Question 1

Does Carter Hart have an official website?

Accepted Answer

As of June 20, 2026, no official website operated by Carter Hart is publicly known. To be clear: this is not it. This site is independent commentary, not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Carter Hart, any team, or any league.

Question 2

What was this case about?

Accepted Answer

In June 2018, players who had won gold for Canada at the world juniors gathered in London, Ontario for a Hockey Canada gala. That night, several of them were in a hotel room with a woman the court identified only as E.M. What happened in that room became the subject of a criminal trial seven years later. Five players, Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé, and Callan Foote, were charged with sexual assault. On July 24, 2025, Justice Maria Carroccia of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice acquitted all five (R. v. McLeod et al., 2025 ONSC 4319).

Question 3

What was the verdict, and what did the court actually find?

Accepted Answer

The court acquitted all five men. It did not find them innocent. An acquittal in Canadian law means the Crown did not prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. The reasons went further than a bare burden-of-proof finding: the court found it could not rely on E.M.’s evidence and did not find that evidence credible or reliable, and it was not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that E.M. did not consent. Those are the court’s findings, reported as the court stated them. Reasonable doubt is not exoneration, and an acquittal is not a finding that nothing happened.

Question 4

Can the verdict be appealed?

Accepted Answer

The Crown had a limited window to appeal the acquittals and did not pursue an appeal. The verdicts are final. In Canada, the Crown can appeal an acquittal only on a question of law, not because it disagrees with the outcome.

Question 5

Why won’t you name the complainant?

Accepted Answer

A publication ban under section 486.4 of the Criminal Code protects her identity. The court referred to her only as E.M., and so does this site. The ban is standard in sexual-offence proceedings in Canada and says nothing about the merits of the case. The site publishes nothing that could identify her.

Question 6

Where do your facts come from?

Accepted Answer

The case content is built from the primary record: the reasons for judgment in R. v. McLeod et al., 2025 ONSC 4319, the agreed statement of facts, the trial exhibits as published by the court, and the transcripts of the 2022 parliamentary hearings. When the site reproduces a message or an exhibit, it uses the court-published version rather than a news summary, because secondary coverage has repeatedly fused and misquoted those texts. Statistics and outside claims carry their sources. Contested facts are attributed, not asserted.

Question 7

If they were acquitted, why does this site exist?

Accepted Answer

Because acquittal and accountability are different questions. A criminal court asks whether the Crown proved specific charges against specific people beyond a reasonable doubt. It does not ask whether Hockey Canada handled the complaint properly, whether the sport’s institutions protected the people inside them, or whether the culture that produced that night has changed. This site examines the second set of questions. Its subject is the institution, not the men the court acquitted.

Question 8

Are you saying these men are guilty?

Accepted Answer

No. A court acquitted all five, and this site does not assert or imply that any of them committed a crime. Where the site sets out what was alleged, what was testified, or what the court found, it attributes each to its source and reports the acquittal alongside it. The argument here is with institutions and a culture, not with the verdict. Readers can weigh the record and reach their own conclusions.

Question 9

Isn’t this just a few bad individuals, not a “culture”?

Accepted Answer

That is the more comfortable version, and this site does not accept it. The pattern is older than one hotel room. Laura Robinson’s Crossing the Line documented the same machinery in junior hockey in 1998; an early-2000s manual that circulated among junior players wrote the vocabulary down; a 2003 World Junior allegation, still under investigation with no charges laid and nothing proven, sits in the same era; and 2018 is where the same shape of allegation surfaces again. Researchers call the mechanism male peer support: closed, ranked, all-male groups that supply the vocabulary, the encouragement, and the cover, locating the cause in the group rather than in a few individuals. The site’s subject is that structure, not the guilt of any acquitted man.

Question 10

What did Hockey Canada do, and who paid for the settlement?

Accepted Answer

In 2022, reporting by the Globe and Mail revealed that Hockey Canada had quietly settled a $3.55-million civil claim brought by E.M. over the 2018 incident, resolving it in a matter of weeks, without a full investigation and without requiring the players to take part. The settlement was paid from the National Equity Fund, a reserve fed by the registration fees of ordinary hockey families, which by the chief financial officer’s testimony to Parliament had paid nine settlements totalling $7.6 million since 1989, most of it unrelated to this case.

The money was the participants’ own, not the public’s: a federal audit completed in February 2023 found no public funds had been used in the settlements. The disclosure triggered parliamentary hearings, a freeze on Hockey Canada’s federal funding, and the withdrawal of major corporate sponsors, and Hockey Canada said it would stop using the fund for sexual-assault claims. The organization’s board and chief executive were replaced over the following months.

Question 11

What do you actually want to happen?

Accepted Answer

One specific thing: a collectively bargained domestic violence and sexual assault policy written into the NHL’s collective bargaining agreement, with defined minimum penalties, mandatory investigation, survivor provisions, and neutral, independent appeals, applied by a binding standard rather than left to the commissioner’s discretion. A survivor-led campaign, SOAR Initiative Canada through its Ontario Says No More project, is already petitioning the NHL and the players’ association for exactly that, and this site points readers to that petition. The goal is a rule, not a punishment.

Question 12

Doesn’t the NHL already have a policy for this?

Accepted Answer

No. The NHL is the only one of the four major North American professional leagues without a formal, written domestic violence and sexual assault policy. The NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball each adopted one after the reckoning that began in the NFL. The NHL instead handles each case individually under Article 18-A of its collective bargaining agreement, which lets the commissioner discipline conduct deemed detrimental to the league. There is no defined standard, no mandatory trigger, and no consistent minimum penalty. A player can appeal off-ice discipline to a neutral arbitrator, but whether, when, and how much to punish rests on the commissioner’s discretion. Writing the standard down is the change this site asks for.

Question 13

What happened to the players after the trial?

Accepted Answer

On September 11, 2025, the NHL announced it would allow the five acquitted players to return, setting a timeline that brought their total time away from the league to nearly two years. In the same statement the league called the events “deeply troubling and unacceptable,” said it expects everyone connected with the game to conduct themselves with the “highest level of moral integrity,” and concluded that the players’ conduct, while found not to have been criminal, did not meet that standard. The players then signed with NHL clubs for the 2025-26 season. Carter Hart signed with the Vegas Golden Knights.

Question 14

How can I help?

Accepted Answer

Several ways, none of which involve giving this site money. Sign the SOAR / Ontario Says No More petition for an NHL policy. Train with RAINN or a local centre to answer a crisis line, or become a court or hospital companion for survivors who would otherwise go alone. Bring bystander training to your own team or league. Share the documented record with people who follow the game. If you coach or parent, the Cause page lists free, evidence-based prevention programs built for locker rooms and for raising boys. The site links all of it and profits from none of it.

Question 15

Who runs this site, are you affiliated with Carter Hart or the NHL, and do you make money from it?

Accepted Answer

No to affiliation, and no to money. This site is independent and noncommercial, a project of Game Misconducts, which documents institutional accountability in hockey. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Carter Hart, any other man named in the case, the Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL, the CHL, or Hockey Canada. It sells nothing, runs no advertising, and solicits no donations. The case content is assembled by a computer working from the public record. That is deliberate: the record is left to speak without a human author editorializing over it.

Questions about the case.

Official site?

The case

What this site is arguing

Hockey Canada and the money

What we want

About this site

Questions about the case.

Official site?

01.01Does Carter Hart have an official website?

The case

02.01What was this case about?

02.02What was the verdict, and what did the court actually find?

02.03Can the verdict be appealed?

02.04Why won’t you name the complainant?

02.05Where do your facts come from?

What this site is arguing

03.01If they were acquitted, why does this site exist?

03.02Are you saying these men are guilty?

03.03Isn’t this just a few bad individuals, not a “culture”?

Hockey Canada and the money

04.01What did Hockey Canada do, and who paid for the settlement?

What we want

05.01What do you actually want to happen?

05.02Doesn’t the NHL already have a policy for this?

05.03What happened to the players after the trial?

05.04How can I help?

About this site

06.01Who runs this site, are you affiliated with Carter Hart or the NHL, and do you make money from it?