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The cascading impacts will doubtless continue infinitum, heated criticism levelled particularly at the judge, the plethora of defence lawyers — most of them female and thus purportedly traitors to women’s solidarity rather than top-drawer professionals effectively doing their jobs — the media and, most crucially, the not guilty defendants. As someone once said, you are entitled to your entitlements.

What’s not fine is for activists to use a judgment they don’t like to push for upending the fundamental principle of innocent until proven guilty when the charge is sexual assault, already significantly altered legislatively to protect victims and encourage them to come forward to police.

Amending the law, as the Supreme Court of Canada has done over the years, was appropriate and necessary in the context of an intimate crime — though no less intimate and invasive than, say, aggravated assault, manslaughter or murder — where there are usually no witnesses. And where too often the alleged victim became the person put on trial, her sexual history dissected, her appearance and mien scorned. Over decades of covering sexual assault trials, I’ve been infuriated by tactics that have demeaned and discredited complainants.

But this was not one of those trials. This was arguably the most railroaded charge-to-trial in the annals of modern Canadian jurisprudence.

There was a plethora of witnesses. There were miles of surveillance video from the bar where the complainant, E.M., first met and interacted with the defendants. There were two “consent videos’’ filmed by one of the accused during and after the group sex engagement that unfolded in Room 209 of the Delta Armouries hotel in the early morning hours of June 19, 2018. There were multiple statements taken in multiple investigations entered as evidence.

The sex was undisputed. The subjective lack of consent, as argued by the prosecution, was intensely disputed. The degree of the complainant’s intoxication — too drunk to consent — was also disputed. The inconsistencies in E.M.‘s testimony — what she said under oath on the witness stand versus what she’d asserted in earlier interviews and statements, and in the $3.5-million out-of-court settled civil lawsuit she brought against Hockey Canada and what were originally eight “John Does’’ (misidentification in some instances, and false postulations for which E.M. blamed her previous lawyer) — were disputed, though Carroccia let the minor discrepancies pass.

The narrative took a screeching hairpin turn from the drunk-out-of-my-mind premise advanced to cops and in the civil suit — “in my opinion, the complainant exaggerated her intoxication’’ wrote Carroccia — to “terror and fear’’ in the midst of up to 10 hockey players who’d come into a teammate’s hotel room, most of them in response to a texted threesome invitation, all of them bigger than E.M. Except no threats or menace, tacit or overt, were ever made, nobody tried to prevent her from leaving and, as E.M. conceded under cross-examination, when she expressed unwillingness for a specific act, her boundaries were respected. Repeatedly, she admitted, when asked if she was “OK’’ with what was happening, she said yes.

The players took pains to ensure that the sexual acts were consensual, if not literally articulating the definition of consent under the law — that it must be active and ongoing at every step. How were they supposed to read her mind, if her thoughts were indeed at extreme odds with her words and actions, when the Crown’s own witnesses were emphatic that E.M. was agreeable and enthusiastic, that she initiated the sex acts, mocked the players who were reluctant or shy, and called them “pussies’’ when they initially declined her command to “f—k her.’’ Oh, but she was only channelling a “porn star’’ personality, severed mind from body, providing what she believed the young men really wanted, going along to get along. Even if it meant having oral and vaginal sex with a succession of strangers.

Left, at the end of a trial that the judge described as “lengthy’’ and “tortuous,’’ was a mountain of evidence to consider in a proceeding that became judge-alone following the dismissal of two juries. (Not because Carroccia had manipulated the trial so she could take over — just one of the many conspiracy theories floated — and not because the defence lawyers had been careless in a couple of interactions with jurors outside the courtroom — they were blameless — but because the jurors involved were dopey and way jacked up by the central roles they’d drawn in a case that had transfixed the country.)

Trashing the five defence teams was heave-ho work for the pitchfork mob. And Carroccia defended the defenders in the decision that took her almost five hours to deliver orally on Thursday. “With five accused and that barrage of evidence, I can say that counsel conducted the trial efficiently, and that the time spent, particularly in the cross-examination of E.M., was entirely appropriate.’’

Trials are always adversarial and this one especially so, even though nearly all the evidence was called by the Crown and, dramatically, when the prosecution tried to impugn its own witnesses. Undo the damage. 

Lead Crown Meaghan Cunningham went on at length dismantling the “myths and stereotypes’’ that surround sexual assault. But her arguments were replete with myths and stereotypes about hockey players and a “hockey subculture’’ of violence — disrespecting of women — that idolized junior stars.

The entire prosecution approach is that E.M. had no agency over her own body, her own wishes, as if she were a child and not a 20-year-old university student. I would posit that they were all immature — two of the defendants were younger than the complainant, in their teens that night — lacking in judgment. What ensued was sordid, in my opinion, but I won’t attack any of them for immorality, not the defendants and not the complainant. More importantly, as Carroccia emphasized, the courts are not there to judge morality; the issue was criminality. When the judge came down hard on the complainant’s lack of credibility and reliability — exhaustively detailed — the prosecution case collapsed.

From the millions of words spoken during the trial and in scrums outside the courthouse afterwards, I will pluck some that encapsulated the assumptions that drove this case into court, offered by E.M.’s lawyer, Karen Bellehumeur, relaying the complainant’s disappointment with the verdict: “She’s really never experienced not being believed like this before.’’

First of all, that’s not true. The original London police detective who spent eight months investigating the complaint had significant doubts — weighed whether E.M. had been a willing participant, possibly an instigator — which is why he didn’t lay charges and was subsequently savaged for his decision.

More to the point, in what world would E.M.’s assertions have been swallowed hook, line and sinker? Well, we know the answer: In a world where “BELIEVE WOMEN’’ has become de facto gospel, a boilerplate liturgy that runs headlong into law and jurisprudence. What Carroccia said bears repeating:

“It is not the function of this court to make determinations about the morality or the propriety of the conduct of any of the persons involved in these events. The sole function of this court is to determine whether the Crown has proven each of the charges against each of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt.’’

The Crown did not.

A further fallacy, as mounted by the judge’s critics, is that this acquittal of the former 2018 world junior championship team players will discourage other victims from coming forward. That is outright sophistry. The landscape of this trial was so distinct and unprecedented that it has no bearing on any other case of alleged sexual violence. The great majority of sexual assaults aren’t reported, but there’s no empirical evidence that they will be even less reported in the wake of this judgment. The fault line at the core of this trial was E.M. herself. She will not haunt any trials in the future.

For the first time in a trial that I covered from start to finish I have deliberately omitted the names of the defendants. Their names and their faces have been splashed across the media for the last 18 months, since they were formally charged on Jan. 31, 2024. During all that time, they weren’t afforded the luxury of anonymity, while mercilessly pounded by presumption of guilt.

Acquittal across the board won’t reverse any of that. The stigma of the charges has soaked into the marrow of their being. Squelched professional careers is the least of it.

For everybody who looks at this case and thinks, that could be my daughter, think also that could be my son.