is Mikey, Hart is Hartsy, Formenton Forms, Dubé Duber, Foote Footer.

It doesn’t help that McLeod’s parents sit front row at the trial every day. Richard and Judi McLeod—who have been profiled as the ur-hockey parents (their eldest son plays professionally in Europe, and their youngest, Ryan, for the Buffalo Sabres)—have seemingly not made the mental switch from bleacher to court bench. Judi speaks over the proceedings as though the lawyers are talking directly to her. She brushes off her son’s suit before he enters the courtroom and hands him his notebook like it’s his lunch box before he prepares to take his seat.

It’s their demeanours that are boyish too. They were identified as potential cash cows at a young age, their high school education and socialization truncated by out-of-town tournaments and practice schedules. In court, McLeod hunches over his notebook like he’s passing time in detention; during recesses, he can’t stop flipping his water bottle to see if he can catch it. Foote sulks behind his lawyers, walking into the courthouse like he is being dragged by his mother through the mall; Dubé is surprisingly jocular for someone who is on trial; on breaks, I see him laughing with his girlfriend, who shows up most days and sits with the McLeods.

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In our national imagination, hockey is a ham-fisted metaphor for patriotic unity: on the campaign trail, Mark Carney pitched himself for prime minister as he likened the country to a team between the second and third periods of a losing hockey game: “We’re getting warmed up, and we’re going to head out in that third period, and we’re going to win.” When Donald Trump installed tariffs: “Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” and Canadians should keep our “elbows up.” As prime minister, Carney donned an Edmonton Oilers jersey and skated with the team as the country rooted for a Canadian Stanley Cup victory.

The five men accused of sexual assault were meant to be living the Canadian dream. Now they find themselves in a courtroom where the system that raised them and the culture that exalted them are also on trial. And what will be revealed is that hockey also functions as a narrative device for gang rape: no player is left behind, everyone touches the puck—score, score, score. After an ugly goal: “They don’t ask how, they ask how many.”

When E. M., the initials by which the complainant in the trial is publicly identified, met McLeod at Jack’s bar on June 18, 2018, she was out with some work friends and he was partying with his teammates. Security footage shows the pair dancing together amid a crowd of other players who surround her: she and McLeod grind, someone pulls her ponytail, current Vegas Golden Knight Brett Howden slaps her on the butt. E. M. says she consumed upward of eight drinks, after which she and McLeod went to his room at the Delta London Armouries hotel.

E. M. does not dispute that she willingly had sex with McLeod. What she says she did not consent to was what transpired afterward, when McLeod hastily put his clothes back on and began mysteriously texting and suddenly more men showed up. McLeod had, in fact, texted his nineteen-person group chat: “Who wants to be in 3 way quick. 209- mikey.” “I’m in,” responded Hart. Then, as if all this were part of an everyday exchange, another player wrote: “Robby you have my charger?”

In E. M.’s telling, the players had her get down on the floor at the foot of two standard hotel double beds. When she refused, they laid out a bedsheet for her and told her to masturbate while they watched. They proceeded to spit on her and laugh at her, she says, taking turns slapping her as hard as they could. They waved their penises in her face and told her to “suck it” and “spit on it.” There were golf clubs and balls in the room for a celebratory tournament on June 19, and E. M. says the players joked about putting golf balls inside of her and whether they could even stick a whole club up her vagina. “I didn’t know where their minds were going to be for the rest of the night,” E. M. says while testifying in court. Hart’s mother lets out a laugh.

The Crown alleges that McLeod, Hart, and Dubé received oral sex from E. M. and that Dubé slapped her bare buttocks while another player had sex with her. Someone spat on her back while she performed oral sex on someone else. Formenton followed her into the bathroom and bent her over the sink as he had sex with her, the Crown says, and then had her perform oral sex on him. Foote did the splits above her and grazed his genitals on her face. (His lawyer will later describe his ability to do the splits at a moment’s notice as a “party trick” that is “cool and amazing” and also claim that Foote was clothed in this instance.) At the end of the night, McLeod, who faces an additional charge of being “party to the offence”—meaning, the Crown says, that he was the “architect” of the events of the night—had E. M. perform oral sex on him again while the boys watched and encouraged him, and then, once everyone had left, he had sex with her in the shower for a final time. There were at one point ten men in room 209.

“My mind had just disconnected itself,” E. M. says. (“Oh yes,” I see Judi McLeod nod, seemingly sarcastically.) “I just felt like I started just watching the rest of the evening unfold.” She remembers crying, overhearing players saying not to let her leave, and then coaxing her back into the room. At one point, McLeod ordered food on Uber Eats, and chicken wings and mozzarella sticks arrived, which E. M. says he ate on the bed as he watched the events of the night. Once McLeod had sex with her for the final time, E. M. says, McLeod asked her to confirm that she didn’t have any sexually transmitted diseases, and “Are you going to go anytime soon?”

At around 5 a.m., E. M. returned home, where she lived with her mother, who awoke to her daughter sobbing in the shower and called the police. After vacillating about five times, E. M. finally decided to pursue pressing criminal charges. London Police Service and Hockey Canada, whom E. M.’s mother’s boyfriend called to report the incident, opened concurrent investigations, but neither went anywhere: Hockey Canada’s investigator had a hard time getting E. M. and the players to speak with her, and the London police closed their investigation by February of 2019 after concluding they didn’t have enough grounds to press charges.

In April 2022, E. M. sued Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League, and eight players (all named as “John Does”) for $3.55 million in damages. The organization notified the players of the lawsuit only after it had settled for an undisclosed sum. The money paid, E. M. was meant to disappear. Then, in May 2022, TSN uncovered the existence of the suit, and the Globe and Mail reported that Hockey Canada had paid E. M. from a slush fund, sourced in part from players’ minor hockey registration fees. The minister of sport suspended federal funding for Hockey Canada and audited its public funds. Hockey Canada lost most of its major corporate sponsors for the year, gutted its executive board, and reopened its investigation, banning all members of the 2018 junior national team from Hockey Canada activities (which include the Olympics)—a prohibition still in effect.

In July, the London police reopened their investigation. In January 2024, four of the players took leave from their National Hockey League teams, and Formenton from his Swiss professional club, and they surrendered to the police. On February 5, 2024, the London police chief issued a formal apology to E. M. and announced that the police had charged McLeod, Hart, Formenton, Dubé, and Foote with sexual assault.

“This is a case about consent,” Crown prosecutor Heather Donkers says in her opening statement. The legal definition of consent requires that it be active and ongoing, and “the defendants took no steps to ensure there was affirmative consent when they touched [E. M.],” Donkers says. “Instead, they just did what they wanted.” She reiterates that E. M. did consent to the first act of sexual intercourse with McLeod, and that this is not on trial. But she says E. M. did not consent to everything that followed and warns the jury that E. M.’s behaviour throughout the night might strike them as unusual. “Do not allow yourself to be tempted by the myths and stereotypes that are pervasive in society about how victims of sexual assault should behave,” she says. In one of Canada’s biggest sexual assault trials since CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi’s acquittal in 2016, Donkers appeals to a heightened national literacy about consent.

The case has the potential to set legal precedent. Though it is already legally understood that consent must be affirmative—meaning that it is not enough for a participant not to say “no” and that they must actively agree—this trial proposes that there are conditions in which a “yes” is coerced. “[E. M.] was going along with what the men in the room wanted, what she felt that they expected of her, because she was drunk, uncomfortable, and she did not know what would happen if she did anything else,” Donkers says.

She is seemingly preparing the jury for the so-called consent videos: the two clips, six and twelve seconds long, recorded on a cellphone. “You’re OK with this, right?” an off-camera male voice asks E. M. in one of the videos. “I’m okay with this,” E. M. replies. In another, she’s wearing nothing but a towel and says “it was all consensual.” “Are you recording me? Okay, good,” E. M. says. “You are so paranoid. Holy. I enjoyed it. It was fine. I’m so sober—that’s why I can’t do this right now.” E. M. testifies that she doesn’t remember being recorded. (I see Judi McLeod smile when she says this.) In the clip, E. M. looks relaxed. She’s smiling in moments. But the bare fact of the videos’ existence remains troublesome.

In 2018, Howden told Hockey Canada’s investigator that McLeod said he filmed those videos after E. M. “had her little episode” (he wasn’t sure what McLeod was referring to, though he guessed it might have been once E. M. had stopped crying). To obtain video evidence of a woman agreeing that she indeed wanted to have sex with you is seemingly wisdom passed between coaches and players in the professional sports world, an enduring lesson of #MeToo: make sure that you have proof. “Lots of professional athletes have done those things before,” Hart says when he gives testimony later in the trial.

Consent is a piece of vocab the boys have seemingly been taught but don’t fully understand. “Ok ya fuck we are fine the boys who did things got consent so just tell them that and it’s fine,” Dubé texted a group chat with ten other players who had been there that night when they got word that Hockey Canada was looking into what had transpired in room 209. Consent is always a noun, never a verb. Later, Howden wrote, “If anything we should put allegations on her fuck.” Then, a moment of sobriety: “Yeah what should I say if they asked why I took the videos tho,” McLeod finally asked.

There are ten defence attorneys, two for each of the five charged, just as there were as many as ten men at one time in room 209 that night, and they spend about seven days cross-examining E. M. They act as a monolith. Their goal is to discredit her at every level—to prove that she is lying not just about not having consented but about seemingly minute details too; to question the character of a woman who would have unprotected sex with a guy she met at a bar when she had a boyfriend; and to wear her down.

I anticipate that the lines of questioning might be more sophisticated post-MeToo. Instead, they feel pulled from television: that E. M. was too drunk to remember correctly what exactly transpired that night (but not, like she claims, drunk enough not to have been able to consent); that she manufactured the assault so her boyfriend of three months wouldn’t leave her; that she was after junior hockey money; that she is a slut.

David Humphrey, McLeod’s lawyer, and the most senior of the group, begins. He has the expressive eyebrows of a Muppet, and they jump out over small, round Armani frames. He opens rather gently. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job so far,” he says, a seemingly overt effort to disarm her. “If you ever feel that you need a break or would like a break, you just let us know.” He has a tendency to scoff at her, and E. M. is prone to apologizing.

He asks her about a claim she previously made about not feeling like an “active participant” during the initial sex act with McLeod. “Are you saying that you were not consenting?” he asks with an affected incredulity.

“No, I’m not saying that I wasn’t consenting,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s too much information to share, but I just know when I’m that drunk, that I can’t orgasm. So it wasn’t like I was doing this for myself.”

“But you know there can be pleasure in intercourse for a woman short of orgasm. Do you agree with that?” Humphrey later asks.

In his cross-examination, Brown, Formenton’s lawyer, proposes an alter ego: that when E. M. drinks, she becomes “Fun E. M.” “Fun E. M. at the bar needs more alcohol,” he says. Brown is short but compact, with close-cropped hair and impeccable posture. “Fun E. M. dances freely.” “Fun E. M. acts on her impulses.” “Sober E. M. wouldn’t have chosen to cheat on her boyfriend.”

“I don’t know [about] the alter ego,” E. M. says. “I’m struggling to understand.”

Brown continues. “Fun E. M. didn’t think about the consequences.” “Fun E. M. went off to the hotel with a guy she hardly knew.” “Sober E. M. wouldn’t risk her sexual health by having unprotected sex with a near stranger.”

When the jury is dismissed (court ends early that day for a street party to celebrate the local junior hockey team, the London Knights), Crown prosecutor Meaghan Cunningham asks that Brown refrain from the “Fun E. M.” alter ego, citing it as “inappropriate” and “disrespectful.” The judge agrees and asks Brown to choose a new line of questioning.

On the second day of his cross-examination, Brown asks E. M. what attracted her to McLeod to begin with.

“He seemed taller than me, that was attractive to me,” she says.

“So what you’re saying, I suppose, is as long as it’s a tall guy, at this point of the night, you’ll go home with him?” Brown asks.

Another day, he asks her about her weight. E. M. had previously testified that she was five feet four and 120 pounds, but Brown looked through her medical records and found she had, in fact, weighed 138 pounds on the night in question. “Maybe you were trying to leave the jury with the impression that you were much smaller than you were to emphasize the size difference between yourself and the players,” Brown says, as quoted by The Athletic. The jury is meant to understand that eighteen pounds would make a difference to ten hockey players whose collective weight roughly totals one ton.

Four weeks into the trial, Justice Maria Carroccia arrives in court with a bombshell note from a juror regarding Formenton’s counsel. “Multiple jury members feel we are being judged and made fun of by lawyers [Daniel] Brown and Hilary Dudding. Every day when we enter the courtroom they observe us, whisper to each other and turn to each other and laugh as if they are discussing our appearance. This is unprofessional and unacceptable,” the note reads. Brown and Dudding vehemently deny the accusations. The five defence teams fear that this negative impression of the lawyers has unfairly prejudiced the jury against the accused, and so they request a mistrial. Carroccia decides to dismiss the jury and continue the trial by judge alone. (This is the second jury dismissal of the proceedings: the first was prompted when a juror reported that Dudding had spoken to her about the trial during a lunch break, which Dudding denied doing.)

Of the lawyers, Megan Savard, who has defended high-profile clients like Jacob Hoggard and, briefly, Peter Nygård, is sharpest. She’s about forty, with high, elegant cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and close-knit eyebrows. She dispenses with any pretences of gentleness. “I think certainly neither you nor I want to be dealing with each other for longer than we have to,” she says on her first day cross-examining E.  M.

If Humphrey’s and Brown’s cross-examinations could have occurred at any point in history pre-2017, Savard’s seems definitively post-MeToo. Savard is adept at wielding therapy speak and underlining how it has become ubiquitous to the point of meaninglessness.

She interrogates E. M. on her word choice when E.M. first told police about the alleged assault. “We’ve been talking a lot about processing over the last few days,” Savard says. “You have given different names to the feelings you had in the room at different times over the past seven years. It took a while for you to find the word ‘scared’ to attach to the feelings that you had.” E. M. agrees. Savard appears to be implying that rape was a conclusion E. M. came to only after speaking to a counsellor. “My suggestion to you,” Savard says, “is that early on, before you did all of the processing, one of the words you attached to your state of mind was that you thought it was all okay.”

“The few times you did say no to something, just to be clear, the boundary you set was, in fact, respected,” Savard says. The boundaries she appears to be referring to are when E. M. said no to lying on the floor and the boys laid out a hotel bedsheet for her, and the time when they took turns slapping her, and she said it hurt, and they stopped. In her closing statements, Savard returns to E. M.’s claims to trauma and the moment E. M. first saw all those men in the room. “Trauma can make you do all sorts of non-intuitive things,” Savard says, as quoted by the London Free Press. “But the important piece here is that nothing traumatic has happened yet.”

The Crown calls as witnesses some players who are not accused but who were in the room. These boys are not in possession of the lawyers’ dexterity with language. They need prosecutors to explain words like dynamic and demeanour. What they are versed in is the language of hockey, which has its own slang. “Chirping,” for example, means teasing; a “gummer” is a blow job; “rippers” are strippers. Some of these terms appeared in the Junior Hockey Bible, a now-deleted document that began in the early aughts, with somewhat mysterious origins, either as a website or email chain between junior hockey players and was eventually codified into a single dictionary.

The players train their whole lives to play hockey, and the sport informs the rest of their world view—even sex is about the dynamics of a team. Sexual humiliation is practically a prerequisite to team bonding; in one reported instance of hazing, four OHL rookies were forced to strip and then locked in the team bus bathroom on the way back from a trip. There’s all kinds of verbiage for sexual interactions in the Junior Hockey Bible. To “troze” is to have sex; “tea bagging” is when you “remove your pants” and “lower the goods” onto a woman’s face (this “works best with unsuspecting sluts”); “The McDonald’s Surprise Meal” is when you’re “banging the broad doggy style,” trick her into thinking you’ve orgasmed by spitting on her back, then surprise her by “hav[ing] your fire hose ready and put[ting] out that fire on her face.” “Sluts know their role,” the Hockey Bible explains. “Suck cock, take it how I give it, don’t call tomorrow, (or ever, for that matter.)” It’s as if the players were trained for the night of June 18, 2018. “It felt like, at least to me, that she was super excited just to be there,” Hart says, later in the trial, of E. M.

“These men are former professional colleagues who worked together for three weeks in 2018, did not know each other well beforehand, have not seen each other meaningfully since, and have no reason to lie for each other,” Savard says of the players in her closing statements, as quoted by the London Free Press. But hockey isn’t a normal workplace, and these players feel bound together by a code that surpasses their three weeks in the World Juniors, requiring all players to be “for the boys.” The non-accused players who entered room 209 and are called to the stand by the Crown answer in the vaguest terms possible, with a mafioso reliance on a lack of memory. They are trained not just for hockey but to test their loyalties. They were world champions, after all.

Hockey players are notorious for giving uninspired post-game interviews. Be it due to minimal vocabularies or maximum media training, they gravitate toward meaningless platitudes—“Get pucks deep” or “keep it simple.” The same is true on the stand.

Taylor Raddysh, then a right wing for the Washington Capitals, zooms into court from Virginia, rosy cheeked as if he is still on the ice. He testifies that McLeod texted him to come to room 209 “If u want a gummer.” To Cunningham’s questions, Raddysh mostly responds that he can’t remember. At one point, Cunningham asks him whether the Hockey Canada team captain, Dubé, has a role off the ice. “Someone who leads by example, in trying to get the group together and leads off the ice and on the ice as well,” Raddysh responds confidently, perhaps momentarily forgetting that he is at Dubé’s rape trial and not a post-game media availability. Court ends early that day because Raddysh has an NHL playoff game against the Montreal Canadiens.

Last to the stand is Brett Howden, who arrives to testify on Zoom in a hoodie and bed-mangled hair. (He is “plainly unsophisticated” and “generally useless,” Savard says of him later.) In 2018, he told Hockey Canada’s investigator that he heard E. M. weeping. In 2022, when interviewed by Hockey Canada a second time, Howden said that Dubé’s slap “dr[ew] a line for me to leave,” and in court three years later, he testifies that Dubé and Foote had called him in 2018 and asked him not to mention their names to Hockey Canada investigators, a request he heeded. He also told Hockey Canada’s investigator that before following E. M. into the bathroom, Formenton asked a couple of the players, “Am I allowed to do this?”

When Howden speaks, I sense anger radiating from the gallery, particularly from the McLeods, that he has already broken some sort of code. But on the witness stand, he is uncooperative. He refers to a lack of memory, which the defence suggests (and he agrees) is in part due to a concussion he sustained playing hockey, regarding statements he gave as late as 2022, in addition to those from after the initial incident in 2018. It is as though he has been advised to tread carefully.

There are so many inconsistencies in his testimony that Cunningham requests to cross-examine her own witness, putting forward a motion that he is fabricating his lack of memory. Specifically, he cannot recall a text he sent Raddysh in the days after the incident. “Man, when I was leaving, Duber was smacking this girl’s ass so hard,” the message reads. “Like, it looked like it hurt so bad.” Carroccia rejects the notion that his amnesia is feigned. Cunningham tries to have the text admitted as evidence, but Carroccia turns this down. The text never enters evidence.

Lisa Carnelos, Dubé’s counsel, cross-examines Howden, asking him what it was like to tell his father about the night. “That was one of the hardest things to go through, was explaining this to my family,” he says, his voice wobbling.

She presses him further and asks about his wife, who had been his girlfriend back in 2018.

“You’ve just had your second child with her, congratulations,” Carnelos says.

Howden erupts into a sob.

“Do you need a minute? Mr. Howden, do you need a minute?” Carroccia asks.

“I’m okay,” he says and continues as though nothing happened.

Only one player is called to the stand to testify in his own defence: Carter Hart. Aside from having had the most promising NHL career, as the Philadelphia Flyers’ goalie—he signed a three-year, $11.9 million (US) contract with them when he was twenty-two—he seems to me to be the most presentable. He has a gravelly, folksy voice. He uses the word “demeanour” mostly correctly on the stand. An older gentleman, a local retired criminal defence lawyer who shows up to the trial almost every day to show support for the boys, introduces me to Hart’s mother during one court recess. “This is the pretty mother of a very handsome goalie,” he says, smiling. Goalie is the most cerebral position in hockey, requiring intense focus. Hart’s parents employed a sports psychologist (not a therapist but someone who coaches players on mental strategies) when he was only ten. He has an excellent game face: sombre, confident, a bit inscrutable.

Hart’s task is to present the sequence of the events on June 18 and 19 from the boys’ perspective. He does so competently, without blushing or wavering while recounting the more unsavoury moments of the night. He confirms that he asked for a “blowie” from a woman whose name he did not know until after the police were contacted, in a sexual encounter he claims did not last long as he was unable to sustain an erection once he made eye contact with a teammate. A lot of the night he forgets, he says, but he is adamant that it was all consensual. Another journalist in the court tells me that during a break in his testimony, Hart’s mother bragged about her son’s VO2 max, referencing the maximal oxygen a person can consume during intense exercise. (“We made some beautiful sons,” the journalist says they heard Hart’s mother say to Judi McLeod just the day prior.)

During his testimony, Hart was prone to somewhat histrionic declarations of moral purity. Dudding, Formenton’s lawyer, cross-examines Hart on whether he saw anyone behaving disrespectfully toward E. M. “Never,” he responds. “If something like that would have happened, I would have stopped or I would have left.”

“Why is that?” Dudding asks.

“If something disrespectful or degrading happened? It’s not okay,” Hart says.

Hart is less steady under cross-examination when Cunningham prompts him off-script.

“If you saw Dillon Dubé playing around with a golf club and take a pretend putt near the woman who’s lying naked on the floor, is that something that would have caused you concern?” Cunningham asks him.

“It could have.”

“Is that the kind of thing you would have considered to be disrespectful?”

“I don’t know if . . .” He trails off. “I would agree, but I’m not sure what she was saying at the time or what she was doing at the time of these things that you’re saying.”

The players are not obligated to give evidence in their own defence: Hart’s presence on the stand is likely as much to testify to his innocence as it is PR that he has the mental fortitude to return to the NHL as a promising goalie.

Consistent across the boys’ testimonies is the assertion that E. M. was begging for and taunting them to have sex with her. Former World Juniors teammate Tyler Steenbergen testifies that while lying on the bedsheet on the hotel floor, E. M. said, “Can one of you guys come over and fuck me?” and later called them “pussies.” “She started chirping guys,” Howden says.

E. M. wavers when asked whether she was taunting the boys to have sex with her. She reiterates that she dissociated, that her mind left her body and did what it needed to survive. That she was drunk out of her mind. She says she grew angry when the players didn’t sexually engage with her because they wouldn’t let her leave if she asked to; the only way to leave the room, she felt, was to give them what they wanted. (According to Formenton, she was insulted that the players didn’t find her “hot” enough.) In a meeting with a police officer, she said that she had adopted a “porn star” persona—one she now says she felt was necessary to get her out of the room alive.

Humphrey puts it to her that it was she who suggested McLeod invite his teammates over. “That doesn’t sound like something I would usually say,” she says. “I don’t recall having any conversation about this and then I [remember] just feeling really surprised when people did walk in.” One might imagine her giving an emphatic no, and I was surprised by her reluctance to definitively do so. (On a recess, the retired lawyer sings a bar from Oklahoma! to me: “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”)

E. M. has a girlish quality. She speaks in a high-pitched voice with a warble. She, too, seems suspended in the night of June 18, 2018. She testified that she was engaged to marry that same boyfriend she was dating back then.

Some of the details that seem to pierce her most from that night, at times, appear juvenile. She returns frequently to schoolyard terms, saying she felt “bullied” and that the boys were “making fun of” her. She reiterates that they laughed at her. Sometimes the social degradations seem to be almost as painful as the sexual ones, like when she recalls McLeod kicking her out of his room at the end of the night. “I think the whole thing wasn’t respectful, but definitely at the end too, he was being rude,” she says. This, Humphrey says, is her real point of contention.

It’s difficult to translate to a courtroom the social sway possessed by a single hockey player, let alone ten. That in room 209, E. M. was deferential not to the higher authorities of police or lawyers or parents or Hockey Canada officials but to a room full of her peers who were slapping her and spitting on her and, perhaps most painfully, laughing at her. (When Foote did the splits overtop her face while she was lying on the floor and the room erupted in laughter, she was in on the joke too, Hart insists.)

When she first spoke to the police, E. M. told them that initially she was “liking the attention for a little bit.” “It wasn’t attention that I had asked for, but I was already getting it,” she says to Humphrey. It’s an uncomfortable truth that doesn’t seem so impossible to imagine, so irreconcilable—that you could be taught your whole life to covet attention from these kinds of boys, and that when it comes, you find a sliver of pleasure in something you didn’t agree to and don’t even want.

When McLeod learned that E. M. had contacted the police, he found her Instagram handle and directly messaged her. Humphrey points out that E. M. could have blocked him. Instead, when McLeod asked her to “make this go away,” she wrote back saying, “I’m sorry for any trouble it might have already caused.” Later, she told him she’d gone back to the police and told them not to go through with pressing charges. These are perhaps the most devastating texts of the trial. Even in the sober light of day, she is still deferential to McLeod.

When Justice Carroccia delivers her verdict six weeks later, she does, as expected, find the players not guilty. “I do not find the evidence of E. M. to be either credible or reliable,” she says. The McLeods burst into tears, and Hart looks like he is starting to cry. Not only does she find that the players had reason to believe that E. M. was consenting but “in this case,” she says, “I have found actual consent.”

I had expected that Carroccia might gesture at the fact that something dark transpired that night, that the events in room 209 were, if not criminal, of concern. She does not. The most criticism she extends toward the boys is that it was notable that McLeod didn’t disclose to the police that he sent the text inviting players to his room for a “3-way” (in fact, he denied this when asked), but she says this is not evidence of wrongdoing. The players maintain their innocence, and so too does our national pastime.

The NHL promptly issues a public statement: “The allegations made in this case, even if not determined to have been criminal, were very disturbing and the behavior at issue was unacceptable.” Until the league finishes reviewing the judge’s findings, the players will continue to be ineligible to play. The NHL Players’ Association has already pushed back against this, and it remains to be seen whether the league will stand fast, especially with players whose skill is of significant value. Hart and his mother hug the retired lawyer while leaving the court and thank him for coming every day. “You can watch him play on TV pretty soon,” she says.

There have for some time been rumours and speculation that Hart will join the Oilers: the team is desperate for a goalie, and it’s historically been hard to convince players to move to Alberta. Is that the nice story then? That in some months, if Carney, who was once a goalie himself, joins the Edmonton Oilers for another practice, rooting for the Stanley Cup to come home to a Canadian team where it belongs, he’ll be taking shots on one Carter Hart?