Opinion | NHL star Patrick Kane's sexual assault case weighs heavily on US conscience

There is no way to gently wade into a topic this volatile and complex, so here we go. Last week, police in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg, New York, announced that Patrick Kane is the target of a sexual assault investigation. Although the investigation has been going on for almost two weeks, no formal charges have yet been laid. Kane is a 26-year-old ice hockey superstar who has accomplished a great deal in a short time. Buffalo born and raised, Kane is perhaps the greatest American born player in the history of the game and one of the most decorated as well, having just won his third Stanley Cup in six years with the Chicago Blackhawks.

In the US, ice hockey is still largely more cult than mainstream sport but if Americans do know one player it's likely to be the flashy and scintillating Kane, who has a number of endorsement contracts including blue chip companies such as McDonald's, Gatorade and Chevrolet. Although he is a wealthy superstar and she is still unknown, it is hardly a simple case of he said, she said.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is that simple when we are dealing with sexual assault. Whether he likes it or not, Kane has now become an extremely high-profile referendum on the issue of sexual assault. He is a referendum for the police and how they handle these types of accusations, a referendum for the media and how they cover these types of cases, a referendum on the parameters of the wildly viral social media phenomena and, most importantly, he is a referendum on you and I, and how we feel about this issue. Speculation has been running rampant in a number of quarters with so much misinformation disguised as facts. But, according to police at least, Kane was out with some friends at a bar in Buffalo a few weeks back.

It was late, a woman came back to his place and, according to the accuser, Kane sexually assaulted her against her wishes. As far as the official accusations go, that is it. But that is not nearly enough to satiate the masses.

The owner of the bar told the Buffalo News that a woman was all over Kane that night and clearly making advances towards him and while the owner was not sure if the woman was actually the accuser, he said what little he knew of Kane he seemed a decent guy. And maybe not coincidentally Kane was scheduled to bring the Stanley Cup to his bar the following week. Almost immediately the bar owner and the newspaper were accused of "victim shaming" by a number of national pundits as the woman's title officially shifted from "the accuser" to "the victim". Also mentioned in the article were quotes from "unnamed sources" that the victim had bite marks and scratches. A few days later, a number of unnamed friends came forward to say this woman was in no way, shape or form a gold digger and to defend the still-unnamed victim's honour.