I don’t follow hockey at all, so I hadn’t heard anything about the case of Jake Virtanen and the Vancouver Canucks after Virtanen was accused (but found not guilty) of sexual assault. Janice Fiamengo provides an outline of the case:
NHL forward Jake Virtanen’s once-promising career with the Vancouver Canucks was torpedoed by a rape allegation, and even after he was acquitted in a court of law, detractors have demanded he be shunned as a sexual predator.
In the summer of 2021, Virtanen was first suspended and then bought out by the Canucks after a woman alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in his hotel room in September of 2017. The woman had accompanied Virtanen to his room after a night of partying. She claimed that after she repeatedly refused his sexual overtures, he forced himself on her; Virtanen said the sex had been consensual.
The fact that the complainant stayed the night with her alleged rapist and then waited nearly four years to tell anyone or report to police may have played a role in the jury’s decision, in July of 2022, to find Virtanen not guilty. It was a He said/She said story that simply did not prove guilt.
Feminist advocates, however, couldn’t care less about the verdict, and many hockey commentators seem to feel the same way.
Mary Jane James, CEO of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton, was adamant in interview with Canada’s state broadcaster that the allegation mattered far more than the verdict, and that no team in the NHL should touch Virtanen. Referring to the decision by the Edmonton Oilers to sign Virtanen to a 2-month tryout last month, James accused Oilers’ leadership of “taking the verdict at face value, regardless of what the allegations were”. It didn’t seem to matter to James that our entire justice system relies on the acceptance of verdicts over unproven allegations.
In James’ expressed opinion, any man accused of a “very, very serious” sexual crime (and what sexual crime would she not consider serious?) should be presumed guilty. Hockey teams, she insisted, need to send a message that “We are not going to associate with anyone who has this history” (i.e., of being accused).
It is an extraordinarily crude statement of contempt for the cherished principles of western jurisprudence — and would presumably not apply to Mary James herself if she were ever tried and acquitted — but it corresponds fairly closely with the thrust of recent feminist activism: Accused men should be made pariahs, and so should anyone who refuses to participate in their shunning.
