Michael McLeod told the police officer the entire situation that played out in his hotel room was “weird.”
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Michael McLeod told the police officer the entire situation that played out in his hotel room was “weird.”
His teammates from the gold-winning 2018 Canadian world junior hockey team had assembled in his room at the Delta Armouries hotel in London to hang out and eat chicken wings and mozzarella sticks ordered off Uber Eats.
And among them was a 20-year-old woman he’d brought back to the hotel from a downtown London bar – and with whom he’d had consensual sex – who was begging his buddies to have sex with her and getting upset when they wouldn’t.
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The whole scene was so absurd, so “weird,” he thought he would take a video of the woman to make sure she was fine with what was happening.
“She said ‘yes,’” McLeod told now-retired London police Det. Stephen Newton during a voluntary interview in November 2018. “I was trying to make sure she was okay because this is, like, a weird situation that I wasn’t expecting was going to happen with all the guys coming in.
“I was worried something like this could happen. I just made sure she was okay with this.”
The interview was played in court on Tuesday at the trial of five Canadian world junior hockey players who were in London on June 18 and 19, 2018, for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament to celebrate their gold medals.
McLeod, 27; Carter Hart, 26; Alex Formenton, 25; Dillon Dube, 26; and Cal Foote, 26, all have pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod has also pleaded not guilty to a second charge of being a party to sexual assault.
The complainant, now 27, and whose identity is protected by court order, met McLeod at Jack’s Bar on Richmond Row when a group of teammates showed up on Dollar Beer Night to dance and drink. She has testified earlier at the trial that once she went back to the hotel with McLeod, she was sexually assaulted by several men in his room.
She testified she suffered memory issues about what happened because she was drunk and had separated her mind from what her body was doing to cope with the stressful situation. But the defence lawyers have pointed to her as the aggressor who wanted to have sex with the players and was annoyed if they didn’t.
The interview was introduced through the evidence of Newton, a 32-year veteran with the London police who left in 2022. He was the lead investigator in 2018 into the complaint filed just days after the big party and made the decision in February 2019 that he had insufficient grounds to lay charges.
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Newton first interviewed the woman on June 22, 2018, when the woman said she didn’t want charges laid, but for her complaint to be documented and the men spoken to. Newton showed her photos of the team from the Hockey Canada website for identification purposes four days later. The woman would tell Newton to carry on with the criminal investigation.
But contacting all the players was going to be tricky. He called it “an unusual environment for this type of investigation.” He didn’t reach out to them himself because he had no contact information and he thought it was best to reach out through their lawyers.
“I knew the nature of this team that these players were all over North America and it was going to be challenging,” he said under questions from Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham.
Newton said he called Bob Martin, the security advisor for Team Canada, and asked Martin to pass his contact information to the players and their lawyers. Once Hockey Canada named Danielle Robitaille as its lawyer, she became his main contact.
The lawyers for two players, McLeod and Formenton, contacted him on July 13. A week later, McLeod’s lawyer, David Humphrey, forwarded to Newton the two videos of the woman appearing to consent to sexual activity.
Newton said he eventually did in-person interviews with McLeod and Formenton and audio interviews with Dube and Foote. Hart wasn’t interviewed, and Brett Howden, who just finished a week as a witness at the trial on Tuesday morning, did not provide an interview.
The McLeod interview, which lasted more than an hour, took place on Nov. 17, 2018, with Humphrey present and with a preamble by Newton informing the player that he was investigating the woman’s complaint of a sexual assault.
“I don’t feel I have identified the necessary grounds for charges of sexual assault,” he told McLeod, making it clear he had no plans at that time to arrest and charge him, noting “you are here on your own free will” and could leave anytime.
Newton also cautioned him the investigation was ongoing and should things change, what McLeod said could be used at trial.
McLeod told Newton he and his teammates arrived at Jack’s Bar around midnight. He described meeting the woman on the dance floor and that “she wasn’t, like, hammered by any means.”
He bought her a drink and she bought him one, he said. “I had a few more and didn’t see what she was exactly drinking, but I know I was drinking with the guys.”
Around 1:30 a.m., “we decided to go back to the hotel mutually,” McLeod said. “We had sex. And then, I decided to order some food off Uber Eats.”
McLeod said he let the others know he had food, but also that he had “a girl in the room.”
Newton asked: “Do you get the sense the guys are coming because they know there’s a naked girl in the room who’s doing sexual favours for people?”
McLeod thought “probably,” but added: “I just told the guys I was getting food and there’s a girl over there, that’s all I said to a few guys.
“Like I said, a lot of these guys aren’t looking for anything . . . most of them had girlfriends at the time, and didn’t participate . . . they just kind of thought it was funny.”
It was 20 minutes before the food showed up and before it arrived, “two guys came around,” McLeod said. “I know Carter Hart was one of them . . . and I’m not too sure who the other two were at the time.
“And then, we’re all hanging out, four or five of us, including (the woman). And then I went downstairs to get the food – the mozzarella sticks and the chicken wings – and then I walked in and she was giving Carter Hart oral sex.
“She seemed completely fine with it and the other guys were just hanging out with other guys. It was a little different.”
The food didn’t last long and then Formenton, his roommate, showed up.
“I guess she wanted to have sex with him, but that was when there was only four or five of us in the room and he didn’t want to do it in front of us,” McLeod said. “So they went into the bathroom and they were in there for 10 or 15 minutes maybe and they, like, had sex, from what I know.”
Three or four more guys showed up and then more. By then it was “eight or nine guys and we were all hanging out. We were drunk, but we weren’t black-out drunk and we all had our heads on straight for the most part and having fun, laughing,” McLeod said.
“Fifteen minutes later, she wanted to have sex with someone else again and, as I said, she was on the bed and said: ‘Do you want to have sex with me’ and ’no one will have sex with me’ and ‘you guys are p—–s.”
McLeod said they were “all kind of stunned by her. Like none of us wanted to have sex with her, you know, in front of everyone.”
Some were laughing, “but not like making fun of her or anything, because it’s kind of weird, so they’re just like ha-ha, like what’s going on, kind of thing.
“She got upset about that. She said ‘no one wants to have sex’ and I had to, kind of, calm her down and say ‘are you okay?’ Literally, I told her no one is going to have sex in front of nine other guys.”
McLeod said the woman felt better after he talked to her, but then she was offering to give men oral sex. “I got one and Carter Hart got another one and, maybe, Dillon Dube.”
Before that happened, McLeod said he took the first video seen during the trial when he asked if she was fine with what was happening because he was “worried something like this could happen . . . I just made sure she was okay with this.”
There were several times that the woman put her clothes on and took them off. He thought she was “embarrassed” and said he asked her at least five times if she was okay.
It was almost 4 a.m. when the men left the room.
“I mean all these guys are smart guys, they know kind of what’s best for them . . . so they just, they didn’t want to, you know, get out of hand, so they just left, and it was late too,” McLeod said.
He added that he took the second video in which she “wasn’t black-out drunk” and said she was consenting to everything and asked why he was so “paranoid” and told him she “had fun.”
Once everyone was gone, McLeod said he hopped in the shower and she came in, too. They had sex again.
“And she was getting dressed and looking for her stuff and couldn’t find the ring she was wearing and she was pretty upset about that,” he said.
McLeod said they looked for the ring for 10 minutes or so, but he and Formenton wanted to go to bed so they could play golf the next day. “We calmed her down . . . but you could tell she was kind of upset when she left.”
The next day, Hockey Canada let him know the police had been called. He tracked the woman down through Instagram and messaged her. She said she was busy but told him her mother called the police and she had told her not to.
Newton asked McLeod if he had regrets. “So if this opportunity happened again, what do you think you would do?”
Said McLeod: “I’d probably just shut it down right away . . . probably go.”
The trial continues.
jsims@postmedia.com
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