E.M. has said she tried to ditch McLeod earlier in the night, but when she went to the bathroom, he was standing outside waiting for her so she didn’t end up getting away from him.
McLeod’s lawyer suggests E.M. had plenty of time to ditch him later in the night.
But by then, she says, she was resigned to going home with him.
Humphrey says she could have used her boyfriend as an excuse, for example.
She says she has a hard time saying no.
“Do you say yes to all kinds of things you just don’t want to do?” Humphrey asks.
“Sometimes, yes,” she says.
Humphrey points out she was “rock steady” on her feet that night despite wearing high heels.
She says she wears those shoes often and is able to walk in heels whether she’s drunk or not.
“You made a choice to go to the hotel room with him. It was a mutual choice,” Humphrey says.
E.M. replies: “About going home with one man, yes.”
Prosecutors have alleged the woman and McLeod had sex in his hotel room, an encounter that is not in question at the trial. They allege the sexual assault took place after McLeod then invited several other men into the hotel room.
Humphrey is now going through the consensual sex that McLeod and E.M. had in the hotel room when they arrived.
She agreed to the lawyer’s suggestion that she initiated oral sex before they had sex.
Humphrey reads a portion of a 2022 statement E.M. gave in which she said the sex with McLeod wasn’t “forced” but she felt like she wasn’t “present in the moment.” E.M. agrees now to that statement.
Humphrey: “Are you saying that you were not consenting [to that sex]?”
E.M.: “No, I’m not saying that I am not consenting. I was OK with what I was doing. In terms of not being an active participant. I wasn’t doing it for my own enjoyment. I wasn’t doing it for myself. I was just to go through the motions to satisfy him.”
Humphrey: “Do you agree that you were not too drunk to consent to sexual intercourse with McLeod?”
E.M. “I wouldn’t have made that choice if I was sober, but I did make that choice.”
The defence is questioning E.M. about the initial sex with McLeod as part of his overall line of questioning about intoxication and consent.
The charges against McLeod and his teammates are in connection with the alleged sexual assaults later in the night with multiple men in the room.
E.M. says she has no memory of any conversation after she and McLeod had sex.
Humphrey asks her if she said something along the lines of, “‘Have your friends come back to have some fun.’"
E.M. says she has no memory of saying anything like that.
Humphrey tells E.M. he believes she “suggested” McLeod have his friends come over because she was “interested in having some sexual interactions with them.” The lawyer and complainant started going back and forth:
E.M.: “No, I don’t think that’s something I would have said. I am shy; I don’t think that’s something I would ever suggest.”
Humphrey: “I suggest that at that point you didn’t want to go home. You wanted this party evening to continue and for some of the players to come back to the room.”
E.M.: No, I wouldn’t have done that. I would have wanted to go home.
Humphrey: I suggest you said something like, “‘Get some of those guys back here. I want to have a wild night.’”
E.M. “That doesn’t sound like something I would say and I don’t remember saying those words.”
She says she was really surprised when others walked into the room.
As she told the Crown earlier, E.M. says she thought it was strange that McLeod put his shorts and shirt on right away after sex. She was still naked.
When two men showed up and she was still naked on the bed, she felt uncomfortable. (Those men, Boris Katchouk and Taylor Raddysh, former world junior players who don’t face any charges, testified earlier in the trial.)
E.M. says she may have been smiling or laughing at that point, because of her discomfort.
“Maybe outwardly I was smiling and laughing, but mentally I was nervous. I didn’t know how to handle that.”
Humphrey suggests she was still in bed with no clothes on because she was waiting for others to arrive and she had asked McLeod to get other guys over to the room.
E.M. says that’s not true and she had no idea he was inviting other people over.
“I was shocked when others walked in. It was an uncomfortable, awkward situation.”
...E.M. says the men put a bed sheet on the floor because she didn’t want to lie down on the gross hotel floor. (She also raised this during her testimony before the Crown.)
Humphrey then questions her on whether the men asked her to masturbate.
She says yes.
“I was scared, naked, drunk, vulnerable. The men were towering over me.”
Humphrey points out that in her first statement to police, on June 22, 2018, she said she “liked the attention.”
E.M. explains: “It was something I was confused about. It was a weird thing to have happen to me. There was definitely points when I wasn’t OK with what was happening. It was attention I didn’t ask for and I was handling it the best way I could.”
...E.M. says she went into the bathroom twice, got fully dressed, came back out crying and tried to leave the hotel room.
Both times, the men would make her stay, she tells Humphrey.
“I was fully dressed. They would see that I was crying and try to console me and tell me everything was fine. They would put an arm around me, lead me back to the bed sheet, and I would get undressed,” she says.
“You make it seem like you had no choice!” Humphrey says.
“I didn’t feel like I had a choice, no,” E.M. answers.
Humphrey says she could have just popped out of the bathroom, and out the door and left.
“I wish I had done that,” she says.
...Humphrey questions how scared E.M. actually was that night. He said she described feeling "terror and fear" in her civil lawsuit in 2022, but did not use those words in her first interview with a detective on June 22, 2018.
At that time, he said, she described being “frustrated,” “annoyed,” “upset” and “tired.”
She tells the court her mind was still shut down at that point because it was just a few days after the alleged assault.
E.M. says she hadn’t processed things then and still wanted to kind of “bury” her feelings.
Humphrey says he’s looked at her first statement to police and the words “fear,” “scared” and “afraid” do not appear in the context of her feelings that night.
The only time the word “scared” appeared in her first police statement was when she told a detective that she was scared she would accidentally identify someone who wasn’t in the room, he says.
“I was worried about falsely accusing someone,” she says.
...Humphrey has suggested E.M. was encouraging the men during the night, asking them to have sex with her and calling them “pussies” because they wouldn’t.
She testifies she doesn’t remember that, and it doesn’t sound like something she would say.
She remembers them saying, “This girl is f–king crazy.”
Humphrey says that was because they thought she was “crazy” for inviting them for sex.
She says she no memory of that and it doesn’t sound like something she would say.
“Maybe you did say, ‘Someone have sex with me?’” Humphrey asks.
“I can only tell you what I remember, and I don’t have a memory of speaking like that,” E.M. replies.
Humphrey goes on: “I’m going to suggest you did say that and some guys were saying, ‘This girl is f–king crazy,’ and other people were saying they didn’t want to have sex in front of their buddies.”
E.M. says, “No, they seemed comfortable with each other.”
...Humphrey questions E.M. about the “consent videos,” which we’ve heard about throughout this trial. (These are the two videos McLeod filmed of E.M. after the alleged assault.)
E.M. says she doesn’t remember saying she was fine and that everything was consensual.
She says the first time she saw the videos was Aug. 31, 2018, when she was interviewed by a female detective.
Before the second video, in which she’s seen holding a towel in front of her while wearing no clothes, McLeod sort of “hounded her” to say the night had been consensual, she says.
Humphrey suggests McLeod asked her throughout the night if she was OK.
E.M. says she only recalls him asking her that at the end of the night, before he took the videos.
In one video, she’s heard saying, “You’re so paranoid, holy!” and “I’m so sober, I can’t do this right now.”
E.M. says she doesn’t know why she said she was “so sober.”...
