Ashley Messier builds hockey legacy with sights on PWHL, Olympics
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Mark Messier is her distant cousin, but this Sask. hockey product is carving her own path.
Saskatoon Blades head coach Brennan Sonne has been thinking of a friend and former teammate all week.
Sonne played with, and remains a close friend of, Kyle Beach dating back to when they played together with the Western Hockey League’s Everett Silvertips in 2006 and 2007.
Beach came forward earlier this week as “John Doe,” the former Chicago Blackhawks player who filed a lawsuit against the NHL team for mishandling his sexual assault allegations.
Beach, now 31 and playing professional hockey in Germany, revealed in an interview on TSN on Wednesday that he was the player, saying: “It was no longer my word against everybody else’s.”
“Having the courage to go in front of the camera and relive that stuff and talk about it to the entire world, that’s courage. That takes a lot of guts to do,” Sonne said.
An investigation by law firm Jenner & Block was commissioned by the Blackhawks and was made public Tuesday.
The report found that “nothing was done” by senior leaders of the Blackhawks in 2010 after Beach reported that Brad Aldrich, the team’s video coach at the time, had sexually assaulted and harassed him.
“I cried, I smiled, I laughed, I cried some more. My girlfriend and I, we didn’t really know how to feel, we didn’t really know how to think,” Beach said in his interview with TSN, describing how it felt to see the investigation’s findings displayed publicly.
Sonne said seeing one of his friends putting himself on the line brought the international story home.
“That has made it a little more personal for me,” he said. “It’s a tough one. I can’t just sit back and take it all in. I’m more thinking about Kyle as a friend and hope he’s doing OK.”
Sonne wasn’t impressed with Jenner & Block’s handling of the report, specifically how much personal information they included about a man who was supposed to remain anonymous.
“They named ages, dates and then the subsequent years of what took place. All it took was five minutes of looking into who was 20 at the time … (and) then who was on the team a few years later. The report itself made it pretty obvious who it was,” Sonne said.
“I think his hand was a little bit forced.”
Sonne said he has reached out to Beach this week but hasn’t heard back from him yet.
Since Tuesday’s report was made public, Florida Panthers head coach Joel Quenneville resigned and Winnipeg Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Quenneville was the head coach of the Blackhawks at the time of the alleged assault. According to the report, Quenneville was among six people with the Blackhawks’ senior management who met to discuss the alleged sexual assault after it happened.
“The National Hockey League agrees with the decision tonight by Joel Quenneville to resign his duties as head coach of the Florida Panthers,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement Thursday.
“In his former role as Chicago Blackhawks head coach, Mr. Quenneville was among several former members of the Club’s senior leadership group who mishandled the 2010 sexual assault claim by former player Kyle Beach.”
The NHL fined the Blackhawks $2 million for their handling of the situation, and general manager Stan Bowman and senior director of hockey operations Al MacIsaac resigned Tuesday.
Cheveldayoff, born and raised in Saskatoon, was cleared of any discipline after meeting with Bettman on Friday.
“While on some level it would be easiest to paint everyone with any association to this terrible matter with the same broad brush, I believe that fundamental fairness requires a more in-depth analysis of the role of each person,” Bettman said.
“Kevin Cheveldayoff was not a member of the Blackhawks senior leadership team in 2010, and I cannot, therefore, assign to him responsibility for the Club’s actions, or inactions.”