I saw your post late last night and I am definitely one of the people who are "vastly uninformed on this matter"...
With that, I went and watched the two videos from the Fifth Estate on Team Canada. Stayed up until 3:30am watching.
My first reaction was this is an exposé type of program, which doesn't negate any of their content but their videos all do have a certain slant of "exposing a dark underbelly"... again doesn't discredit anything but it's fairly obvious that anything they do is done with a certain narrative. Going back to 89' or 2003 in the context of this case is an obvious crafting of a narrative that is completely irrelevant to facts of this case. In some regards I do think that discredits the massager, not totally but enough to raise an eyebrow and question the motives of the piece.
2nd thing...I think the videos didn't add much to this specific case and was really more of an indictment on Team Canada and hockey culture in general...If anything, they raised more questions regarding consent in this specific case.
And in the end, it's fairly obvious that "consent" will be the defining issue for the courts to settle.
I just went and just watched the video as well. I had read articles about the case, but this definitely provides some different perspective, even if there's not much new information.
The piece may be slanted in a certain direction, but at least for me touching on the sheer number of alleged
group sexual assault cases among Junior Canadian players (which not directly having a bearing on this case) changes my perspective a bit on this particular case - especially, the alleged details of the 2003 team, which I had not heard before. While I never found the alleged victim in this case to not be credible, it was (and still is to a certain degree) difficult to fathom that 10-12 players (which the video all alleged were in the room at some point that night) were all either a clear sexual assault or witnessed it and did nothing to stop it. We're talking about people that have the brightest of futures, which they've been working for their whole lives, and are on the verge of doing something millions of people can only dream about in playing in the NHL, let alone the WJC's. To think that even just one of those players on the team was willing to risk throwing that all away, let alone 5...8...10...12...again, difficult to wrap my head around. That's not to say I thought these guys were innocent, but that maybe there was some more nuance to this than a simplistic "these guys are just monsters" narrative, but maybe I was just being naïve and underestimated how bad hockey (sports? group?) culture can be in some instances. The whole aspect of these guys even wanting to be part of what happened in that hotel room that night even if she had consented to everything is something that not remotely appealing to me either, so this is a completely different world than I'm used to - I only played sports until my junior year of high school, but I was in a fraternity in college and nothing like that was going on to the best of my knowledge.
The fact that Hockey Canada never did anything to try to stop stuff like this (let alone the cover-ups, hush money, etc.) is also deeply disturbing.
Sorry to mix this in with some quality hockey talk, but this is where this topic currently resides (though I think it should be a different thread).
