How a sexual assault allegation decades ago rocked a city and upended a life

New York Times

17-04-2025

More than three decades later, Murray Walter still carries the heavy memory.
It weighs on his voice. Not anger, exactly. At least not anymore. It took him years to get past that part. But he's in his late-70s now, long retired from his career as a small-town trial lawyer. And that old fury has settled into a resigned sadness.
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'Of all the cases that I had over 50 years, this one was the one that was the most difficult for me personally,' Walter says.
He's followed headlines of the looming sexual assault trial of five members of the 2018 Canadian World Junior gold medal-winning hockey team, the latest in a near constant cycle of allegations of group sexual assault involving junior hockey players since the case Walter defended first captured the nation's attention.
The Swift Current Broncos had just won the Memorial Cup, beating the rival Saskatoon Blades in overtime. The national championship came less than three years after four players were killed when the team's bus crashed on the highway just outside of Swift Current.
The Broncos' emotional triumph made headlines across the country. For the community of 16,000 people in southwestern Saskatchewan, the victory was a step toward healing.
'They were the heroes,' Walter says.
Five months later, the mood changed. The allegations were shocking. And to many, unbelievable: Two members of the Swift Current Broncos were charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl.
A publication ban was immediately placed on the allegations and the names of the accused. By the time a court challenge by the CBC succeeded in having the ban lifted, the two 18-year-old players accused of the assault — Brian Sakic and Wade Smith — were traded to the Tri-City Americans, in Kennewick, Wash. Despite the move across the border, more than 700 miles away, the players were jeered by taunts of 'rapists' from fans around the Western Hockey League, media reports said.
A few weeks later, in late November, the charges against the players were dropped by the Justice Department — and the girl who made the complaint was charged with mischief.
Her trial was set for February 1990.
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Walter knew the young woman's family from the congregation at St. Olaf Lutheran Church. Her parents asked for his help days before she was charged, when it seemed to her family that the police were turning against their daughter.
By then, Walter says, it seemed that much of the community had made up its mind. He noted what he said was a clear conflict of interest in how the initial charges were approached.
In her book 'Crossing the Line,' journalist Laura Robinson wrote about the tangled realties of justice in a small town. A part-owner of the Broncos was a former law partner of the Crown prosecutor in Swift Current. Walter believes that relationship played a part in the Crown's decision to drop the charges against the players.
A guidance counselor at the local high school was accused of pressuring the alleged victim to drop the charges. The counselor later denied to Robinson that she had pressured the student.
'There were two focuses,' Walter says. 'To protect the players and the team, and to send a message to young women: Don't make complaints.'
Walter agreed to represent the young woman against the allegation that she had made a false claim to the police. The girl's identity was protected by a publication ban because she was being tried as a minor, but it provided no anonymity in a small town.
As the trial neared, it seemed to Murray the sentiment in Swift Current was that the girl had lied about her experience. Beyond her family, the only support she had was from a group of older women at St. Olaf who met with her frequently, and Southwest Crisis Services, a local nonprofit that provides aid for victims of abuse.
Murray had defended murder trials in Swift Current, which garnered lots of local attention. But he'd never experienced anything like this.
'If you're a trial lawyer in a smaller community, you get a little bit used to that,' Murray says. 'But this was more — and from people maybe you wouldn't otherwise expect.'
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His family was targeted. Two of Walter's children went to the same high school as the girl and Broncos players. His children were questioned at school because their father had agreed to defend the alleged victim against the accusations that she'd lied to police. There were no alleyway fistfights, Walter says, but there were several uncomfortable conversations. Friendships were broken, and never repaired.
He was OK with lost acquaintances.
'It made me so angry the way she was being treated,' he says.
At the trial, in a packed courtroom, the judge heard that the accused was a shy teenager with few friends who struggled in school. Her guidance counselor testified she had a below-average IQ of 83, according to media reports of the proceedings. The young woman, who had turned 18 by the time the trial had begun, broke down in tears in the courtroom as those details were revealed.
She testified that she had longed to date a hockey player and to be popular. Brian Sakic was in her class at school. She testified that the previous February, she had gone to the house where Sakic and another player were boarding and had oral sex with them because she wanted Sakic to like her.
The following September, she phoned Sakic and invited him to her parents' apartment, apparently to watch TV. Sakic testified that he went 'suspecting sex.' Sakic came over briefly and left, then returned to the apartment with his friend Wade Smith. She told the court that she told the players not to come in. When they did, she said, she was told to undress and have sex with Smith — to which she repeatedly said no. Over the next hour, she said, sexual acts occurred without her consent.
The young woman testified that she did what she was asked because she was scared and had been ordered to. She was left bleeding, suffering considerable physical and emotional pain, the judge in the case later said. She said Sakic asked her not to tell anyone what had happened. Sakic initially admitted this in an interview with police, but denied it on the stand. He claimed the girl consented to have sex with him and Smith. He didn't like her, he told the court, but he wanted to have sex. Smith denied he was involved when police first questioned him. But days before the young woman was charged with mischief, he told police that he'd had consensual sex with her at the apartment.
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'I was scared,' Smith told the court, when asked why he'd lied to the police.
Though the girl initially objected to having sex with Smith, the court was told that she later agreed when Sakic threatened to not go out with her if she failed to complete the sexual act.
After being accused of lying to the police and charged, the girl attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills, according to media reports.
In the trial, the Crown prosecutor said that he believed the previous sexual experience with one of the players was 'significant' regarding consent.
By the end of trial, the sentiment seemed to have shifted. The packed Swift Current courtroom erupted into applause as she was acquitted on the charge that she had lied to police about being sexually assaulted.
In his decision, Judge Gerald King said that he doubted the stories told by the two players. King described what occurred in the apartment as 'degrading and disgusting by any reasonable person's standards' — and said, from his perspective, the young woman 'honestly believed what had happened to her … was not by consent.'
After the trial, Walter called for the Justice Department to investigate the decision to drop the charges against the players and charge the alleged victim. He suggested that threats of a lawsuit against the RCMP and the Crown had influenced the decision to lay the mischief charge.
In the months after the case, sexual abuse experts and politicians echoed calls for an investigation. But in May 1990, Saskatchewan Justice Minister Gary Lane announced that he had rejected a request for a public inquiry. The girl and her parents considered a civil suit against the Crown for malicious prosecution, but after meeting with Walter that July, they decided the financial and emotional costs were too high.
Shortly after her trial, Walter says, the young woman — the complainant who became the accused — left Swift Current for good. They kept in touch for a long time, he says, but in recent years he lost contact with her.
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'It was a hard experience,' Walter says. 'It had negative effects for her.'
To most, the case is long forgotten. When you ask around Swift Current, there are faint recollections of a trial long ago — at the courthouse, the library, and St. Olaf church. But no clear memories. Even the journalists who covered the trial are hazy on the specifics. Six years after the girl's acquittal, it was revealed that Broncos coach Graham James — who ran the team the year of the fatal crash and when they won the Memorial Cup — had sexually abused several of his players for years.
In that wide shadow, the 1989 incident became another footnote in a decades-long list of accusations against junior hockey players and anonymous women forced to find new beginnings. But even as the details fade, the plot stays the same.
'These sort of stories play out in one way or the other,' Walter says. 'Over and over again.'
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic. Photos: Andy Devlin / NHLI/Getty, iStock)