Content warning: This story includes allegations of sexual assault.
LONDON, Ont. — The complainant in the sexual assault trial for five former NHLers told court on Monday that she felt “scared” and “numb” while surrounded by men in a hotel room on the night of the alleged incident in June 2018.
The woman, known as “E.M.” in court documents because of a publication ban on identifying her, testified from elsewhere in the courthouse via CCTV while questioned by assistant Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham.
She said that after consensual sex with Michael McLeod, she saw McLeod on his phone. Soon after, she said other men started coming into the room while she was still naked.
E.M. said, “I remember feeling uncomfortable and wasn’t sure what was happening.”
She said a bedsheet was put onto the floor and she was told to perform sexual acts on three men in the room. At that point, E.M., who testified on Friday that she had consumed 12 alcoholic drinks that night, said she started to disassociate from what was happening.
She said she had a “weird feeling of just separating from my body” and that her mind “floated to the top corner of the room” and she “started watching everything that was happening … didn’t feel like I had any control, that I didn’t have any choice.
“I shut down and let my body do what it needed to do to be safe. It seemed like the only safe thing to do was give them what they were wanting," she told a packed courtroom.
She said that toward the end of the night, when she tried to leave the room in the Delta Armouries, she felt pressured to stay. “I felt like I had no option. They kept bringing me back,” E.M. said, adding she was crying. “I couldn't think straight with the pressure and everyone in the room.”
Court was shown two phone videos, one in which E.M. says “it was all consensual.” E.M. said she has no memory of recording those videos but after watching the videos, she said McLeod was “trying to get” her to say the events were consensual. She added that, “It’s at a point where my mind is disconnected from my body and what I’m actually doing. I’m saying what they’re wanting me to say and wanting to hear from me. I don’t think it reflected how I was feeling.”
A pair of subsequent security-camera videos show E.M. walking out of the lobby of the hotel at 4:46 a.m. before appearing to talk on her phone. She gets into an Uber shortly after.
She testified that the video shows her talking on her phone to her best friend.
“I was really upset with what had happened, and I needed some comfort and for someone to be with me so I wasn’t alone at that point,” she told the court.
During cross-examination, David Humphrey, McLeod’s lawyer, questioned E.M. about her memory of that night as well as why she engaged with McLeod on Instagram in the days afterward, suggesting she could have blocked him rather than accept his request to communicate.
“I wasn’t happy to hear from him, I was so upset about what happened,” E.M. replied, when Humphrey suggested she was happy to hear from McLeod.
“I’m going to suggest you were trying to be friendly with him with that response,” Humphrey said. E.M. replied that she responded because it is in her nature to be a friendly person.
“I was afraid to talk to him, especially after everything,” she said.
Humphrey also challenged E.M. on whether it was her or her mother who wanted to press charges. E.M. said during testimony that she initially didn’t want to press charges and instead wanted the accused to be “spoken to” so that they knew what had happened was wrong and it wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
When she spoke to London police in the days after June 18, 2019, she “didn’t take going to the station lightly. … I wanted to try and give as much detail as possible. It was a difficult situation talking to a stranger about what happened. … I wanted to get the story out but it was really hard to talk about.”
McLeod, 27, has been charged with two counts of sexual assault, including one relating to aiding in the offence. Dillon Dube, 26, Cal Foote, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, and Carter Hart, 26, have each been charged with one count of sexual assault. All have pleaded not guilty to their charges.
For the second straight morning of the trial, demonstrators, this time numbering 20 at one point, stood outside the courtroom entrance, chanting and holding signs that read, “The system is on trial too,” “Justice for survivors,” and “We are so proud of you E.M.”
Cross-examination by Humphrey of E.M.’s testimony is expected to continue on Tuesday.
