Lawyer for hockey player suggests complainant led his client to bathroom for sex

A defence lawyer representing one of five hockey players on trial for sexual assault suggested Monday the complainant led his client to a bathroom to have sex and actively participated in the encounter.

Daniel Brown, who represents Alex Formenton, suggested during cross-examination that the woman pulled Formenton into the bathroom after he said he didn’t want to have sex in front of the other players in the hotel room.

CAUTION: The following paragraphs contain graphic content some readers may find disturbing.

Once inside, Brown suggested, the woman touched Formenton’s crotch and said she would help him get an erection. She also pulled down his pants and underwear, he suggested, and guided his penis into her because she thought their height difference would make it difficult.

The defence lawyer suggested the woman told Formenton he didn’t have to wear a condom because she was on birth control, and asked him not to ejaculate inside her, which he respected.

The woman, who cannot be identified under a publication ban, said Formenton wore a condom but she did not recall having any conversation with him about that or anything else happening inside the bathroom. Nor did she remember doing any of the things the defence suggested.

“I know I got up to go to the bathroom and I knew someone was following me and based on the conversation, just based on (the men in the room) already shouting at each other for someone to have sex with me, I just … resigned myself to the fact that that was what was going to happen in the bathroom,” she said.

Formenton and his former world junior hockey teammates Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Dillon Dube and Callan Foote have pleaded not guilty to sexual assault in connection with an encounter that took place at the Delta hotel in London, Ont., in the early hours of June 19, 2018.

McLeod has also pleaded not guilty to an additional charge of being a party to the offence of sexual assault.

Prosecutors allege that McLeod, Hart and Dube obtained oral sex from the woman without her consent, and Dube slapped her buttocks while she was engaged in a sexual act with someone else.

They allege Foote did the splits over her face and grazed his genitals on it without her consent. Formenton is alleged to have had vaginal sex with the complainant without her consent inside the bathroom.

The events at the heart of the trial took place as many members of Canada’s 2018 world junior team were in London for a series of events celebrating their gold-medal performance.

The complainant, who has been on the stand via CCTV since May 2, previously testified that she met some of the players at a downtown bar and went back to the hotel with McLeod. She and McLeod had sex, an encounter that is not part of the trial, court has heard.

The woman was naked and scared when other men came into the room afterward, she said. She was drunk and went on “autopilot,” engaging in various sexual acts that she believed the men wanted from her, she said.

When she tried to leave, they would coax her into coming back, putting an arm around her shoulders, she said.

Defence lawyers, meanwhile, suggest she asked McLeod to call his friends into the room so they could have some “fun” because she wanted a “wild night.”

She egged the men on, asking if anyone would have sex with her, the defence has suggested on multiple occasions over days of cross-examination.

The complainant maintains she has no memory of saying those things, and that they don’t sound like things she would say. If she did say them, she said, that would be a sign of her level of intoxication.

On Monday, the lawyer representing Dube suggested that on one occasion, one of the players responded to those words by giving the woman a “playful” slap on the butt. At the time, the woman responded by again asking if he would have sex with her, Lisa Carnelos suggested.

The complainant said the only instances of slapping she recalled were when she was performing oral sex on the floor and again on the bed near the end of the night.

Carnelos also suggested that one of the players told the woman some of them didn’t want to do anything with her because they had girlfriends. The complainant replied that she didn’t recall ever hearing someone say that.

“I’d be confused as to why they were even in the room in the first place, if that was the fact,” she said.

Text messages the woman exchanged with her best friend on June 19 and days later were also shown in court Monday. The woman had already spoken to her friend on the phone after calling her in tears from the lobby of the Delta hotel, she previously testified, adding she couldn’t remember the specifics of that conversation.

In one of the June 19 messages, the woman alludes to having been “a little over dramatic” in their phone call, which she on Monday said was because she felt bad about waking up her friend and didn’t want to worry her further.

She told her friend she felt “dirty and used” and shouldn’t have put herself in that position. Days later, in message dated June 22, the woman told her friend about going to the police and hospital in relation to “the situation that happened Monday night.”

“The group of guys are all high up hockey players,” she said in the text.

Carnelos pressed the woman on why she had waited days to tell her best friend that she believed she had been sexually assaulted. The woman replied that she initially was having those conversations only with her mother.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 12, 2025.

Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press