Major case updates: what happened next [2]

The Hockey Canada case and what's happened since the trial.

It's now been more than a year since Justice Maria Carassia released her decision and Canadian True Crime released our series breaking down the case and the outcome of the trial.

Our five-part series ended up being much heavier and more detailed than I originally intended.

So I'm going to go over a high-level summary of the case and why I reached the conclusions I did before I get to what's happened since the trial.

This is for those that might not have listened to the whole series because it was so long and detailed.

Many people assumed that my conclusion was going to be that the hockey players should have been found guilty of sexual assault, but that wasn't the case.

I understood why Justice Carassia found those hockey players not guilty.

What I didn't understand was the clear double standard in how the judge assessed their evidence and credibility compared to E.M.

There were things in the decision that just didn't add up to me, so I started comparing it line by line with the evidence from the trial, trying to work out how some of those conclusions had been reached.

The closer I looked, the more inconsistencies and patterns I found, and that sent me much further down the rabbit hole than I ever [laughs] intended to go.

So I ended up spending the entire summer last year critiquing a judge's 90-page written decision from one of the most high-profile trials the country has seen.

It was intimidating, and I needed to show exactly how I reached each of my conclusions step by step from the evidence.

I'm obviously not a lawyer, but I know I've built trust with my audience, you, and I take that responsibility seriously.

I've always tried to be careful about the facts, the legal language, and the limits of my own expertise, but the Hockey Canada case took that to a whole new level.

It was the most mentally taxing work I've ever done, having to triple check everything from multiple angles.

It took a toll that affected everything I've done since, which I'll come back to.

The series was long, and it was detailed because it had to be.

I had to show how I arrived at my conclusions, my workings, if you will.

And in the year since the judge issued the not guilty verdicts, I felt validated to see legal experts independently raise many of the same concerns I did.

It's also worth noting that I haven't needed to make any factual corrections or edits to the podcast series either, and the reason I say this is because of the nature of this case and the sheer vitriol that comes whenever anyone dares to speak about it in this way.

So I wanna stress that I've put the work in and brought the receipts.

I've written the entire series up as a comprehensive case study document that shows all my workings, so if you want to have a look at anything I'm referencing, you can find that document linked in the show notes and on our website.

We all know it centered around one night in June of 2018 when junior hockey player Michael McLeod met the woman known as E.M. at a bar in London, Ontario, where he was celebrating with some of his teammates after winning the Junior World Championship.

McLeod and E.M., both 20 years old, went back to his hotel room where they had consensual sex.

What happened after that became the focus of criminal charges for sexual assault and then a trial.