About this site
This page is a noncommercial commentary and activism project from Game Misconducts. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Carter Hart, his representatives, the Vegas Golden Knights, or the NHL. This site reports court records and public documents, and publishes clearly labeled opinion and satire. Carter Hart is one of five players acquitted of all charges on July 24, 2025, and is a current Vegas Golden Knights goaltender.
The culture
Most of this site is about one case. This page is about the thing the case grew out of: the everyday, normalized, individually-deniable behaviour that builds the environment where the rest becomes possible.
When people picture sexual violence they picture the top of the pyramid: the assault, the horrific crimes with names. But prevention researchersWho uses this modelPrevention bodies and consent educators, including the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and 11th Principle: Consent. describe it as a continuum, which is usually drawn as a pyramid where those rare severe acts rest on a wide base of common, everyday, and mostly-unpunished behavior.
Tolerating the base is what normalizes everything above it. The small stuff isn’t a lesser category of the same problem. It’s the very foundation the assault stands on.
The continuum / pyramid model is used across prevention education (see diagram, rightbelow): 11th Principle: Consent ↗ · NSVRC ↗ · MCASA ↗
Prevention educators call this the continuum, or rape-culture pyramid. It shows how the layers connect rather than ranking which harm is worse.
The culture is deniable in isolation and damning in aggregate.
Every single piece of it can be waved off. It’s just a joke. It was just locker room talk. He didn’t do anything. He was just there. No one brick is a wall. But the wall is made entirely of bricks, and the people laying them rarely think of themselves as building anything at all. Here is what the base looks like, in four layers.
It starts with the words we use, because our language is where the group decides what’s normal or not. Rating women, ranking them, or trading them as stories in a male-dominated space is not safety for women; it’s men performing a toxic culture for other men. It’s them making their sexual conquests into a status symbol. Touring entertainers know the line “What happens on the road stays on the road” as the mantra of every creep. Or, maybe more relevant to this topic today, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”… Either way, it’s always the same where the audience is other men, and the woman is a prop in the performance.
Rape jokes and “locker room talk” normalize sexual violence as something funny and inevitable; in the prevention model, that normalization is the base everything else is built on. It really is just talk. That is not the defense people think it is. The talk is the topsoil everything else grows in.
Prevention research: 11th Principle: Consent ↗ · MCASA ↗
And it doesn’t stay spoken. The same logic that lives in a locker-room joke also gets drawn, printed, and hung on a rack with a price tag in the Golden Knights’ team store. Which brings us to this t-shirt sold in the Vegas Golden Knights gift shop.
On its own, the shirt is nothing. A sports rivalry with aggressive merch in poor taste, and no more. But that is exactly how this works. No single piece inherently means anything, which is precisely why the whole thing is so hard to see individually. Stack it up, though, and you get: a brand called Violent Gentlemen, an armored knight hog-tying the Carolina Hurricanes’ pig mascot while it cries, and an NHL team booed for rostering Carter Hart, one of five players acquitted in the case, and Brett Howden, a teammate who testified at the trial, whose social media team is choosing to lean into this villain role rather than away from it. This is somehow not a bootleg. Violent Gentlemen is an established brand that makes officially licensed NHL merchandise, and the Golden Knights stock it in their own store. A franchise with a full PR department put this on its shelves anyway. In any other Stanley Cup Final, this would be angry rivalry merch. With this roster, during the 2026 Final, it read differently. The accumulation of all of it is a fanbase being taught, one harmless-looking purchase at a time, that none of this is anything to flinch at. That is what normalization looks like: not a decision anyone announces, but a slow recalibration of what a crowd will cheer or defend in the name of their tribe.
The structure is not unique to hockey, and it is not over.
The easy version of this story is that hockey has a problem. The truer version is that men do, and hockey is one of the places it collects. The same structure turns up wherever men are organized into closed groups that reward one another.
In 2024, a French man named Dominique Pelicot admitted in court that he had drugged his wife unconscious and recruited dozens of men to rape her.1 He and the others were convicted. What the case exposed was not one monstrous marriage. It was a system: a forum where men found each other and coordinated the assault of a woman, together.2
That forum was taken down. The behavior was not. In 2026, a CNN investigation found men still doing it, gathered in online groups to trade methods for drugging and assaulting women and to sell the footage to each other. One such group had nearly a thousand members. The material sat on a host that drew around 62 million visits in a single month and warehoused more than 20,000 videos tagged as “sleep” content. A French lawmaker who works on this abuse called the groups an “online rape academy.”2
The mechanics change. The chatroom, the livestream, the locker room. The structure holds. In each, a woman’s degradation becomes the thing men trade for standing with other men, and the group’s first move, once seen, is to protect itself. The psychologist who assessed the men convicted alongside Pelicot described what bound them as a kind of brotherhood.2
This has a name. Male peer support theory holds that it is the group, not the lone bad man, that produces and excuses violence against women. The group supplies the vocabulary, the encouragement, and the cover.3
The mechanics change. The structure holds.
Hockey builds that group on purpose. Boys are drafted at sixteen, sent to live far from home, and made into “men” by the players above them, inside the exact kind of closed, ranked, all-male room the theory describes. It is not the only such room, and it is not the worst. But it is one of the few that ever kept a manual.
The culture is usually described as if it were weather: ambient, unwritten, impossible to pin down. It is not. At least once, it was written down.
In the early 2000s, junior players across Canada and the United States circulated an email chain trading what they called war stories. Compiled, it became known as The Junior Hockey Bible.1 The original eventually went defunct. It did not disappear. A blog called Top Shelf Hockey, founded in 2010, rebuilt a version on a page titled The Bible, crediting the original Junior Hockey Bible by name as a source alongside material lifted from locker rooms across the country.2 It sat online, openly, for years after that.
It is a glossary and a code. It supplies an alternative vocabulary for women and for group sex, assigns status for degrading a woman on camera, and sorts women into the disposable and the “pure.”12 The same document that rewards filming a woman’s degradation also warns, elsewhere, that the boys should keep no copies because evidence can be harmful. It rewards making the record and fears the record in the same breath. It knows exactly what it is.2 The page builds its own defense into the top of itself: it tells anyone who can’t take a joke to leave, then signs off, “Use this wisdom wisely boys.”2
The framing is the defense. The joke is the alibi.
Vice’s Ben Makuch, who grew up around the system, described the document in 2014 as reading like a guide book for sexual assault, and argued that team culture breeds rape culture with the Bible as its framework.1 That is his characterization, and it is opinion. What is not opinion is that the text existed, had an audience, and circulated widely enough that a 2015 petition asked WordPress to terminate the account and take it offline, explicitly to reduce sexual assault in hockey.3 It took a petition. The thing did not come down on its own.
None of this is new, and none of it is fringe. A full quarter-century before this case, journalist Laura Robinson documented the same machinery in Crossing the Line (McClelland & Stewart, 1998): boys drafted at sixteen, billeted far from their families at the most malleable age, socialized into “men” by veterans, run through hazing rituals with sexual overtones engineered to push past inhibition.4 Robinson’s other finding has aged just as well: when accusations land, the people who run the sport close ranks to discredit the accuser rather than the accused.4
The written record is not the only thing from that era. The same window produced the earliest World Junior incident yet publicly alleged. In 2022, a member of Parliament and TSN reported allegations that members of Canada’s 2003 team were involved in a group sexual assault during that year’s championship, co-hosted in Halifax.5 Hockey Canada referred the matter to Halifax Regional Police, who opened an investigation. As of the most recent public reporting (August 2025), the matter remains under investigation and no charges have been laid.6 Nothing has been proven. What matters for this page is not what is alleged to have happened in that room, which is uncharged, unproven, and not ours to narrate, but when it sits on the calendar: a 1998 book, an early-2000s manual, and a 2003 allegation are one era, and the next time the public hears the same shape of allegation, it is 2018. That is what a pattern looks like, as opposed to an incident.
That is the point of putting a document on this page. You do not have to prove any individual ever read it. A manual only tells you the vocabulary existed and the audience was fluent. The culture is not an atmosphere you can wave away. It had an email chain, a glossary, a host, and a readership, and when someone tried to take it down, the instinct was to defend it as a joke.
Then there’s the code, and its popular phrases: “Bros before hoes” and “Don’t be a rat,” and even the more violent “Snitches get stitches,” all from the same social contract. It’s that same brotherhood that asks you, sometimes indirectly, to cover for a teammate and then recasts telling the truth as the real betrayal. This is the layer where a culture protects itself, and you don’t have to reach for theory to see it when it’s literally in the record.
Read each piece alone and it’s deniable as a heated text, or a bad night, or a guy who was just there. But the instinct underneath is the thing: close ranks, get the story straight, treat the woman as the problem and the investigation as the threat. That instinct isn’t invented in a hotel room at 2 a.m. It’s taught long before, on every team that ever decided loyalty outranks the truth. Researchers have a name for this. Criminologists Walter DeKeseredy and Martin Schwartz call it male peer support: the way certain all-male groups supply the attitudes and the cover that encourage and excuse the abuse of women, locating the cause not in a few bad individuals but in the social bonds of the group itself.
DeKeseredy, W. S. and Schwartz, M. D. (2013). Male Peer Support and Violence against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory. Northeastern University Press.
Silence is one of the ways the code gets kept. Not the only way (the texts and the version that protects the room are louder) but it is the quietest and the most common. Most of the people in these situations did nothing and said nothing and weren’t involved. And that is not the exoneration it sounds like. That’s the very mechanism.
A culture like this does not require everyone to participate. It only requires that enough people not interrupt. The men who were “just there,” who “didn’t do anything,” who “didn’t say anything,” are not bystanders to the structure. They are the structure. Their non-intervention is what lets the rest proceed.
This is among the most studied findings in social psychology. Darley and Latané, working after the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder, identified the bystander effect: the more people who witness something, the less likely any one of them is to act, because responsibility dilutes across the group until no one feels they own it. And the part that matters most here: their unresponsive subjects were not cold or indifferent. They showed visible distress over the victim yet the inaction came anyway. Silence is not evidence that no one cared but is what happens when caring is not (or deemed not) enough to overcome the pull of the group.
Two details sharpen it for this setting. People are far more likely to intervene when the person in distress is a stranger to the perpetrator, and far less likely when the perpetrator is one of their own. A teammate is the hardest possible person to act against. And the effect is documented even at the level of the individual: at the trial, Brett Howden, a teammate who testified as a Crown witness and was never charged, testified that he heard what sounded like crying and went to his room because he did not want to be part of anything.
Reporting: Westhead, TSN ↗
And here is the cost that is easiest to miss. Silence does not only shield the people responsible after the fact. It shapes what happens in the moment, and it shapes how the person at the center of it understands what is being done to her. When a room full of people treats something as normal, the one person it is happening to is stripped of the confirmation that it is not. We already know that a majority of survivors do not name their experience as rape, reaching instead for softer words. The silence of everyone present is part of what teaches them to reach for those words. A crowd that does not flinch becomes the victim’s reason to doubt her own alarm.
That is the load-bearing wall: not the men who acted, but a room where not interrupting had become the normal thing to do.
Darley, J. M. and Latané, B. (1968). “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383. · Banyard, V. L., Moynihan, M. M. and Plante, E. G. (2007). “Sexual violence prevention through bystander education.” Journal of Community Psychology, 35(4), 463–481. · Wilson, L. C. and Miller, K. E. (2016). “Meta-Analysis of the Prevalence of Unacknowledged Rape.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 17(2), 149–159.
Above the locker room sits the adult version of the same instinct: organizations that treat harm as public relations to manage rather than behavior to stop. The reflex that tells a player to close ranks also tells an institution to settle quietly, control the story, and call the cleanup a reform.
It has a paper trail. Hockey Canada maintained a reserve called the National Equity Fund, fed by the registration fees of ordinary families (a cut of every fee from beginner Timbits hockeyTim Hortons -- a Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain -- sponsors entry-level minor hockey across Canada, and 'Timbits hockey' (after its doughnut-hole snack) is the nickname for that youngest beginner level, roughly ages 4 to 8. The point: the fund was fed by fees from the very smallest players on up. to adult rec leagues), though there is no evidence the organization told those families what the money could be used for. By its own chief financial officer’s testimony to Parliament, the fund paid out nine settlements totalling $7.6 million since 1989, most of that total unrelated to this case. In the 2018 case specifically, Hockey Canada used the fund to settle a $3.55-million lawsuit from a woman who said she was assaulted by members of the World Junior team, settling in a matter of weeks, without a full investigation and without requiring the players to cooperate. When the Globe and Mail exposed the arrangement, Hockey Canada announced the fund would no longer be used for sexual-assault claims, reform arriving only after the practice became public. The money, throughout, was not taxpayers’. It was the participants’ own.
Researchers have a name for the harm this does. The psychologist Jennifer Freyd calls it institutional betrayal: when an institution that people depend on fails to prevent harm, or responds to it in ways that protect the institution rather than the people it serves, and her studies find that this institutional failure measurably worsens the trauma of those it betrays. The betrayal is not only the original act. It is the machinery built to absorb the fallout while leaving the cause untouched.
During the Final, the Golden Knights’ official account kept posting like the context did not exist. All from the team’s verified account, in their own words.
Any one of these is a boilerplate hype post. That is the point. But read them in a row, posted by an organization with one acquitted defendant and one trial witness on its roster, and the register curdles. The June 7 post is captioned “What happens in Vegas...”, the phrase the culture uses for keeping things quiet, over a carousel of celebration photos. Brett Howden, who testified at the trial, is in some of them, because he plays for the team. There is nothing unusual about a player appearing in his own team’s game photos. But once you know what the phrase means, it is hard to unsee, and that is the whole problem with a culture that has stopped noticing: the organization posting it can no longer tell how its own ordinary reads from the outside.
Maybe someone in the building weighed all this and posted anyway. Maybe no one thought about it at all. It does not matter which, because both answers are the problem. The question stops being whether any single post was a slip and becomes a choice between two readings, neither flattering to a professional franchise: either this is deliberate, or a professional hockey organization with a full communications department cannot read the room it is standing in. There is no third version where this looks good.
The culture, in other words, is not confined to twenty-year-olds in a hotel room. It scales. It buys insurance, hires a communications team, and keeps running, because at every level the same choice gets made: protect the structure, manage the perception, and treat the people harmed as a liability to handle rather than a wrong to answer.
Sources: Hockey Canada FY2022 audited financial statements ↗ · CHPC Meeting 41 testimony (CFO Brian Cairo) ↗ · The Globe and Mail (2022), reporting by Grant Robertson. Smith, C. P. and Freyd, J. J. (2014). “Institutional Betrayal.” American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. Posts: @vegasgoldenknights, June 2–7, 2026.
None of this is a fact of nature. Sexual violence gets treated as inevitable, as fixed as death or taxes, but most of what we file under inevitable is just a set of values and attitudes, and those can change. The numbers below are not a record of justice done, but rather, a record of how rarely it is.
Choose your country to view the statistics.
View these statistics forIn Canada, the system loses the overwhelming majority of sexual assault cases long before a verdict: at reporting, at police case-closure, and at the decision to lay a charge.
Estimated attrition through the Canadian justice system, modelled on Johnson’s 2004 survey data -- its ~3.3% reporting rate predates, and runs lower than, the 6% headline figure above (StatCan, 2019).
Of every 1,000 assaults: about 33 reported → 12 charged → 3 convicted. Johnson, 2012 ↗
How it compares with other crimes in Canada, by how often each goes unreported.
| Crime | Not reported |
|---|---|
| Sexual assault | 94% |
| Physical assault | 64% |
| Break & enter | 55% |
| Robbery | 53% |
Far fewer sexual assaults are ever reported, yet false reports are rare at about 2–8%, which is no more common than for any other crime. Statistics Canada, GSS · NSVRC ↗
Among victims who didn't go to police, women cite these barriers far more than men, a gap that reflects how overwhelmingly sexual assault is committed against women.
| Reason victims give | Women | Men |
|---|---|---|
| Shame or embarrassment | 34% | 6% |
| Felt they wouldn't be believed | 25% | 7% |
| Reporting would shame or dishonour their family | 19% | 4% |
One in four women who stayed silent expected not to be believed, the exact reaction the case attracts. For men, just seven percent. Statistics Canada, GSS 2019 ↗
Both the above numbers are true. The difference is every case the system already threw away before counting.
This is not the exception that proves the system works. It is the system working exactly as it was built. Changing the outcome means changing the culture that produces it.