NHL
Hockey
Canada Trial
A member of the 2018 Canadian World Junior team described watching his teammates have oral sex with a young woman in a London, Ont., hotel room during the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial Wednesday.
Tyler Steenbergen, the latest Crown witness, said two teammates, Carter Hart and Michael McLeod, received oral sex from a woman after she asked the men assembled in the room for sex.
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“She said, ‘Can one of you guys come over and f— me,’” Steenbergen testified.
Steenbergen was teammates with McLeod, Hart, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé and Cal Foote, who are facing sexual assault charges stemming from an alleged incident in 2018. The complainant, a woman known as E.M., said she was sexually assaulted over the span of several hours. The men were in town for a Hockey Canada event celebrating their 2018 World Juniors championship. All five of the accused have pleaded not guilty.
Steenbergen played three seasons in the AHL but no longer plays professional hockey. He now works with his father building small starter homes, he said.
Steenbergen told Crown attorney Heather Donkers that after the Hockey Canada gala, the team went to a pub before going to Jack’s bar. He and others were drinking at the pub and continued drinking at the bar, he said. He said he had “a couple” of beers at Jack’s.
“I was drunk but I wasn’t overly drunk,” he said about his state once he left the bar at closing time, around 2 or 2:30 a.m.
When he arrived at the hotel, he said he received a text message via a group chat saying there was food in McLeod’s room. He went up to the room with two other teammates, including Dubé. There were seven men, including Hart, Formenton and McLeod, in the room when they arrived, he said, and soon after, he said someone mentioned there was “a naked girl in the bathroom.”
A naked young woman emerged, lay down on a bedsheet spread out on the floor, started masturbating and asked the men in the room for sex, he said.
Hart walked over to her, unbuckled his belt, pulled his pants down and received fellatio for about 30 to 60 seconds, Steenbergen said. Donkers asked whether Hart said anything to the woman before, during or after the oral sex. Steenbergen said he could not recall.
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Steenbergen said McLeod received fellatio in much the same way. “The pants were down and then it was pretty quick, from what I remember,” he said. Steenbergen said he also could not recall whether anything was said at the time.
Earlier during his testimony, he said he knew some of the players on the team, including Dubé, after years of playing with and against them. He said by 2018, he and Dubé were friendly but not close. Steenbergen also said that since the team didn’t have a “superstar,” the team fostered a “close” dynamic.
He will return to the witness box Thursday morning.
Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham spent Wednesday morning and most of the afternoon on the re-examination of E.M., the complainant in the case. A re-examination seeks to clarify details brought up during the cross-examination, which wrapped up Tuesday.
Wednesday marked E.M.’s ninth consecutive day in the witness box; she was first called to testify on May 2. Much of the day was consumed by legal arguments, which required the witness and jury to be excused.
During E.M.’s re-examination, the Crown asked her to clarify part of her statement to police on June 22, 2018, a few days after the incident, in which she described one of the men in the room “did the splits on my face, just put it in my face.”
E.M. told Cunningham that she meant that the man’s legs were split over her face, and that he put his penis right on her face.
“It was all I was seeing,” E.M. said. “It was directly on my face.”
Earlier in the trial, Julianna Greenspan, Foote’s lawyer, called his ability to do the splits a “party trick.”
E.M. was also asked why she did not participate in the Hockey Canada investigation in 2018, but changed her mind when the national governing body reopened its third-party investigation in 2022.
She said in 2018, she was focused on the police investigation. By 2022, the police investigation was closed, and the lawsuit she had filed against Hockey Canada and eight unidentified defendants had been settled out of court.
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“It just felt like one more thing to kind of do to finally put this behind me,” she said.
Cunningham also asked E.M. about her civil lawsuit against Hockey Canada, asking her if the statement of claim in that suit named any of the John Does included in the suit.
E.M. said that it did not.
“My understanding was that they wouldn’t be identified at all,” E.M. said. “That’s the reason for going with the John Doe name.”
E.M. also told Cunningham that the statement of claim did not identify the acts that each John Doe did, nor did it say that eight different people touched her in a sexual manner. It was her lawyer’s decision to later name the John Does in a statement to Hockey Canada in July 2022, E.M. said.
During her cross-examination, Megan Savard, lawyer for Hart, referred to that statement as a public document, suggesting players had been identified. On Wednesday, Cunningham asked E.M. to clarify who she understood would have access to that statement. E.M. said she believed it should just go to Hockey Canada.
Earlier, Cunningham asked E.M. to clarify how she would have referred to her female friends in 2018. E.M. said that she would have called them “girls” because that’s how she spoke back then, when she was 20 years old.
The defense has referred to the accused as “boys” throughout the trial. During her cross-examination, Greenspan suggested that E.M. has called the accused “men” during the trial because she has a “clear agenda.”
— The Athletic′s Kamila Hinkson reported remotely from Montreal and The Athletic′s Dan Robson reported remotely from Toronto.
(Photo: Andy Devlin / Getty Images)
