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If he was as gobsmacked as I was by that, Mr. Murphy didn’t show it; he simply asked if that meant Mr. Elliott’s was an offensive point of view.

“Offensive?” Ms. Guthrie replied. “I would say dangerously misguided.”

Now it was a thousand degrees in the Old City Hall courtroom, where the AC had to be turned off for anyone to have a prayer of hearing anyone else, and, as Judge Knazan later remarked, the proceedings were on the sixth day (albeit spread over months) in the fifth hour.

The inference was Ms. Guthrie, who has been testifying most of that time, must be drained and losing her patience.

But still, the exchange was an effective illustration of Mr. Murphy’s point — that Mr. Elliott’s real sin was to take issue with Ms. Guthrie’s politics.

In other words, he wasn’t harassing her; he wasn’t trying to scare her; he was disagreeing with her.

Mr. Elliott is believed to be the first person in Canada to be prosecuted for criminal harassment via Twitter.

He and Ms. Guthrie, a prominent feminist and activist, met online in the spring of 2012 when she advertised for someone to do a free poster for an event she was organizing for witopoli, the Women in Toronto Politics group she co-founded.

Mr. Elliott responded; they even met once IRL (in real life), for dinner, where she says now she recognized immediately a “creepy glint” in his eye but nonetheless continued to have a professional relationship with him for a short time because she was hoping for that poster.