RECAP: Alex Formenton's lawyer, complainant spar at Hockey Canada trial
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He was tall, it was dark, and she wasn’t sure if he was handsome.
The woman at the centre of the sexual assault trial of five 2018 Team Canada junior hockey players couldn’t articulate why, after just meeting player Michael McLeod, she chose to leave Jack’s bar on Richmond Row and head back to his hotel room for consensual sex.
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“I don’t really know how else to say what it was that I found in him attractive or what made me go home with him,” she said Friday in her fifth day of cross-examination at the high-profile Superior Court trial.
She insisted that some time earlier after meeting him that she had wanted to ditch him. But at the end of the court day Friday after a methodical set of questions and video presentation by defence lawyer Daniel Brown came the surprise.
Brown produced Facebook Messenger texts between the woman and one of her co-workers with whom she went to Dollar Beer night at the downtown bar that were contemporaneous. At 11:48 p.m., the friend sent a message that she was looking for the woman in the bar after the woman had split from the friends on the dance floor and could be seen in the security footage buying herself some shots of liquor.
At midnight, just as the woman was talking to McLeod at the bar, the friend sent a message. “Let me know if you want me to get u from the guy!!”
“Haha ok thank you!” the woman wrote back. “I’m ok for now but I will let you know for sure… I’ll come back soon.”
But she didn’t come back. A few minutes later, the friend wrote again, “It’s getting awks come back… Where u go!!! I wanna take a shot !!”
By then, the woman said, “I got carried away with the drinking and dancing with the other boys.”
That exchange was part of a full day spent tearing down the version of events at the bar that the woman told both the police in 2018 and Hockey Canada in 2022 that led to the charges.
McLeod, 27, Carter Hart, 26, Dillon Dube, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, and Cal Foote, 26, have all pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod also has pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to the offence.
The 27-year-old woman, who started her testimony a week ago and whose identity is protected by court order, claims she went back to the Delta Armouries hotel with McLeod for consensual sex and that once that encounter was over, McLeod summoned other team members to the room where she says she was repeatedly sexually assaulted.
The woman filed a civil suit against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League and eight unnamed John Does in April 2022 that was settled a month later. The jury has heard that the five men on trial were not told about the civil suit or the settlement until after it was widely publicized.
The woman has said repeatedly she was extremely drunk and the men should have known she was highly intoxicated. She also said she has wide gaps of memory loss about the night and that she separated her mind from her body to cope with the situation in the hotel room.
But the defence have offered an alternative scenario: that the woman asked McLeod to invite the players to the room and that she was offering to perform sexual favours for them. The jury has also seen two videos from McLeod’s phone that appear to show the woman consenting to the sexual activity.
Brown represents Formenton, who was McLeod’s roommate at the hotel. Formenton was 18 in 2018 and couldn’t go out to the bars. However, that didn’t limit Brown from doing a deep dive into the woman’s activities in the bar before meeting up with the men.
The woman’s memory issues have been a recurring theme during cross-examination as has her insistence that she was so drunk that everything was “blurry.”
That included whether she thought McLeod was attractive to her while she danced with him.
“I was really drunk and it was someone I was spending a lot of time with. And we were dancing and kissing and he seemed taller than me, that was attractive to me, those kinds of things, but I wasn’t really fully registering details of someone I just met in a dark bar,” the woman said.
“I can’t recall the conversations that we had, he was just really all over me and I was all over him. I don’t really know how else to say what it was that I found in him attractive or what made me go home with him,” It’s just how it was.”
She did recall that McLeod said to her that he “wanted to take me home and have fun with me” while they were on the dance floor.
Brown focused in on the woman’s alcohol consumption. “You know, of course that alcohol has some other side-effects – lowers your inhibitions, maybe turns you into a different person, carries some risks, impairs your judgements,” Brown said.
“Yes, I think it can do that,” the woman said, but she wasn’t thinking about the risks while out with friends..
However, it appeared she didn’t spend a whole lot of time with her friends on the dance floor. Before even encountering the hockey team, she had downed eight drinks, including six Jagerbombs, which are shots of Jagermeister and Red Bull energy drink.
That contradicted what she said in earlier statements that the hockey team got her drunk. “It wasn’t that the players got you drunk, you got yourself drunk,” Brown said.
“They continued to get me drunk, there will still be shots after that,” the woman said.
In the videos, the woman can be seen alone and buying two shots for herself after earlier buying two shots with her female friend. “They just go down easy, I guess. So I feel I can take two and be OK,” she said.
However, in a demonstration to the jury, Brown produced a regular shot glass that holds an ounce of booze and a smaller glass that Jack’s uses for shots. He poured water into the smaller glass and transferred it to the regular shot glass, showing that the Jack’s shot was half of what a regular shot is.
So, the woman agreed, that instead of eight ounces of 35-per cent liquor, she had four ounces.
Brown was also able to show the woman that her movements around the bar that night differed from what she had said in previous statements and particularly her 2022 written statement to Hockey Canada that the woman has said her civil lawyers wrote and she signed.
“When I want to refer to something in my 2022 statement, I’m not allowed to because there are errors, but when you guys want to refer to it, I guess we’re allowed to then. So I just don’t feel that’s fair,” the woman said.
Justice Maria Carroccia told the woman to just answer the questions.
Brown zeroed in on a conversation the woman appeared to have with one of the bouncers in the security videos – a man she knew from high school. She spoke to him before she met McLeod and the hockey team.
Brown pointed out that the woman never told the police in 2018 or 2022 or Hockey Canada during their investigation that she spoke to the bouncer, but did in March in a statement she wrote while preparing for the trial and after reviewing the video footage.
The woman has testified she was surrounded at the bar by the hockey players, touched inappropriately on the dance floor and separated from her friends.
The bouncer “can protect you, can potentially help you escape from this group of players, throw them out of the bar for example, if you told this person that you were being touched inappropriately or handled inappropriately,” Brown said.
“I could speak to him. I didn’t really feel the need to implicate him. I was handling my own situation and drunk and not really thinking clearly, so I didn’t consider that really as an option,” she said.
But before she left the bar with McLeod, the security footage showed she talked to the bouncer again for seven minutes at the same time McLeod was on the dance floor dancing with his teammates to the hockey team’s goal song, Hey Baby.
The woman denied she was “hiding him” from the police because Brown said he wouldn’t support her narrative that she was extremely drunk.
The woman said she didn’t have a plan that night for a ride home and would have likely took an Uber. In the Facebook Messenger exchange, Brown suggested that there was an audio call at 12:15 a.m., just 15 minutes after she met McLeod, from the woman’s friend after telling the woman they were grabbing a ride home.
Brown said the woman told the friend she was “having fun.”
“I was fine at that point. I was good to stay,” the woman said. “I was fine to be with him.”
The next morning, the friend checked in to make sure the woman got home. “Hey girl Ya I did thank you (heart) How about you? Did you make it home and everything al right?”
The woman said “sorry I kept losing you guys” and made plans to go out drinking again.
“Lol it’s all good !! You were having a blast with those guys so when I left I was like, don’t worry, she’s definitely in good hands,” the friend wrote back.
The woman said she wasn’t going to open up to her new friend what had happened to her. “I was really embarrassed and I felt so much shame,” she said.
“Shame and embarrassment for the choices you made,” Brown said.
“I made the choice to dance with them and drink at the bar. I did not make the choice to have them do what they did back at the hotel,” the woman shot back.
The trial continues on Monday.
jsims@postmedia.com
See below for coverage from the London courthouse of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial on Friday
