(Reuters) -Five former members of Canada’s 2018 world junior ice hockey team were found not guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room that year, a judge declared on Thursday, according to CBC News.
The charges against Michael McLeod, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dube, Carter Hart and Cal Foote stemmed from an encounter in a hotel room in the Canadian city of London after a Hockey Canada gala to celebrate their world junior championship victory.
All five former National Hockey League players faced one count of sexual assault while McLeod faced an additional count of being a party to an offence. They all pleaded not guilty.
McLeod was also found not guilty of the additional charge.
When the charges were announced in January 2024, McLeod and Foote were with the New Jersey Devils, Dube was with the Calgary Flames, Hart was with the Philadelphia Flyers while Formenton was playing in Switzerland.
The trial, which began in April, has faced many disruptions including a mistrial and two dismissed juries before a decision to proceed to a judge-alone trial.
A police investigation into the alleged incident was closed without charges in February 2019, but investigators reopened it in July 2022 in response to public outrage over reports that Hockey Canada used players’ registration fees to pay an undisclosed settlement to the woman who made the accusations.
The scandal prompted the Canadian federal government to freeze Hockey Canada’s funding for 10 months while a number of major companies either paused or canceled their sponsorships with the national governing body.
Amid the scandal, Hockey Canada said it would no longer use the fund financed by player registration fees to settle sexual assault claims, and the organization’s CEO and board of directors stepped down.
(Reporting by Frank Pingue in Toronto; Editing by Nia Williams and Caroline Stauffer)
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