Quebec woman finds purpose by sharing story of alleged assault with hockey teams

Content Warning: The following article contains references to sexual assault

Seven years after Catherine Laroche says she was sexually assaulted at a house party by a major junior hockey player, she is working with college and minor hockey teams in Quebec to educate players about issues including consent.

While the 30-year-old Laroche says she’s still processing her alleged assault, her expanding program is helping her find purpose after attempts to navigate the legal system led to frustration and anxiety.

Her story offers a glimpse into why some abuse survivors do not report allegations of sexual assault or take years to do so. Laroche said a year and a half passed from the time she first reported her alleged assault before detectives informed her they were prepared to begin speaking with witnesses.

“It felt like forever. It was all consuming,” Laroche said in a series of interviews with TSN over the past three months. “I was feeling anxiety, and if you're having so much anxiety with a process, maybe it's not your road. Maybe you need to do something else. So, I chose another road.”

Laroche said she thought she was on a path towards justice when she walked into a Montreal police station on July 30, 2020, to report she had been sexually assaulted in June of 2015. She told police that her alleged attacker drugged her drink before he took her into a bedroom and assaulted her. 

The man, who then played major junior hockey in Quebec, went on to become a star in the National Hockey League, Laroche said.

After she reported the incident, it took more than six months before a police detective contacted Laroche to arrange for her to provide a videotaped statement. Following that Feb. 9, 2021, interview, it took another 10 months before police contacted her again, this time to say a new detective had been assigned to her case and planned to begin speaking with witnesses in January of 2022.

Laroche said she told police to drop the matter. She said it was clear it would take years for her case to work its way through the courts and for her alleged attacker to be held accountable, if that happened at all.

“The way victims are treated… it’s not right,” she said.

Dr. Lise Gotell, a women’s study professor at the University of Alberta and an expert on sexual assault law, said the length of time that Laroche had to wait for the criminal justice system to proceed was typical for people reporting sexual assault.

“It’s egregious but that length of time and lack of communication characterizes so many investigations,” Gotell said. “Memories fade and witnesses disappear. After that amount of time it also means the survivor may have inconsistencies in their story because so much time has passed and they may have forgotten details. It’s why it’s so difficult it becomes so difficult for crown attorneys to get convictions. And then they just stop pursuing cases because those convictions are so hard to get.”

Gotell said she was raped in Toronto in 1987 and filed a police report the following day. But police didn’t contact her again until 2007, when they were comparing DNA in a rape case against samples in a cold case file, she said.

“Police do a terrible job keeping complainants informed,” Gotell said. “Crowns and police both should be compelled to keep to timelines on investigations and also should be compelled to maintain contact with complainants. We hear the phrases trauma-informed and victim-centred a lot now, but that often just means they might be nice to a survivor, and there’s really no guarantee even of that.”

Rather than tell her story in a courtroom, Laroche, now a mother of two, decided to build a workshop so she could share her cautionary tale with college and minor hockey players in Quebec.

She interviewed 36 active and retired elite hockey players, asking them for their attitudes towards women and understanding of consent, and turned to Montreal detective Genevieve Boucher and Marie-Claude Methot, a criminologist who works for the Quebec government, and created a program to provide to hockey players and teams.

Catherine Laroche and a College Lafleche hockey player

In January, she met three times with varsity hockey players at College Lafleche in Trois-Rivieres.

In her first 90-minute session, Laroche spoke about the “masks” that some people wear and discussed players’ relationships with teammates. During their second meeting, she told the players the story of her alleged assault.

“A lot of the guys were shocked because they thought she was just there to give them some life advice,” said Vincent Dumont, Lafleche’s head coach. “She talked about her own case and about Victoriaville [two Tigres players have been charged with sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room in 2021 and are awaiting trial] and about Gabriel Gagne.”

Gagne was drafted 36th overall by the Ottawa Senators in 2015. He last played with the Rockford IceHogs of the American Hockey League and was charged in August of 2021 with sexual assault against two alleged victims in 2016 in Montmagny and Trois-Rivieres. 

The Trois-Rivieres alleged assault purportedly occurred while he was a member of Shawinigan’s hockey team in the Quebec Major Junior hockey League, the highest level of junior hockey where many players chosen for the World Juniors come from. Gagne was re-arrested in February and charged in connection with the alleged luring of a 14-year-old girl in December 2021, The Journal de Montreal reported in July.

Laroche now meets with the Lafleche team once a week, and also meets individually with players.

“She wants to create a spark in players, to tell them about consent and remind them that even if a woman says yes, if she’s drunk then that can’t be a real yes,” Dumont said. “These lessons may not all be learned by players today, but maybe they trigger something in them in one or two or three years from now.”

Laroche said she’s been pleased with the players’ attention to her message.

“I tell them they can’t control laws and they can’t control women that don't have good intentions, because that exists, too,” she said. “But they need to ask themselves two questions: Do they know the consequences if they go there and are they ready to have those consequences in their life?”

Laroche has also shared in detail the story of her sexual assault, explaining that she attended a house party in June 2015 and drank two glasses of wine before going into a sauna with a young man. She said she took a bottle of water with her into the sauna and believes either a man who was also in the sauna or one of his friends spiked the water with GHB, a drug that has been linked to date rape cases.

“I never used drugs in my life,” she said. “I knew what a hangover from alcohol felt like and that was not how I felt. I felt so bad the next morning that I couldn't even drive. I tell the players my story and I answer all of their questions except one. I won’t answer ‘Who was it?’ The process of dealing with this is so personal and individual and the players all respect that.”

Laroche began working last month with bantam and midget teams at College Charles-Lemoyne in the Montreal suburb of Sainte-Catherine.

Charles-Lemoyne coach Olivier Latendresse said he wanted Laroche to meet with his school’s teams following media reports about a 2018 alleged sexual assault in London, Ont., involving members of Canada’s 2018 World Juniors team. 

“We have more stories like this coming out now, and I wish when I played junior we were having the kind of conversations Catherine is helping with,” said Latendresse, a former QMJHL player who played professional hockey in Europe until 2020.

“This is about more than sexual assault. It’s about how to treat people. Sometimes you don’t realize when you say something to a teammate the pressure they may be under or the consequences your words can have. I can see already a change in the way that the players talk to each other.”

Catherine Laroche

Laroche has not yet worked with QMJHL teams.

In May, Laroche said former Halifax Mooseheads goalie Zach Fucale, now playing in the AHL with the Hershey Bears, connected her with QMJHL officials. While they have had a number of conversations over Zoom, Laroche said she’s been told that teams don’t have enough free time to commit to her program.

(The QMJHL said in September it was updating its policies to better educate players about sexual misconduct. Players must watch instructional videos during the first week of the regular season, sign codes of conduct and ethics, and participate in three webinars during the season about sexual abuse and consent.)

Over the past months, Laroche has been featured in French media and appeared this summer as a guest on Juiced Up, a podcast hosted by Saskatchewan Roughriders player Jordan Beaulieu. 

Roughly 20 abuse survivors have contacted Laroche as her profile has grown, including a woman who was allegedly assaulted in 2014 by four players with the Gatineau Olympiques QMJHL team. Quebec City police said they recently reopened their investigation of that case, which was initially closed without charges. 

“Hearing from survivors is not a burden at all,” Laroche said. “I want to be of service. I want to help people.”