WARNING: This story contains graphic details some readers may find disturbing.
Before she blacked out, the young woman says she was just watching the 20-something men play video games.
But when she woke up in a bedroom in West Kelowna, B.C., she says she was naked and four of them were taking turns penetrating her orally and vaginally. At one point, she says a man choked her until she couldn’t breathe.
On that night in 2018, she says she turned to a fifth man to save her.
“I asked him if he could help me and he refused,” she testified later in a B.C. courtroom. “He just laughed.”
The Crown invited the judge to acquit all four men — two of them junior hockey players — after the complainant had some difficulties remembering during several days of cross-examination and testimony.
“My memory is reliable and I know I was assaulted,” the woman told court. “They still had sex with me without my consent.”
However, the judge disagreed and acquitted the accused. One defence lawyer told the local paper, The Castanet, his clients were vindicated, and suggested the woman had consented, even if she didn’t remember.
Such reports of gang sexual assault by junior hockey players are far from unique in Canada. Through a review of public records, The Fifth Estate has identified at least 15 cases of alleged group sexual assault involving junior hockey players that have been investigated by police since 1989 — half of which surfaced in the past decade.
Former junior hockey players and those who study the sport say these incidents have grown out of a culture that has included the pursuit of women as a team sport that can result in group sex.
“We do know that group sex is very common in men’s hockey culture,” said Cheryl MacDonald, a Halifax-based sociologist who researches hockey and sexuality.
But also what appears to be common are allegations of sexual violence connected to this culture.
“In my own experiences, I hear hockey players talk about how things unintentionally got out of hand,” MacDonald said. “And to me, that suggests that the line between something that was premeditated and something that got out of control isn’t always clear.”
In total, at least 50 players have been accused in the alleged crimes, with 25 eventually charged, The Fifth Estate has found. Only one of those charged has been convicted, after taking a plea deal to a lesser offence.
Roughly 10,000 minor junior players and nearly 1,000 major junior players are registered to play in Hockey Canada-governed leagues and teams.
Of the 15 cases identified by The Fifth Estate, two include incidents that hit the headlines over the past few months: allegations of gang sexual assaults by some players on Canada’s 2003 and 2018 world junior teams, first reported by TSN.
Neither the 2003 nor the 2018 world juniors case has resulted in criminal charges and those suspected have not been identified.
However, seven of the eight players accused in the 2018 case have, while staying anonymous, had lawyers state publicly that any sexual activity was consensual and there was no wrongdoing.
Players from both teams have stated publicly that they had nothing to do with the alleged incidents.
The allegations have prompted members of Parliament, critics and parents to call on Hockey Canada and its affiliate leagues to change how they handle these kinds of complaints and how they address junior hockey’s culture.
Hockey Canada and its president, Scott Smith, declined a request from The Fifth Estate for an interview about Canadian junior hockey’s history of allegations of group sexual assault.
In a statement, the organization said it takes any allegation of sexual assault seriously and reports any it receives to law enforcement.
Although Hockey Canada has pledged to change, to revamp its systems and reactivate long-dormant internal investigations, the organization is still under considerable fire.
Former Detroit Red Wing Sheldon Kennedy, who has spent his post-hockey career advocating for survivors of sexual abuse, called on Hockey Canada to do more to stamp out sexual misconduct in junior hockey.
“One of the most concerning factors is there wasn’t enough confidence in one of the eight players to say, ‘Uh, we shouldn’t be doing this,’” Kennedy said in an interview with The Fifth Estate, referring to the 2018 world juniors allegations.
“We need to give them the confidence and the tools to step up and step in.”
I. ‘Hockey stood out’
Of the 15 cases identified in The Fifth Estate tally, 10 resulted in at least one player being charged, but most of those charges were dropped, resolved by peace bond pledges to not contact the complainant or resulted in acquittals.
The Fifth Estate analysis looked at the often-extensive local news coverage of these cases, which detailed how junior hockey players’ positions on their team affected their cases.
In several cases, players were allowed to continue playing while charged.
In the 1990s, journalist Laura Robinson started investigating sexual abuse by athletes in various sports, but quickly, she said, “hockey stood out.”
“With hockey, I found that most of the assaults were being done by the team, whether that was an alleged gang sexual assault of a female who they basically cornered, either in a basement or a hotel room, or it was rookies during the initiations,” she said.
Her investigations resulted in a 1998 book, Crossing the Line: Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport. When she took her findings to some hockey leaders, she said they “basically ostracized me.”
“Hockey Canada and the [Canadian Hockey League] have known for decades that there is alleged gang sexual assault in hockey towns right across this country,” Robinson said.
- WATCH | Author Laura Robinson discusses what she found investigating junior hockey:
In one of the cases Robinson studied, the CBC also successfully challenged the publication ban that kept the players’ names hidden.
The court action revealed that in 1989 Brian Sakic and Wade Smith of the Swift Current Broncos had been accused of sexual assaulting a 17-year-old girl, who Robinson said had a learning disability.
Police interviewed the complainant more than once, at times without her parents or lawyer present, Robinson said, and eventually, the girl told police she may not have said no to having sex with the men.
Police charged the teen with public mischief, alleging she made a false report. She was acquitted, but police also dropped the charges against the two players.
Sakic was drafted to the Washington Capitals shortly after.
“We live in a wonderful country where you are innocent until proven guilty,” Jack Button, the director of player personnel for the Capitals, told The Washington Post at the time. “As far as I’m concerned … Brian Sakic is as clean as a whistle.”
In another case a few years later, three players — including a top NHL draft pick — were charged with sexual assault against a teenage girl in Windsor, Ont. Their lawyers called a news conference to name her publicly and allege that she was lying.
Weeks later, two of the three players sued the girl for defamation. By summer, police had dropped the charges against the players, and the players then dropped their lawsuit.
II. ‘Let’s bring the boys in’
Former St. Louis Blues player Mike Danton said he saw in his late 1990s junior hockey career how sex permeated much of what team members did together off the ice, from rookie initiations to sex at celebratory parties.
“Being a teenager, I don’t think that seven-on-ones and six-on-twos and 10-on-threes is a smart thing to do.”
Danton said he doesn’t think group sex was coming from teenagers just being experimental.
“I think it’s more like a: ‘Hey, let’s bring the boys in and let’s do this,’” Danton said. “Like a team concept type of thing, you do everything as a team type of thing.
“I’ve been at parties before and I’ve seen how a group of four or five hockey players can talk to two or three [women] and you can see the intimidation factor there.”
Danton made headlines 18 years ago after pleading guilty to a conspiracy to murder charge after the FBI said the young NHL player had orchestrated to have his former agent, David Frost, killed. Danton, however, says he was in mental distress at the time, and that he was targeting his father, not Frost.
Soon after, Frost would be outed as being at the heart of the most infamous allegations of junior hockey group sexual assault in Canada. Danton says he doesn’t have first-hand knowledge about Frost’s alleged sexual abuse, although he felt Frost “had to control almost every facet of my life.”
Frost, who also coached players, faced 12 sexual exploitation charges after his players’ girlfriends accused him of directing players and girls to engage in group sex in front of and with him. Frost was acquitted in 2008.
III. Rookie party
In 2015, rookie players were welcomed to the Gananoque junior C team in eastern Ontario with an initiation party that, a court was later told, included trying to help the new players “get laid.”
The Kingston Whig-Standard reported that a 16-year-old girl was invited to the party by a teenage friend on the team, and the two of them were bombarded by players asking them to have “threesomes.”
The situation escalated to the point the girl claimed that she and her female friends, who went to the party with her, were being chased throughout the house, reports said.
At one point, the girl testified in Ontario Court of Justice in Kingston that a senior player named Chance A. Macdonald held her down on the bed while he groped her breasts and put hands down her pants, while a second player put his penis by her face and requested oral sex.
The woman told court she “could feel two people touching her the whole time but couldn’t escape because of Macdonald’s body weight,” according to the newspaper report. The 20-year-old Macdonald weighed 209 pounds.
Macdonald was charged with sexual assault but was permitted to take a plea deal to assault.
In 2017, Macdonald, then a student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., was sentenced to 88 days in jail, to be served on weekends after his internship tied to his bachelor of commerce degree had ended.
“I played extremely high-end hockey and I know the mob mentality that can exist in that atmosphere,” Justice Allan Letourneau told Macdonald.
Letourneau declined comment through a spokesperson.
IV. ‘How we end up surprised’
Robinson said in her research, the girls and women she interviewed described situations that went beyond group sex and were, in her opinion, “very contrived, very premeditated” assaults.
“These hockey parties, what the evidence I gathered showed [was] that they designated which girl,” she said. “By 3 a.m., there’s still maybe eight or nine guys in the basement and one female, and they’ve made sure she’s been drinking all night. And she doesn’t have a chance.”
Robinson also found that junior hockey players were often treated like “young gods” in the small Canadian towns where they stayed away from their families.
The players’ celebrity status, she said, mixed with a lack of parental supervision often resulted in a feeling of impunity.
“They learn that whatever comes their way, they get it,” Robinson said. “And that definitely includes girls and young women.”
Cheryl MacDonald, now a sociology professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, grew up watching major junior hockey in the Maritimes. As a teenager, she dated a hockey player who got her thinking about the change in personality some players undergo as they progress in the sport during a crucial time in their personal development.
Her boyfriend was loving, respectful and fun to be with, she said. As he neared junior hockey age, she said, he became a different person around his teammates. He took part in fist fights, hazing and homophobic jokes, she said.
“I saw a side of him that I hadn’t recognized before in terms of the normalization of violence or the normalization of hazing practices that were very degrading,” MacDonald said.
“And he told me that I didn’t understand and that he had to do those things in order to succeed, in order to fit in, because that’s what hockey players do.”
- WATCH | Sociologist Cheryl MacDonald discusses how she found some young hockey players change their behaviour:
MacDonald said that was one of the first moments where she realized some men in hockey took on views about relationships, sex and sexuality that weren’t always normal, healthy or safe. She went on to survey junior and professional hockey teams across Canada for her research.
Often, she would find, the players presented one face to the world and another to each other behind closed doors.
“That is how we end up surprised by some of the things happening in junior hockey,” she said.
V. ‘Hockey is not the normal world’
Former Chicago Blackhawks player Daniel Carcillo is the lead plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Canadian Hockey League and many Hockey Canada-affiliate teams that alleges players have been subjected to sexualized hazing practices for decades.
He says the environment in small-town Canada — where “hockey’s religion” — also exposed teenage players to unusually mature sexual experiences with local girls. He said that although he didn’t take part himself, he “definitely” heard about players involved in group sex.
“There’s the girls that want to be around the hockey players…. I think it’s pretty apparent in very small towns that you know who these people are, and it’s really just, it’s no secret,” Carcillo said.
“You have to remember this community — and hockey — is not the normal world and that’s why so many guys struggle when they get out.”
- WATCH | Former NHL and junior hockey player Daniel Carcillo discusses the future of hockey in Canada:
Much of the misconduct junior hockey players witness, experience and commit is rarely reported, according to a recent study conducted for the Canadian Hockey League.
The league commissioned Kennedy, the former NHLer turned victim advocate, and others to interview nearly 500 players and team staff about bullying, harassment, hazing and violence, resulting in a 2020 report that determined that few junior hockey players recognized when behaviour was inappropriate, and many felt uncomfortable reporting wrongdoing.
- WATCH | Former NHL and junior hockey player Sheldon Kennedy discusses the future of Hockey Canada:
“The systemic culture doesn’t, say, fall on one individual’s shoulders,” said Kennedy, who also played junior hockey in Canada.
“It falls on people that have been brought up in a system that has operated a certain way for a long time.”
VI. Investigations reopened
The dark underbelly of the hockey world that Carcillo, Danton and others say they’ve seen is only now receiving widespread scrutiny.
Thirty years after the first group sexual assault allegation identified in The Fifth Estate tally, Canada is once again reeling from similar allegations: junior hockey stars accused of sexual crimes against young women.
This past spring, a 24-year-old woman sued eight players on the 2018 world junior team and Hockey Canada in a $3.5-million lawsuit that details allegations that some players took turns penetrating her vaginally and orally while she was intoxicated in a hotel room in London, Ont. The men — known only as John Does 1-8 — also allegedly spit and ejaculated on her.
Hockey Canada settled with the woman for an undisclosed sum in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement that was lifted when her allegations became public. Lawyers for seven of the players have previously stated their clients were not consulted about the settlement and did not agree with it.
Both the London police and Hockey Canada have reopened their respective investigations.
An alleged group sexual assault also surfaced about the 2003 world junior team that sources told TSN was captured on video. One witness who says they saw the video of the alleged incident in Halifax told CBC that it showed “five or six naked players all masturbating with one person having sex with a girl on a bed who seemed extremely intoxicated.”
Nearly 20 years after that video was allegedly taken, Halifax police are now investigating.
The Fifth Estate has identified other alleged group sexual assaults investigated by police in communities in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and B.C. In two cases, police alleged as many as six players were involved.
VII. ‘You have to have respect’
Hockey Canada’s CEO Scott Smith has said the organization could have done more when faced with the London allegations. Despite calls for his resignation from Kennedy, Carcillo and some members of Parliament, Smith insists he is the best person to lead the charge for change.
“Canadians have been clear. They expect those representing our national sport to do better,” Smith, who has been with Hockey Canada since 1995, told a parliamentary committee on July 27. “I believe that I am the right person to lead Hockey Canada to a new place.”
- WATCH | Coach Mike Danton discusses how he tries to teach his players respect:
In Halifax, Danton runs a popular hockey skills school that falls outside Hockey Canada’s jurisdiction. He said he’s trying to change the culture starting with the youngest players by teaching that “you have to work hard, you have to have respect, you have to be accountable, you have to do things the right way.”
“You’re not going to be able to change the people that are in the NHL now. They’ve been conditioned for 10 years to play in the NHL — major junior, major midget, bantam major, peewee Triple A,” he said.
“It is a fantastic sport, it’s a beautiful sport…. However, it also shouldn’t be a conduit to allowing you to do whatever the hell you want and get away with it.”
The parliamentary committee examining the group sexual assault allegations against junior hockey players has subpoenaed Hockey Canada’s current and former executives to further explain their decision-making. Those hearings are scheduled to begin in October.
If you have tips on this story, please email fifthtips@cbc.ca.
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, help is available through: Endingviolencecanada.org.
Free and confidential one-on-one mental health support from professionals is available 24/7 from Wellness Together Canada by calling 1-866-585-0445 or texting WELLNESS to 686868 for youth and 741741 for adults.
If you are in immediate danger or fear for your safety, call 911.
Copy Editor: Janet Davison | Video editor: Jan Silverthorne | Principal videography: Jonathan Castell | Additional videography: Joe Fiorino, Dave Laughlin, Rob Short, Steven Vazquez, Justin Pennell | Top Image: Dmytro Aksonov/Getty Images.