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Shortly after the sun rose on a clear June morning, the Hockey Canada establishment, including members of that year’s gold medal-winning World Junior team, gathered at the London Hunt Club to play golf.
Players wore matching red polos with black collars and hit balls marked with the Hockey Canada logo during the morning round at the private country club in southwestern Ontario’s largest city.
While playing, Hockey Canada officials were notified that a young woman had claimed to have been sexually assaulted by several members of the world junior team just hours earlier.
Later that day, long after the golf tournament had ended and the players had left town, around 6 p.m., Hockey Canada contacted London police.
That was six years ago.
This week, according to a report from The Globe and Mail, five members of the 2018 Canadian world junior team were asked to turn themselves in to police to be charged with sexual assault. In the interval between the alleged assault and the impending charges, almost no one in positions of authority or knowledge did the right thing.
The hours it took for Hockey Canada to speak to police that day in June 2018 were just the first delay in six years of obfuscations, backroom deals and roadblocks intended to prevent transparency and shield organizations and defendants from scrutiny. .
Instead of operating openly, Hockey Canada chose to hide under a cloak of secrecy.
In the close-knit hockey fraternity, it’s fair to wonder how much of an open secret the allegations against the World Junior players were. Which players knew this? What agents? What team executives?
What could have been revealed but wasn’t and why?
London police quietly ended their investigation in February 2019, when the lead detective deemed there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.
This result was in line with the findings of a Globe and Mail investigation from 2017 by journalist Robyn Doolittle, who revealed that one in five sexual assault reports in Canada were dismissed as unfounded. In LondonSpecifically, 30 percent of such claims were deemed “unfounded” by city police.
The allegations of what happened after the Hockey Canada Foundation gala in June 2018 remained hidden, buried amid a long history of allegations of sexual violence within the youth hockey community, which had been ignored, dismissed or attacked during decades.
The incident would have remained another crisis averted for hockey’s watchdogs had the whistleblower not filed a subsequent lawsuit against Hockey Canada, the Canadian Hockey League and eight players in April 2022.
Hockey Canada settled the lawsuit out of court on behalf of all parties, attempting to keep the allegations secret.
And so they would remain, at least beyond the fraternity, if TSN reporter Rick Westhead hadn’t learned of the lawsuit and settlement a month later. His story opened a series of investigations into what really happened that night in London.
In the nearly two years since then, a culture of silence and secrecy within Hockey Canada has come to light for public scrutiny.
Grant Robertson of the Globe and Mail revealed that the organization had a multimillion-dollar secret fund to solve cases of sexual assault, keeping them hidden. Some of that money was funded by registration fees paid by parents of kids playing minor hockey around the country.
Amid public outrage, Hockey Canada executives were called to several parliamentary hearings in Ottawa and questioned by MPs about the organization’s handling of the allegations, the settlement and lack of transparency.
During those hearings it was revealed that Sport Canada, which oversees all sports governing bodies in Canada, was aware of the sexual assault allegations in June 2018 but did nothing.
No research, no review, no questions.
Nothing.
Following public hearings, the federal government froze Hockey Canada’s funding and several high-profile sponsors ended their partnerships. Hockey Canada CEO Scott Smith has resigned, after initially resisting calls from MPs for him to step aside. Hockey Canada’s entire board of directors also resigned.
As scrutiny grew over how Hockey Canada handled sexual assault allegations, the London Police Service reopened its investigation in July 2022.
The details of what happened that night in London became public as media attention focused on them. For journalists, it was not difficult to find first-hand accounts of members of the world junior team plying young women with alcohol in a bar and trying to bring them in. Return to the Delta Armories Hotel. It was easy to find photos and videos from the night. Through those images, videos and sources that interacted with the players that night, it was possible to reconstruct a timeline of who was, where and when. Lawyers representing some of the players addressed the media with two videos taken from a room at the Delta Armories hotel, which allegedly show the alleged victim stating that she had given her consent to what happened. Text messages were also revealed in which a player asked the woman if she had gone to the police.
The names of the members of that world junior team occasionally trended on Twitter, while public speculation ran rampant and our insatiable hunger for details went unsatisfied. The anonymous complainant, who asked for privacy, was similarly tried in public, as strangers questioned her motivations and the veracity of her claims.
Months after the police investigation was reopened to the public, investigators believed they had grounds to file charges in a case that had initially been dismissed.
In December 2022, London police filed a court application seeking more investigative powers, stating that they had reasonable grounds to believe that five hockey players committed sexual assault. The request provided details of that night in London, obtained through interviews with the complainant and with the players who were in the hotel room at the time. The 94-page document, First obtained by The Globe and Mail, also revealed that a member of Hockey Canada notified a player that police had been contacted after the alleged incident. The player then searched for the woman on Instagram, asked her if she had called the police, and pressured her to dismiss the complaint.
For a year, potential charges loomed over members of Canada’s 2018 world junior team, most of whom now play in the NHL. All members of the team were banned from representing Canada in international hockey events, pending the results of an internal investigation by Hockey Canada. This story has since disappeared from the headlines and returns from time to time, in small updates with little progress.
The slow pace of the reopened case is understandable. This is an active criminal investigation with potentially serious consequences and justice at stake. Our desire to obtain more information does not influence the legal process.
But skepticism about what would be revealed and what would remain hidden is valid. As do questions about who is being protected.
Is justice the main concern?
It’s a fair question. From the beginning, the horrible accusations were treated as a nuisance, brushed aside, and then bore fruit. Instead of seeking the truth of what happened, the impulse from the moment the allegations emerged was to mitigate the damage to the hockey establishment.
When Hockey Canada first hired a law firm to investigate the allegations, players were not forced to participate and several declined to be interviewed. The investigation was closed and the law firm was unable to determine the identities of the defendants.
When that investigation was reopened in July 2022, amid public outcry, Hockey Canada demanded that all players participate or be prohibited from participating in future international programs or competitions for Canada.
Why wasn’t this the initial requirement?
The results of the law firm’s investigation were provided to a third-party panel in November 2022. It took an entire year for the panel to make recommendations on potential sanctions against the players, which it found to be in violation of Hockey Canada’s code of conduct.
Those findings still remain hidden, citing an opaque appeals process. When does Hockey Canada plan to make its finding public?
The NHL also launched its own investigation into what happened and whether any of its players would face disciplinary action, saying its findings would be made public. That investigation was “closer to the end than the beginning,” commissioner Gary Bettman said in October 2022. Throughout the NHL investigation, all players involved were able to collect their paychecks while continuing to play in the top league. of the world.
Details of that investigation have not been disclosed. If the investigation has uncovered misconduct, how long has the league retained that information before acting?
Now, five players from that youth team will reportedly head to London, where police have scheduled a press conference for February 5 to discuss the details of this high-profile case. Long court proceedings await him.
Neither Hockey Canada, the NHL nor the NHL Players’ Association have commented on the news of the pending charges.
So here we are, in what is really just the beginning: six years after a sunny June morning, waiting for answers to questions that too many people hoped would never come to this point.
(Photo by Andy Devlin/Getty Images)