Perhaps what’s most disturbing about the leaked group chats of Washington Capitals player Brendan Leipsic is how unsurprising they are.
On Wednesday afternoon, messages Leipsic sent to his friends, including Florida Panthers forward Jack Rodewald, were leaked on social media. The chats are a stunning string of remarks that traffic in casual sexism and misogyny, where Leipsic ridicules women for their weight, judges the wife of a teammate for her appearance and generally behaves like a boorish patron at a bar that people can’t wait to get away from.
Once the chats became public, Leipsic quickly issued a weak apology that has the hands of a PR department written all over it.
“I fully recognize how inappropriate and offensive these comments are and sincerely apologize to everyone for my actions,” he wrote. “I am committed to learning from this and becoming a better person by taking time to determine how to move forward in an accountable, meaningful way.”
It’s sad, but Leipsic’s comments are yet another incident of an athlete revealing themselves as a product of a toxic culture, and the cycle of public of condemnation and forced apology looks like one that will continue ad infinitum. It is hard, honestly, to keep mustering up the anger that these kinds of words deserve knowing the cycle will never end.
We are in the middle of a global pandemic that continues to take a devastating toll on the lives of our most vulnerable citizens, and one immature NHL player’s gross group texts should barely register. Yet, it isn’t just that we have far more pressing concerns at the moment, but that Leipsic’s comments are just one of many, many, recent reminders that hockey culture is strewn with sexism, racism, bullying and toxicity. This stuff is embedded so deep inside the sports DNA that it feels inextricable.
In responding to the comments that Leipsic made, both the Capitals and the NHL issued strong statements condemning his language, with the league promising to “address this inexcusable conduct with the clubs and players involved,” whatever that means.
On the bright side of this, there was a time not too long ago that the league wouldn’t even have dared uttered the word misogyny over a player fat shaming women on social media. It is a small step forward that at least organizationally there is recognition that behavior like this will no longer be tolerable, if only because it means terrible publicity.
Still, there’s only so much that the league or the Capitals can do in a situation like this. The comments Leipsic made aren’t a one time offense, or a slip of the tongue or a bad choice of words. It’s clear from the chats that Leipsic just talks and thinks like this all the time. His primary mode of engaging with women seems to be to think about their appearance and weight first, he has no problem calling his teammates losers, and he possibly also might have admitted to drug use. What his chats expose is a lifetime of learned behavior that can’t be unraveled because he’s now mandated to take a two-week sensitivity training course from the league.
Maybe Leipsic can unlearn this behavior over time, but for the past 25 years, parents, coaches, friends, teachers and pretty much everyone else in his life has allowed it to go on. It is indefensible but not surprising that getting ratioed on Twitter might be the first course correction Leipsic has received.
Leipsic has had a middling NHL career, been a healthy scratch more times than not with the Capitals, and should quickly be on his way to irrelevancy. This is the most that anyone has written about Leipsic, and fingers crossed, he’ll disappear into the void of international leagues where he’ll cling to the last vestiges of his playing career. The problem is that while Leipsic will quickly be forgotten, the culture he’s a product of will stubbornly stick around.
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