In surveillance video of the bar’s dancefloor, multiple hockey players are seen swarming around the woman. Her ponytail is pulled, her buttocks are slapped. She’s picked up into the air. It’s hard to tell the men apart — they are all young and white, most are over six feet tall and wearing snapback hats.
There are so many of them, yet it seems like they all move as one amorphous blob, like some kind of twisted neuroconnectivity.
“They’re all sort of sharing her in that moment. It’s like … sharks gathering a seal to share amongst themselves,” says Ariella Garmaise, a reporter for The Walrus, in describing the surveillance footage.
This is one of the first scenes in Code of Misconduct, a documentary about last year’s sexual assault trial, in which five former Canadian World Junior hockey players — Michael McLeod, Carter Hart, Cal Foote, Dillon Dubé and Alex Forementon — were charged with sexual assault following a June 2018 incident with a then-20-year-old woman in a London, Ont., hotel room.
It took seven years for the players to face trial, due to a saga plagued by lacklustre police probes and two shocking mistrials. All five men were acquitted on all charges in July 2025.
Directed by Quebec filmmaker Sébastien Trahan and based on coverage by dogged TSN journalist Rick Westhead, Code of Misconduct makes many firm points, primarily about how our defective justice system works to crush survivors of sexual assault. But it is strongest in its exploration of how male sports culture, if left to its current form, breeds toxicity and psychopathy.
Blending footage from the trial and interviews with hockey players and advocates trying to overhaul toxic hockey culture, Trahan expertly guides viewers through the dense saga. We learn how the victim, identified as E.M., met the accused players at a local bar. E.M. leaves the bar to have consensual sex with McLeod, but says she did not consent to the group sex acts that occurred at his hotel.
Years later, E.M. would end up testifying for nine gruelling days, facing cross examination from lawyers representing each of the men, in what became a mimetic recreation of the hotel room incident. Once again, she was outnumbered.
After two mistrials, the jury was dismissed, and it was decided that the players’ fate would be decided by a judge alone.
Finally, the judge acquitted all five men, telling a shocked courtroom that she found E.M. to not be “credible nor reliable.”
Code of Misconduct affirms what many legal experts have long argued: that our justice system is not meant to work for victims of sexual assault. It seems futile to seek justice through the courts. That futility may be more pronounced for survivors where the perpetrators are hockey players, who are nationally revered.
A more original insight the film offers is how hockey culture creates a mentality in which no player is seen, or sees themselves, as mere individuals. Rather, they understand themselves as corporal extensions of one and other — both on the ice and in their sexuality — and that allegiance to the pack subsumes any individual judgement. This culture fosters the belief that women are to be hunted, and that all prey must be shared.
Given this distressing reality, the question at the heart of the film is: how do we possibly proceed with our national pastime as it exists, when we know what we know?
A year after the trial began, Canadians continue to gorge on hockey, though little has been done to address the large-scale, structural problems that plague it. The film calls for systemic change in hockey culture, though it could be more clear and prescriptive about what practical transformations might take place. It also fails to scrutinize why Parliament has been largely silent on the issues in hockey since the trial’s conclusion.
A more ambitious documentary might have looked closer at a Hockey Canada sponsorshipboycott that fizzled out in late 2023. Or it might have examined more closely whether the federal government’s monitoring of the organization in the last three years has actually been effective at changing culture on and off the ice.
But as an early look into a recent trial, it’s encouraging that the film was framed with survivors in mind. The film ends by focusing on E.M.’s strength and the many who support and believe her.
And it is not just the government that is failing. Early on in the film, Westfield gravely notes that the newscycle moves fast, and the window for change is small.
Dedication to sexual assault coverage in our crumbling media environment can feel like an impossibility. But individual reporters are not giving up. That’s clear with a reporter like Westfield. He and director Trahan ensured this film was framed accurately with care for survivors in mind.
If this film can encourage other journalists and filmmakers to incorporate those lessons, that’s a win.
Code of Misconduct premieres Friday, May 8 on Channel Fuse and will also be available on demand.
