A content warning for those watching. This interview contains discussions of sexual assault.

In May 2022, TSN senior correspondent Rick Westhead broke an explosive story. Five Canada World Junior players had allegedly sexually assaulted a young woman in a London, Ontario hotel room in June 2018.

Hockey Canada had kept the case quiet, and more stories of assault and violent hazing have emerged since.

I talked to Westhead about his new book, We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture and what's changed and hasn't changed in the world of junior hockey.

>> Rick, welcome to our makeshift uh studio. How are you doing?

>> Yeah, great. Great. Glad to join you.

>> I want to talk about how you started writing about the problems in hockey culture in Canada. This really began with sort of a phone call. Uh but tell me how did that all come about? It

>> it actually kind of began before that.

So through the summer, spring and summer of 2021, I did a lot of reporting on an allegation that a player with the Chicago Blackhawks had made uh who said that he'd been sexually assaulted by one of the coaches with that team.

And I did over 40 stories on that case again through 2021 culminating with an investigation that the team, the Chicago Blackhawks commissioned that corroborated this player's allegations.

That player uh turned out to be Kyle Beach.

And I did a live interview with him on TSN that ran 27 minutes uninterrupted to lead off our Sports Center program.

And since then, since October 21st, there has not been a week that's gone by in these four years that I haven't received a number of credible tips from people asking me to look into issues, whether it's, you know, sexual assault or fraud allegations or maltreatment in sports.

And and this story on the Hockey Canada lawsuit started the same way with somebody giving me a tip in May 2022 about a lawsuit that had been filed and settled uh quietly in a London, Ontario courthouse.

>> For people who aren't familiar, who haven't been uh tuning into the headlines, give us a little uh I know that case has wrapped up, but give us an idea of what that case sort of started.

>> Well, th this case um captured international headlines.

It was a where a woman who was identified in court documents as EM alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by a number of players with Canada's 2018 World Junior Hockey Team.

She said that uh she attended a bar in London, Ontario, and met uh hockey players and wound up going back to have consensual sex with one of those players.

Uh and she said that after the fact the player invited uh all the players on his team to come back and participate in group sex.

Uh and so the criminal charges were announced in January 2024 by London police.

And ultimately there was a trial and after a two-month trial, the the judge not only acquitted all five players, all five codefendants, but the judge actually said that she'd found um actual consent in this case as well.

So in one respect from a criminal perspective these players were acquitted.

In another the National Hockey League came out subsequently and still condemned what happened saying that the behavior that took place in that hotel room was inappropriate and wrong.

>> That's just one case that you look at uh throughout this book. I want to talk about some maybe what people have have said about the book and what your hopes were. You you wrote that your hope of this book is not to tear down the game, but to make it better. I am curious, have you been accused of trying to tear the game apart?

>> Well, hockey enjoys a particular place in Canadian society, doesn't it?

>> Yeah.

Um, and I think whenever, you know, Steven Brunt, great Canadian journalist, wrote the forward for this book, and the way he put it was to critique hockey is to be anti- hockey, and to be anti- hockey is to be anti-Canadian.

And so when you, you know, are telling a story that's an uncomfortable truth, you're naturally going to get blowback.

But it's not as if this is new territory for investigative journalists.

You know, it reminds me a little bit of the the situation in Boston back in 2001.

And at the time, the Boston Globe did amazing reporting about how the Catholic Church in that city was moving around priests who had been accused of sexually abusing children uh without telling the public about this.

The that story of course turned out uh was turned into an Academy Award-winning movie spotlight.

But at the time back in 20 2001 that the Globe was doing this reporting, there were powerful voices in the within the church. one powerful priest who suggested that the wrath of God should come down on the media,

you know, another who suggested that perhaps the children in these cases were seducing priests and widespread uh comments within Boston that the media should be focusing on all of the good that the church was doing, not focusing on these bad stories.

And I see a parallel there.

You know, it's much more comfortable for people to think about all of the good that happens within hockey.

And for sure there's a lot of good. I love hockey. I play a couple times a week.

I've coached my son through the game.

Some of the best friends that I have and my family has are because of hockey.

>> But two things can be true, right? You can have a sport that's so amazing and still have these systemic issues that need to be confronted.

>> I don't want to assume that everyone is familiar with hockey who is listening or watching to this.

And there are people who are unfamiliar with the junior hockey system in itself.

For people who don't know, how does it work?

So, one of the things I look at in this book is the both the commercialization of minor hockey, right?

So, we're talking about kids 11, 12, 13 years old and how that has become a major industry.

Uh, but also the junior system.

And so, how that works is if you are good enough, you're an elite player, you may well leave your family home at the age of 14, 15 or 16 to go off and play for a junior team, sometimes hundreds of miles away from your family.

You would stay with a billet family.

So, you'd stay with a family that's agreed to take you in and house you and feed you for the course of the hockey season in exchange for discounts on tickets or free tickets and, you know, a monthly stipen as well.

Um, and and this is where, you know, it's really interesting talking to players who've been through this system and what they describe is a situation where you move away from home, you're so young, and you're playing on a team with teammates who are in some cases 20 or older

and you're so adults and you're so desperate to be accepted because if you're not accepted, you're an outlier and no one wants that.

So, this is a real situation where conformity comes into play.

And again, when you are so desperate to be accepted, you know, the players I've talked to and I I interviewed 58 men, 58 who've played junior hockey, junior A hockey within the last 10 years in Canada and they to a person have said that while they love the game, they've identified that there's these real issues when when you know they're so young and have to move away from home.

>> Your book shares stories not only of hockey players who are allegedly perpetrating um sexual assault, but you also write about players who've been victims of hazing and abuse, whether it's the by their own peers or even coaches.

>> Does this feed each other? It seems pretty obvious when you look at it on paper when you're reading through your book that this is a cyclical problem, but does it feed into each other?

>> Right? I mean, isn't it a natural progression? If players are going to objectify one another, should we be surprised when there are cases where they're objectifying young women?

Um, you know, and a lot of this shocked me.

I'll be honest. Uh, I had not heard in detail about a lot of these rights of passages that that many of these players have gone through.

One of them memories I have that uh from reporting this, I I sat in Toronto at a at a at a restaurant in the in the West End near where I live and I sat with a a young man in his 20s and his and the man's father.

Uh and I heard uh and the player in they're in the book. So Marcus Patterson and his father Tom and Marcus Patterson played h junior hockey, junior A hockey in 2019.

and he told his dad for the first time about while we were sitting at breakfast about how when he played junior A hockey in 2019, he went through this right of passage uh called the hot box.

And for people who don't know what that is, he was a rookie on the team and during a road trip they were on the team bus and all of the rookies on that team got called to the back of the team bus, tapped on the shoulder, come back again.

They're 10 or 15 feet away from their coaches.

So, begs the question of what the coaches whether the coaches knew what was going on.

But the rookies go to the back of the bus. They're told to strip

and then they all are forced to get into the the bathroom at the back of the bus.

And imagine five or six 16 17year-old teenagers jammed in there without clothes on.

The lights are turned off.

Some coins are thrown in through a vent and they're told, "You guys can only come out when you collect $3.25 25 cents and change for us.

Well, the joke of it is there's only 95 cents worth of coins in there.

So, I've heard of anecdotes of players being in that situation for upwards of half an hour or more.

I want to talk a little bit about that age range.

Um, how does it play whether they're the rookies or they're, you know, they're on borrowed time at that point when they're kind of in their 20s, that dynamic?

Because, you know, those 20-year-olds, they were they were ones who were 16 and went through it.

they may not have an NHL team that's calling them.

Um, is there something in that sort of dynamic there that plays into it as well?

>> Yeah, good question. I think I think that there is.

I think if you're still playing hockey when you're 20 or 21, the writing's on the wall that you're about to have to make this transition away from being a junior hockey player into the real world,

right?

>> And that might be scary because all you've done, all you have identified yourself as is a hockey player forever.

And so, you know, in some cases, again, from what I've heard from these these young men, you have situations where 20-year-olds have wanted to take advantage of that and make sure that these young players coming up have to go through the same sorts of initiations that they had to.

To be fair, I've also heard stories about, you know, players who are veterans, 20, who've ensured that that practice does not continue.

Right.

>> Right. and that there is um a safer environment for these teenagers coming up playing junior.

>> All right, I want to read a quote uh from your book that talks about sort of the culture of silence.

It goes, "The young men who once endured or inflicted harm have not disappeared from the game.

They're coaches and scouts and general managers and team and league executives.

From these perches of influence, they have too often played a quiet but pivotal role in sustaining a culture of silence.

How is this culture of silence functioned in the hockey world?

>> Well, I can't tell you the number of times in my interviews that I heard the word omea, you know, like this and and and this this whole concept that

you know, we don't talk about the bad things that we see.

And that ex that start that's in junior hockey. It's in professional hockey.

It even extends down into minor hockey

because families are petrified that if they come forward and they, you know, make a report even about abuse or maltreatment that their children will be, you know, who are still hoping to chase the dream that their kids are going to be dropped from the teams and they'll be blackalled, blacklisted and not welcome back on their teams.

I I wrote about a story only in the last couple last week or so about a case in Ontario where uh an under4 doubleA hockey team within the locker room.

It was like Lord of the Flies.

There was a group uh a group discussion where there were racist and homophobic and you know hate speechfilled um passages going on this group chat.

There were players holding down their teammates and pulling down their their pants and their underwear and taking photos of their genitals while other boys were standing guard by the doors of the locker room to make sure that nobody was coming in.

And in in that case, the coach uh who's and again the rules of Hockey Canada are the coach is coaches are supposed to be in these rooms all the time.

And and I think that case really does illustrate um what happens when you make a report because the the kind of the after afterward of that story is after a family made a complaint about this and after there were sanctions, the young boy who stood up and made the complaint was assaulted in another hockey rink, punched in the face.

Uh and it only came that assault only came days after these sanctions came down.

And uh that led to another sanction where the boy who punched him in the face was suspended for a year.

>> I know that you know the book is focused on hockey but are is this what is it about it being is it exclusively a hockey thing?

Is this happening in AAOU in in other sort of uh bas whether it's basketball or other sports.

>> Yeah. And and I think that's the the reflex of people within hockey is to say this isn't just a hockey problem, it's a societal problem.

And there's truth in that.

There really is.

Of course, it happens everywhere, right?

Look at all the stories that we read about Jeffrey Epstein.

Look at all the stories that we've read about Harvey Weinstein that have been reported.

There have been issues like this in soccer in England.

There's issues around this in basketball, in football in the United States.

But you know what?

There's journalism about it as well.

And these stories are documented.

They're told. There's accountability issues that are reported on.

And so to me the question is why wouldn't we report on it in Canada about hockey

if former players are working their way into leadership positions that we are seeing how do we break that cycle?

>> Well I think there is some optimism to be found too and there are efforts and I document them in in this book about programs that are trying to do this differently.

So, for one example, in Hamilton, Ontario, the AAA Hamilton Steel and Double A Hamilton Huskies have bought into this program that started in the United States. It's called Coaching Boys into Men.

And so, I went down and and the way this works this season, they have 16 teams in Hamilton that are running this program.

So all of the coaches are taught about how to speak to their players about issues of consent, about what healthy masculinity looks like, how they should treat each other, how they should treat, you know, young women.

And I actually sat in and watched these modules.

I watched the coaches talk to boys 11 and 12 years old about these issues.

And I wondered, where else are the boys hearing these kinds of messages?

Of course, parents should be talking to their kids about this, but you know, I know just through my interviews and through asking people, a lot of people are uncomfortable and these kinds of conversations they should be having with their kids are not happening.

Are they happening in schools?

Certainly not always.

Um, and so maybe moving forward, the reason for optimism here is if word about programs like this get off the ground and spread, maybe hockey can be a place where we're actually as concerned about grooming young men of character as we are of grooming young men who can play hockey really well.

>> Rick, we're going to leave it there. Really appreciate it and uh really appreciate your thoughtful reporting.

>> Thank you.