TORONTO — The so-called Twitter case — what appears to be the first time in Canada someone has been charged with criminal harassment based entirely on tweets — has taken an odd and unexpected turn.

Ontario Court Judge Brent Knazan came into court Thursday to announce he had received a letter from a stranger making the startling allegation the complaint he is hearing “is fraudulent, or worse.”

Greg Elliott of Toronto, 53, is charged with criminally harassing three women, though the Toronto Police officer in charge of the case, Det. Jeff Banglid, already has testified he found no overt threats or sexual overtures in Elliott’s tweets to any of the complainants.

The first one, 29-year-old Steph Guthrie, an articulate political activist, was on the witness stand when the trial first adjourned in January.

According to the letter, parts of which the judge read aloud in open court, the person claimed to be a former acquaintance of the three complainants and alleges they “conspired, in my presence, to fabricate a criminal harassment complaint” against Elliott.

The person also alleged the conspiracy extends “to the ministry of the attorney-general,” information relayed in the summer of 2012 by two of the complainants’ friends.

Judge Knazan said the letter, which he received Tuesday, was signed and provided contact information.

But he kept the writer’s name and gender out of the public domain, in case the person was well-intentioned or was unaware it’s inappropriate to write to judges.

Neither did the judge read aloud the names of the two complainants’ friends mentioned in the letter or its first paragraph, in which the writer explained the reason for writing.

Still, the judge said, the “allegations leave police and Crown counsel no option but to investigate,” and adjourned the case until its next scheduled date in May.

Interestingly, according to the Criminal Code of Canada, a criminal harassment charge appears to be rooted as much in the alleged victim’s perception of the offending conduct as in the alleged conduct itself.

(I also received a copy of the letter to the judge, sent by email last week, before the judge got his. I attempted to reach the writer via the contact information included, but neither phone number nor email worked.)

When the case previously adjourned two months ago, Guthrie was in mid-cross-examination by Chris Murphy, Elliott’s lawyer.

Murphy had questioned her at length about a meeting in the summer of 2012, when a group of people, including the other complainants and a couple of their friends, gathered to decide, as she put it once, “how as a community we could respond to predatory and harassing behaviour of men,” including allegedly Elliott, on Twitter.

One of the friends whom Guthrie identified as being at the meeting is one of the two named in the letter and alleged by the writer to be knowledgeable about the purported conspiracy.

When the meeting ended, Murphy alleged in January, the attendees “had a plan to deal with Mr. Elliott … Each of them had a role.”