On a warm June night in 2018, more than a dozen members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior hockey team bypassed a long line of waiting customers, had their IDs checked and were funneled into Jack’s Bar in London, Ont. They wore T-shirts and several wore backward baseball caps. Some gave others fist bumps, and one draped his arm around another’s shoulder.
Inside the bar, a group of the players gathered at a corner of a long counter, just beyond a packed dance floor, appearing to order drinks.
Seven years later, five members of that team sat in a stuffy wood-paneled courtroom just a few blocks away from Jack’s, on trial for sexual assault.
Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé and Cal Foote are all facing charges stemming from a June 2018 incident in which a 20-year-old woman alleged she was sexually assaulted over a span of hours in a London hotel room following a Hockey Canada gala celebrating the players’ 2018 World Juniors championship run. They have all pleaded not guilty.
On Monday, the former NHL players sat at different tables — freshly shaven, wearing fitted suits — accompanied by their defense counsel.
A jury composed of nine women and five men sat across from the defendants, as Detective Tiffany Waque, from the London Police Service — the first witness called in the trial — presented silent security footage from that night.
The jury watched video of the complainant arriving with a friend at Jack’s Bar, on Richmond Street, and standing in line at around 11 p.m. Inside, a short time later, the friends take money out of a cash machine and order at the bar. The silent video appears to show them each taking two shots.
In another video, dark and flashing with strobe lights, the complainant appears to join a pulsing dance floor, before wading out into the open space beyond it. Soon after, video shows the complainant standing alone at the bar as a bartender moves quickly to serve a row of patrons beside her. She fixes her hair and types something on her phone, before finding another empty spot at the bar. After getting the bartender’s attention, she appears to order and quickly consume two more shots.
Around the same time, according to the timeline laid out by Waque, the players entered Jack’s, jogging one-by-one up the stairs at the entrance off Richmond.
The jury also saw images of those players from earlier in the evening, at the Delta Armouries Hotel, wearing suits and making fists to show off their World Junior Championship rings, emblazoned with the Hockey Canada logo.
Earlier, in her opening remarks to the jury, Crown Attorney Heather Donkers outlined the Crown’s roadmap for what to expect from witnesses.
“This is a case about consent,” Donkers said. “And equally as important, this is a case about what is not consent.”
Donkers told the jury that they will hear from the complainant that the defendants took no steps to assure that there was consent when they touched her.
“Instead,” Donkers said. “They just did what they wanted.”
Waque will continue her testimony tomorrow.
(Photo of Ontario Court of Justice is seen in London, Ont., by Peter Power / AFP via Getty Images)
