Hockey Canada trial: Witness testifies woman asked players to have sex

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Editor’s note: This story contains words and descriptions of sexual activity some readers may find disturbing.
The word went out that there was food in Michael McLeod’s hotel room.
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That was music to the ears of four 2018 Team Canada junior hockey players who had stumbled back to the Delta Armouries hotel in London after closing down Jack’s bar on Richmond Row. But when they got to Room 209, there was an unexpected surprise.
“I hear someone say, ‘Guys, there’s a naked girl in the bathroom,'” said former team member Tyler Steenbergen, who began his testimony Wednesday at the trial of five former teammates charged with sexual assault stemming from what happened in McLeod’s room in the early morning hours of June 19, 2018.
“I was kind of shocked,” he said. “And then she shortly after came out.”
The woman was “unclothed,” he said. There was a bed sheet on the floor between the beds and the woman placed herself on top of it.
“She went on the floor and started masturbating and then asked guys to come over and have sex with her,” he said.
Assistant Crown attorney Heather Donkers asked Steenbergen exactly what the woman said. “She said, ‘Can one of you guys come over and f— me.'”
And after that, Steenbergen explained in the early moments of his testimony, he watched two teammates receive brief oral sex from the woman who had taunted the men with a profane name when they didn’t take her up on her offer.
It was a shocking end of the day in the London courtroom after the woman who is the complainant in the case finished giving her evidence after more than a week on the witness stand, including eight days of gruelling cross-examination by the five defendants’ defence teams.
McLeod, 27, Carter Hart, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, Dillon Dube, 26, and Cal Foote, 26, all of whom had National Hockey League careers, have each pleaded not guilty to sexual assault stemming from events at the Delta Armouries hotel when the world championship team was in London for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament on June 18 and 19, 2018.
McLeod has pleaded not guilty to a second sexual assault count for being a party to the offence.
The Crown has contended that the woman, who was 20 at the time, went to the hotel with McLeod for consensual sex after meeting him with his other rowdy teammates at Jack’s bar. After the sexual activity with McLeod, and unbeknownst to her, McLeod invited teammates to the room for “a three-way” where she was sexually assaulted with activity that included vaginal sex and oral sex.
She maintained throughout her evidence that she was extremely drunk and has large memory gaps about the night, telling the jury she went on “autopilot” and switched her mind off once the men were in the room.
But the defence has proffered another scenario and has pointed to the woman as being the aggressor who suggested to McLeod to invite the men to the room for “a wild night,” then initiated sexual activities with her once they gathered in the room where she appeared to them naked and on a bedsheet spread out on the floor.
Steenbergen, 27, is the third player to testify at the trial. He told the jury he no longer plays hockey and works in a family construction business in Alberta.
In 2018, when he was named to the national team, he said he knew “most of the Alberta guys,” including Dube, Hart, Jake Bean, Kale Clague, Sam Steel and Dante Fabbro – players he met growing up “playing with and against them.”
Dube, who captained the team, was someone Steenbergen met when he was 10 when they played at The Brick tournament and they knew each other through junior and into the pro ranks. They weren’t “super-close friends” before the world juniors, but once the team was picked “we were all pretty close,” Steenbergen said.
“I thought we got pretty close together from the start. We didn’t really have any superstars, so we all had to buy in, so that’s how I feel we got close… We had to get close and know each other and know our strengths and weaknesses.”
He said Dube was “a good leader” and “tried to get everyone to hang out with one another.”
Steenbergen confirmed that he was in London on June 18 and 19, 2018, for Hockey Canada’s gala and golf tournament to celebrate their gold medal win. Bean was his roommate.
After the gala, Steenbergen said the team changed clothes at the hotel and headed to a small pub with some of the team’s staff, and then to Jack’s, where it was loud and it was Dollar Beer Night.
He and teammates were drinking and hanging out on the dance floor together. Steenbergen said he had “a couple of beers” and that he was “drunk, but not overly drunk.”
He said he didn’t meet any women at the bar, but “I think I ran into Mikey (McLeod) and the girl,” while he was heading to the bathroom. He said he never knew her name.
Steenbergen said he figured that the rest of the team was drunk too but “I couldn’t tell” if the woman with McLeod was drunk.
Steenbergen, Dube, Fabbro and Colton Point closed the bar down at 2:30 a.m., grabbed some poutine at a restaurant near the bar and made their way back to the hotel. Steenbergen said he found Bean in the lobby waiting for him because he had lost his room key, “and then we heard there was food in Michael’s room,” after someone in the group got a text message.
So, Steenbergen, Dube and Bean headed to McLeod’s room. When they got there McLeod, Formenton, Hart, Sam Steel, Maxime Comtois, Drake Batherson and Brett Howden were already there.
Steenbergen said he sat down at the desk at the far side of the hotel room and then heard someone say there was “a naked girl in the bathroom.” He described what the woman did once she appeared – on the floor, on the bed sheet, masturbating and inviting them to have sex with her.
“I feel like when she asked the guys to come over to have sex with her that everyone was just kind of in shock that she had said that,” he said.
Hart, he said, was either standing near to Steenbergen at the desk or sitting at the edge of the bed. After the woman invited one of them to have sex with her, Hart “unbuckled his belt and pulled (his pants) down, probably towards his knees” and walked over to her.
“She had asked for guys to come over and (have sex) with her, but then I guess he just wanted oral sex,” Steenbergen said.
Donkers asked Steenbergen how long the sexual activity lasted with Hart. “I know it wasn’t super long,” he said. “Maybe 30 seconds to a minute.”
Steenbergen didn’t recall anyone saying anything to the woman or Hart. He said he was trying to have a conversation with Bean.
“Then I think Carter stops and I remember her saying something along the lines of ‘Oh, you guys are being p——,” he said. And then he saw the woman give McLeod oral sex.
“It was like the same thing as Carter, just quickly the pants were down and it was just pretty quick from what I remember,” Steenbergen said.
While Steenbergen is expected to continue testifying on Thursday, the 27-year-old complainant finished her testimony after more than a week.
However, Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham’s re-examination started and stalled several times for legal arguments. What the jury did hear was that the woman never thought that the names of the eight “John Does” named along with Hockey Canada and the Canadian Hockey League in a $3.55-million civil lawsuit she filed in April 2022 would ever be revealed.
Hockey Canada settled the suit a month later and the details were not made public. However, the jury was told Hockey Canada “expressly denied liability” on their behalf and on behalf of the players and that the players were not aware of the lawsuit before it was reported in the media that it was settled.
The lawsuit’s statement of claim said that the unnamed junior hockey players had engaged in some or all of a list of sexual acts. The woman agreed that the document didn’t identify which John Doe did which act, nor did it say eight people touched her in a sexual manner.
She was also asked about her 2022 Hockey Canada statement – which the woman has said was drafted by her civil lawyers – that included the names of the eight civil defendants. The woman said it was the lawyer’s call to include the names.
She said she didn’t know the Hockey Canada statement would be a public document. She said that the reason she didn’t talk to Hockey Canada in 2018 when requested was because “my focus was the police investigation. I didn’t think I needed to really speak with Hockey Canada about it.”
“But then for 2022, once the police investigation had closed in 2019 and nothing else was happening, the settlement was done and then Hockey Canada wanted my participation again …it just felt like one more thing to do to finally put this behind me.”
“Did you ask the London police to reopen their criminal investigation” in 2022, Cunningham asked.
“No, I hadn’t asked them to do that,” she said.
The trial continues on Thursday.
jsims@postmedia.com
The complainant whose allegations are at the core of the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial continued testifying on Wednesday for the ninth day. See below for coverage from the London courthouse.