Gilhooly hopes coming forward helps others
Lawyer details struggles following abuse at hands of hockey coach, writes Nick Faris.
TORONTO At every stage of his life, Greg Gilhooly appeared to have it made.
He was a star goaltender growing up in Winnipeg, a model student whose record of straight A’s got him a scholarship to Princeton. He balanced hockey and law school at the University of Toronto, then criss-crossed the world as a corporate lawyer for Canada’s biggest media company.
No one knew of the war he waged with himself all the while. As a teenager he tore his toenails off his skin to distract from a worse pain, the thoughts in his head. He started binging and purging junk food to force his body to look unattractive. Ten years ago he walked alone into the woods on a summer night, climbed onto the guardrail of a bridge and teetered there for hours, staring into the sky until the desire to live finally beckoned him back.
Gilhooly says he was one of the first minor hockey players victimized by Graham James, the disgraced former coach convicted of hundreds of incidents of child sexual assault. In 1979, before James met and abused Sheldon Kennedy and Theo Fleury — the NHL players whose disclosures of James’ villainy eventually sent him to prison — he arranged private training sessions with Gilhooly, then 14, under the guise of developing him as a goalie. Those sessions soon turned predatory.
The abuse and lasting trauma James inflicted on Gilhooly and other boys isn’t a hockey story, per se. But it was hockey, Gilhooly writes in I Am Nobody, a new memoir of his ordeal, that James stole from him at the same time he killed his soul.
“Once Graham got me, I hated hockey. It was the last thing I wanted to do,” Gilhooly said in an interview. “In my mind, the only thing that happened to me when I truly got in shape and was a top-level athlete was I became a target for him, so I was going to do everything to take myself out of that loop.
“But I loved hockey when I was a kid,” he said. “Loved it.”
In the eye of the law, James’ debt to Canadian society is nearly settled. Sentenced to 11 years in prison as part of four separate guilty pleas, he was paroled in 2016 and will be free without conditions next year. The Parole Board of Canada even pardoned him after his first two convictions in 2007. Gilhooly discovered the pardon three years later, shortly before he told his story for the first time to Winnipeg police.
That story was never heard in court; the Crown dropped its pursuit of Gilhooly’s allegations when James agreed to plead guilty to sexually abusing Fleury and another player he coached as a junior, Todd Holt. The deal meant Gilhooly would never officially be counted as one of his victims.
Instead, Gilhooly pursued justice on his own. He started writing I Am Nobody in 2012, when a Manitoba judge sentenced James to two years — later upped to five on appeal and seven when another victim came forward — for abusing Fleury and Holt.
“I didn’t want Graham to have another win over me,” he said.
In I Am Nobody, Gilhooly details how James capitalized on his distant relationships with his parents by positioning himself as a mentor. He ran Gilhooly through workouts to the point of exhaustion before asking to massage his feet, which was his gateway to heinous sexual acts.
James’ abuse, Gilhooly says, turned him into “nobody at all.” It stripped him of his selfesteem. It made him question his identity and his sexuality. It set him on a decades-long course of self-sabotage in which he’d do anything to torpedo the athletic and academic success his natural talents prescribed for him.
Gilhooly isn’t a criminal lawyer, but his legal training is a defining feature of his story. He devotes one of the last chapters of I Am Nobody to his hard-won recovery — in between a pointby-point challenge of the defence James’ lawyer presented at the 2012 sentencing hearing and a breakdown of recommendations he has for the Canadian legal system.
Sexual abuse victims should be given a greater voice in the legal process, Gilhooly said, so the consequences of the offence are properly conveyed.
He thinks Canadian law overinca rcerates for many crimes but isn’t harsh enough on sexual predators. Where the American system handed Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar sentences that will keep them imprisoned for life, he says lenient precedent got James off easy.
The abuse Gilhooly suffered arose decades ago in hockey, but he says it could happen again, and anywhere. Researchers have estimated two per cent to eight per cent of minor-aged athletes are sexually abused, and that the perpetrator is almost always a coach, teacher or instructor.
Decades ago, Gilhooly writes in I Am Nobody, James’ abuse led him to hurt himself, to stop exercising and to blow off studying. They were passiveaggressive cries for help that went unheeded by any authority figure. For most readers, it may be the book’s most practical lesson: if you notice a child acting abnormally — hockey player or otherwise — make a point of asking why.
“If people can be reminded that no child is safe, that every child has a vulnerability at a certain level, that anyone in the community is capable of perpetrating the crime,” Gilhooly said, “that heightened awareness can’t be a bad thing.”