Content advisory: This article includes graphic language and details of alleged sexual assault

LONDON, ONT – When Michael McLeod first spoke with London police in November 2018 about an alleged sexual assault five months earlier, he didn’t say that E.M., the complainant in the case, asked him to invite his Team Canada teammates back to his hotel room to engage in group sex – a claim his lawyer made earlier in the trial.

On Tuesday, the trial of McLeod and four of his former teammates on Canada’s 2018 world junior hockey team was shown a 2018 police interview in which McLeod shared his version of what happened the night of an alleged sexual assault and in the days after.

London Police Service sergeant Stephen Newton, who was the lead investigator in the case after E.M. initially contacted police and who closed the case without laying charges in early 2019, conducted the Nov. 17, 2018, interview of McLeod at the office of his Toronto lawyer, David Humphrey.

McLeod told Newton that there were eight or nine players in his hotel room at any one time with E.M., whose identity is protected by a publication ban. McLeod said at one point in the interview with Newton that he filmed two so-called consent videos because “I was worried something like this would happen.”

Newton, who is now retired, testified remotely on Tuesday. He said that the only members of Canada’s 2018 world junior team who he interviewed in connection with his investigation were McLeod and Alex Formenton, who both agreed to in-person interviews, and Callan Foote and Dillon Dube, who spoke to Newton on the phone.

McLeod, Formenton, Dube, Foote, and Carter Hart are accused of sexually assaulting E.M. in McLeod’s hotel room during the early morning hours of June 19, 2018, following a night of dancing and drinking at a downtown London bar. McLeod faces a second charge of being party to the offence. All of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.

The Crown has alleged that Formenton had sex with E.M. in the bathroom, that McLeod, Hart and Dube received oral sex from the complainant, that Dube slapped E.M.’s naked buttocks, that Foote did the splits over E.M.’s head and “grazed” his genitals over her head, and that McLeod had sex with E.M. for a second time in the hotel room bathroom.

McLeod, who was 20 in 2018, told Newton in the interview that after dancing and drinking with his........

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