Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé and Callan Foote are shown in a courtroom sketch. The five former world junior hockey players have been accused of sexual assault, and all have pleaded not guilty.Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press
Andrea Werhun is a performer, producer and author.
In May, the complainant known as E.M. took the stand to tell her side of the story in the trial of five former members of Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey team who have been accused of sexual assault. According to her, the events that unfolded in room 209 of the Delta Armuories Hotel began in the evening of June 18, 2018, with drinking, dancing and more drinking in London, Ont. The woman, then 20 years old, says she was drunk when she met junior hockey player Michael McLeod, a six-foot, 20-year-old “boy” – as defence lawyers insist on calling him. Consensual sex back at his hotel room ensued.
The court case revolves around what happened next. E.M. testified that she was lounging naked in bed, intending to stay the night, when Mr. McLeod got dressed and inexplicably disappeared. Allegedly unbeknownst to the still drunken E.M., Mr. McLeod had sent a text message to the team group chat: “who wants to be in a 3 way quick. 209- mikey.”
Soon, she said, she was “shocked” as several strangers entered the room. E.M. testified she was “scared and confused” as the men – Mr. McLeod, along with Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Cal Foote, Carter Hart and up to five other teammates – allegedly instructed her to lie down on the floor. She told the court that the “towering” hockey players prompted her to perform oral sex on them by “putting penises in my face” and to engage in vaginal intercourse. All the while, she alleges, the men slapped her, spat on her, laughed at her, and made jokes about inserting golf balls and a club into her vagina. E.M. was “intimidated,” saying she felt like an “object” and “on autopilot”; it was “as if my mind kind of floated to the top corner of the ceiling.” She cried and said she tried to leave on multiple occasions, but was each time guided back into the room by men who told her they were “having fun.” She also testified that she never said no or physically resisted the men.
During cross-examination, E.M. was asked by defence lawyer Megan Savard about her adopting “a porn-star persona,” as E.M. had described it in a trial-preparation meeting with prosecutors. Ms. Savard suggested that because she was “offering certain sexual services,” it sent confusing signals around consent: “I am going to suggest to you that regardless of what you were feeling in your head, you were acting in a way that would make the men in the room think you were consenting,” she said. But E.M. testified that she took on this persona as “a coping mechanism” since, she stated, the players would not let her leave. “It seemed like that’s what they wanted to see,” E.M. replied. “They were trying to recreate, like, a porn scene.”
These comments have brought the issue of the influence and accessibility of porn in our culture to the fore again. Pornography is more freely available to developing boys and young men than ever before. And it may feel like there’s a clear association – that violent or aggressive porn can inspire or normalize violent sexual behaviours, and that pornography can be blamed for popularizing coercive sex or depictions of “gang bangs” in which women are sexually objectified.
But is porn, with its occasionally lurid scenes of sexual depravity, really a relevant facet of a case involving group sexual assault? Did a desire to recreate what these young men may have seen in porn have anything to do with their alleged actions?
Years of research suggests otherwise. A 2022 meta-analysis found that sexual aggression and violent porn were only “weakly correlated,” and noted that selection bias couldn’t be ruled out from the available evidence. Another study from 2009 even argued that “the increasing availability of pornography appears to be associated with a decline in rape.” Blaming porn in any way for alleged sexual assault by men is, at best, misguided; at worst, it seems like a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the truth to protect predators.
Yes, some BDSM porn depicts group sex in scenes that can be described as “consensual non-consent.” Behind the scenes, however, it is standard for porn performers to discuss their boundaries before intimacy begins, establishing safe words and protocols. While what is seen on screen may appear sexually violent, consent is a fundamental component of any BDSM practice.
Anti-porn stereotypes like “all porn is rape” are incredibly harmful, particularly for the people who make porn, because it suggests that they and other sex workers are beneath requiring consent. This stigma has real-world consequences: Sex workers are less likely to speak up when they do survive sexual assault, for fear they won’t be believed, helped, or taken seriously, and, in certain situations, victim-blamed or punished. If we allow young people to believe that sex workers are acceptable targets of sexual assault because of their work, it effectively means we condone rape in certain circumstances, when we should be teaching them that rape and sexual assault is wrong in every circumstance.
The reality is that there are absolutely youth who use porn as an educational tool, in lieu of frank conversations with trusted adults. For them, especially, it is important to make explicit that porn is a fantasy and its performers are paid actors. There’s no need to feel guilty or ashamed, either – two emotions that can drive violence – since watching porn is a safe, judgment-free way to explore desire, and a form of harm reduction where STIs and pregnancy are not possible outcomes. Before sex, young people should talk to their partners the way porn stars do: Discuss boundaries and hard nos, and make clear what they like and what they don’t like. After all, consent makes for great foreplay.
Regardless of their intent or consensual context, violent pornographic scenes are not appropriate for children’s consumption. The best way to mitigate the risks of accessible porn is for parents to have age-appropriate conversations about sex with their kids, especially if those children play junior hockey. If we withhold sex education from young people – including explicit conversations about the necessity of ongoing and enthusiastic consent – they will learn about sex elsewhere, like on the context-collapsing internet, or in the protective sanctum of the locker room.
And there is evidence that suggests the locker room is where some of these behaviours are systemically learned. Over the last 35 years, police have launched at least 15 group sexual-assault investigations of Canadian junior hockey players across the country. Hockey Canada has also paid big money to cover up allegations. In 2022, The Globe and Mail revealed that Hockey Canada had created what was known internally as the “National Equity Fund,” which quietly used registration fees – from players as young as five or six years old in Timbits programs – to settle sexual-assault cases without court hearings. At the parliamentary hearings that followed, executives admitted the organization paid $8.9-million to settle 21 cases of sexual assault since 1989.
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During the hearings, Hockey Canada’s then-CEO Scott Smith refused to call the repeated occurrence of sexual-assault allegations against junior players “systemic.” But not everyone was buying it, including retired NHL player and two-time Stanley Cup champion Daniel Carcillo. In a statement, he wrote: “Systemic failures continue to occur in protecting the children and young people who play in the CHL.”
Because it’s not just girls and women like E.M. who allegedly experience group sexual assault at the hands of junior hockey players. It’s boys, too.
In 2018, the same year E.M. was allegedly assaulted, Mr. Carcillo read about the hazing scandal at St. Michael’s College in Toronto. That story unearthed previously buried traumatic memories of repeated group sexual assaults he endured as a Canadian junior hockey player from 2002 to 2005. He began talking about his experiences with other former CHL players, who then began sharing their own. These accounts coalesced into a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 against the Canadian Hockey League by Mr. Carcillo and 16 former CHL players.
In 2023, Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Perell deemed the suit uncertifiable because of its scope, but acknowledged in his ruling that the widespread hazing culture of violent abuse in junior hockey was an “evil that has persisted for half a century.” He wrote that the evidence presented to him “establishes” that a number of players, some as young as 15, “were tortured, forcibly confined, shaved, stripped, drugged, intoxicated, physically and sexually assaulted; raped, gang raped, forced to physically and sexually assault other teammates.”
He added that these players were also “compelled to sexually assault and gang rape young women invited to team parties.” According to the allegations, these boys – initiated by veteran players and emboldened by the willful ignorance or even tacit support of staff, coaches or other leaders – endured and inflicted pain on their teammates and young women to demonstrate their loyalty to the group. Teammates abused each other as a team; teammates abused others as a team, too.
Both E.M. and Mr. Carcillo have stated that coming forward stemmed from a desire to hold those responsible for harm “accountable.” In court, E.M. described the opportunity to testify as her “time to stand up for myself when I couldn’t that night.” Regardless of the trial’s ultimate outcome, E.M. has displayed an inspiring amount of strength, courage and dignity over her nine days of brutal cross-examination, bringing to national attention a scourge that has been hiding in plain sight for decades.
E.M. told the court she adopted the persona of a porn star, but porn doesn’t explain the alleged events. Indeed, perhaps porn was the reason she survived the alleged assault: tapping into the archetype of a sexual athlete may have given her the dissociative endurance necessary to fake it until she made it through. The problem, then, doesn’t appear to be porn in our culture – it’s that cases of sexual assault continue to emerge from the world of Canadian hockey. And if the various leagues don’t address the root causes of abuse plaguing their organizations, E.M.’s case unfortunately won’t be the last.