
Videos not evidence of consent, Crown argues on last day of hockey players’ trial
LONDON — Two cellphone videos in which a woman says she’s “OK with this” and that “it was all consensual” are not evidence that she actually consented to a series of sexual acts with five hockey players inside a London, Ont., hotel room, prosecutors argued Friday at the players’ sexual assault trial.
The videos, taken about an hour apart in the early hours of June 19, 2018, also did not represent reasonable steps to determine whether the woman voluntarily consented, prosecutor Meaghan Cunningham argued on the final day of a complex eight-week trial whose twists and turns have captured national attention.
At most, the short clips — played in court in the early days of what was then a jury trial — amounted to a kind of “token lip service box checking,” the Crown attorney added.
Michael McLeod told police in 2018 he took the first video because he was worried “something like this,” meaning the investigation, might happen, and the second because he wanted to get the woman’s consent for “the whole thing,” Cunningham said.