Hockey Canada trial: Crown presses to enter NHLer’s text as evidence

Article content

Brett Howden doesn’t have a clear memory of what happened in Room 209 of the Delta Armouries hotel in London, but remembered “just feeling uncomfortable.”

The Vegas Golden Knights player, who began his testimony on Tuesday, was in Michael McLeod’s hotel room with teammates on June 19, 2018, where a woman says she was sexually assaulted by several men after meeting McLeod at a downtown bar.

Recommended Videos

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Hockey Canada trial: Crown presses to enter NHLer’s text as evidence Back to video

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Try refreshing your browser, or
tap here to see other videos from our team.

Play Video

The details of what happened differ between the woman’s account during her lengthy testimony earlier at the high-profile Superior Court trial and what the players told Hockey Canada and the police.

Howden has already told the trial of five 2018 Canada world junior hockey teammates he has little memory of what happened once he went to the hotel room. What the Crown set out to do on Friday was to take Howden through transcripts of his statements of what he said happened.

McLeod, 27; Carter Hart, 26; Alex Formenton, 25; Dillon Dube, 26; and Cal Foote, 26, have all pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod has also pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to the offence.

The team was in town to celebrate their gold medal win months earlier for a gala and golf tournament. A rowdy group of them went to Jack’s Bar on Richmond Row after the gala and ring ceremony.

McLeod brought the woman, who was 20 at the time and whose identity is protected by court order, back to the hotel. The woman, now 27, has testified that after they had sex, more men came to the hotel room where she says she was forced to perform sexual acts.

She added she was intoxicated and found herself separating her mind from her body to cope with the stressful situation.

But the defence has countered with an alternative narrative, claiming the woman was the aggressor who urged McLeod to invite his teammates to the hotel room for “a wild night,” and who initiated sexual activity, even taunting the men when they ignored her.

After more than two hours of legal arguments by the Crown and the defence on Friday morning over a single text message sent by Howden to teammate Taylor Raddysh a week after the encounter, Howden finally was called back to testify remotely from his location in Nevada.

Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham took Howden to passages found in transcripts of his statements about what it was like inside the hotel room and what he saw. After reviewing each example, Howden said he did not have a memory of saying what he did, but agreed he knew them to be true when he said them.

Howden read into the record what he said, while Cunningham read the parts of Hockey Canada investigator Danielle Robitaille or a London police officer.

On July 3, 2018, just a couple weeks after the gala, Howden gave an interview to Hockey Canada. Cunningham pointed to a passage that Howden read aloud stating that during the encounter in the hotel room, the woman would “start to get dressed, and she’s like, ‘I’m way too sober for this.’”

“By the end, like, when I was leaving, like, she kept saying she was too sober for this, ‘I’m too sober.’”

At the same interview, Howden described to Robitaille how the woman emerged from the bathroom fully clothed and called McLeod by the wrong name.

“She didn’t know his name and so, like, he was kind of saying ‘screw off, like you don’t even know my name. Like, why are you even here?’” he told Robitaille.

He told her his name was Mikey “and she was, like, apologizing for that and saying sorry . . . you could tell she didn’t want to leave. She made it seem like she was going to leave, but she didn’t want to.”

Howden also told Robitaille he recalled hearing the woman crying. “I was like, this can’t be good. I don’t know what happened. So, I just went to my room.”

Robitaille asked Howden whether, other than McLeod or Hart, he saw anyone have a sexual interaction with the woman. Howden told the investigator he saw Formenton go into the bathroom with her and on the way, he asked Howden: “Will I get in trouble for this? Am I okay to do this?”

Howden said he told Formenton, “I don’t know . . . if she wants to have sex with you, like, I guess it’s okay,” adding “if she consents, and she wants you, then sure,” but nothing happened in front of him. He told Robitaille Formenton and the woman weren’t in the bathroom for long.

When the woman would say she wanted to leave, a couple of the men would say: “Like, baby, don’t leave. And then she’s like, so you guys do want to have sex and everyone’s like, well, no, I don’t want to have sex. And then she just stayed there . . . she didn’t want to leave.”

Cunningham took Howden to passages where he described the woman “clipping” and “unclipping” her shirt on and off. The court has heard the woman was wearing a body suit

He described to Robitaille about hearing the woman crying and the next day McLeod showed him the “consent” video made “after she calmed down.”

“What he said to me is he thinks that she was embarrassed,” he told Robitaille.

Howden did another interview with Robitaille in 2022 about one piece of information he hadn’t said before about “the smack.”

“That was drawing the line for me to leave, because I had felt uncomfortable to that point and then once I (had) seen that, I just wanted to be out of there,” he told Robitaille.

The “smack,” he said, was a slap – and once he heard it, he left quickly.

“I just remember, at most points, wanting to leave and just felt uncomfortable,” he told Robitaille. He told Cunningham he had no memory of the events but only the feeling of being uncomfortable.

He told London police in 2023 he couldn’t remember seeing it “but once I heard it, that was my time to go . . . that was basically the thing that finally pushed me out the door.”

The slap, and who did it, has been an issue at the trial. Dube, who was captain of the team, is charged with sexual assault for allegedly slapping the woman on the butt.

The alleged slap was the subject of the legal arguments earlier in the day and the subject of a text message Howden sent to teammate Taylor Raddysh a week after the hotel encounter. Howden wrote, “Dude, I’m so happy I left with all the sh– went down. Duber (Dube) was smacking that girl’s ass so hard, it looked like it hurt so bad.”

It appears to be some of the Crown’s strongest evidence to point to Dube, but only if the text message is admitted into evidence.

Justice Maria Carroccia dismissed the Crown’s application to have the text message admitted under a “past recollection recorded” application, the second route the Crown had attempted after failing to have the message admitted under other evidentiary rules.

The text was not an official statement and while Howden testified he had no reason to lie, he has not memory of sending the text message or if it was accurate.

“This was a text message sent to a friend during a casual conversation. . . . Mr. Howden was understandably under stress and worried about himself when he learned he was facing an investigation as being undertaken by Hockey Canada and is talking about events when he was drunk,” she said.

Despite the objections from the defence that they had not been properly given notice, Carroccia allowed the Crown to make another application under the hearsay rules to have the text message admitted.

Carroccia will tell the court about her decision on Monday.

jsims@postmedia.com