Kyle Beach #12 of the Chicago Blackhawks skates against the Detroit Red Wings during a pre season game on September 24, 2010 at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Michigan. | Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
“It made me feel like I didn’t exist,” Beach told TSN about an alleged sexual assault by former Hawks video coach Brad Aldrich.
Hearing the Blackhawks executives who covered up his alleged sexual assault for 11 years finally condemned Tuesday, Kyle Beach felt overwhelmed by emotions.
“I cried, I smiled, I laughed, I cried some more,” Beach said. “Following it, [I had] just a great feeling of relief, vindication and it was no longer my word against everybody else’s.”
Beach revealed himself as the previously anonymous former Hawks player whom former video coach Brad Aldrich allegedly sexually assaulted during the team’s 2010 Stanley Cup run during a Canadian television interview Wednesday with TSN’s Rick Westhead.
Beach, the No. 11 overall pick in the 2008 NHL draft, was previously considered one of the larger draft busts in Hawks history. It now has become clear the immorality and irresponsibility of team executives at the time ruined Beach’s career themselves through their inaction.
“When they won [the Cup], to see [Aldrich] paraded around, lifting a Cup at the parade, at the team pictures, at the celebrations, it made me feel like nothing,” Beach said. “It made me feel like I didn’t exist. It made me feel like I wasn’t important. It made me feel like he was in the right and I was wrong.”
Beach was a Black Ace for the 2010 playoffs — a prospect called up to accompany the NHL team and gain experience. He’d never been in the NHL before and had only played 10 AHL games by that point, leaving him eager to prove himself in any way possible.
Aldrich exploited that vulnerability, the Jenner & Block investigation into the Hawks’ cover-up revealed, by giving Beach and other Black Aces inside information about lineups yet telling them he could “bury” their careers if they wronged him.
After the sexual assault — a night when Aldrich invited Beach over to supposedly watch hockey videos, then physically forced him to perform oral sex, per the investigation — Aldrich’s previous threats kept Beach quiet.
“I felt like I was alone and there was nothing I could do and nobody I could turn to for help, and I didn’t know what to do,” Beach said on TSN. “As a 20-year-old [at the time], you could never imagine being put in this situation by somebody that’s supposed to be there to help you and make you a better hockey player and continue to build your career.”
Sun-Times file photo
Kyle Beach remained an AHL player for the Blackhawks through 2014, attending community events such as this 2012 alumni softball game.
Beach told his family only once, he said, then tried to never think about the assault — using alcohol and drugs to avoid doing so — again. He played 173 career games for the AHL Rockford IceHogs through 2013-14, then moved overseas; now 31, he plays for a third-division German club.
Recently googling Aldrich’s name and learning of Aldrich’s sexual assault of a still-anonymous Michigan high schooler in 2013 shocked him into motion.
“Because of what happened to him, it gave me the power and the sense of urgency to take action — to make sure it wouldn’t happen to anybody else,” Beach said, breaking down in tears on TSN. “I hope at some point, down the road, if he’s open to it, I would love to meet him.”
Beach said he witnessed meetings discussing Aldrich’s assault in coach Joel Quenneville’s office — “There’s absolutely no way he can deny knowing it,” he added. He also said he fully believes the Hawks’ NHL roster knew about the assault because “word spread pretty quick” — he was bullied with comments about it within the locker room and on the ice.
But he’s now ready to try to recover his life after telling his story publicly.
“The healing process is just beginning,” he said on TSN. “But the one thing that I want to make sure comes from this is change… I would love to be a part of a group that comes up [with] and designs a system to make sure that there is a safe place in the sports world [for all abuse victims].”
