During the trial, the defence approach also revealed a disturbing ignorance about the normal patterns of gendered fear, danger and safety in situations where men are violent towards women.

Research just published, on people's experiences of feeling scared during sex, found "substantially more women than men reported that someone had done something during sex that had scared them". Being held down, and being choked were some of the experiences people described. Even within organised BDSM communities, which have explicit guidelines to promote consensual and "risk aware" behaviour, non-consensual behaviour does occur.

I know that many of us witnessing this trial felt the ache of sadness for Grace and her family, and sadness about the other women and girls who have been killed and harmed by men in their lives. I also felt fury. Fury at the way our society, and most other societies around the world, still promote norms for men and masculinity that can so easily turn toxic and fuel violence. Fury for the misogyny that still channels some of the worst expressions of men's violence towards women, including those they purport to love. And fury about how people within the upper echelons of our criminal justice system are willing to draw on this misogyny to try and cover up other men's violence against women.

A month before he killed Grace Millane, the convicted man had told another woman he met through Tinder that he loved her. He had met her only once before, earlier in the year, but they had not been in regular contact. That night after hours of talking and drinking he went on to violently assault her as she lay on the bed in his shoebox apartment. Facing her feet, he pinned down her forearms with all his weight, and sat on her face with so much force that she could not breathe. She was kicking and struggling with all her might, but he kept pressing down on her. She was terrified she was going to die. Earlier in the evening, he had told her things about himself that scared her. At one point in her evidence, she stopped short, and said she wasn't allowed to speak about that. So the full context of what he had told her seemed to have been suppressed, distorting how much the jury and the public could understand about the context of her fear.

Yet, as all criminal lawyers should know, on the 3rd of December last year the new crime of "Strangulation or suffocation" was added to the Crimes Act. Experts increasingly recognise non-fatal strangulation as a particularly dangerous form of violence committed by men against their intimate partners. As a 2016 New Zealand Law Commission Report noted: "The psychological impact on victims can be devastating. It is often said that, while the abuser may not be intending to kill, he is demonstrating that he can kill. It is unsurprising that strangulation is a uniquely effective form of intimidation, coercion and control."

Repeatedly, Mansfield told this witness her experience was not what she said it was. She was told that she had "exaggerated" what happened, that she wasn't really scared, and that she was being "dramatic". He asked her repeatedly why she did not leave earlier, why she did not raise with him her concern about him having suffocated her. And especially, he asked why she maintained regular text message contact with him over the following month. "You wanted to portray yourself as a bit of a victim", he callously told her. As he repeated this line of "questioning" ad nauseum, it suggested he understood little about the dynamics of men's violence against women. His line of questioning suggested he did not understand how threat manifests for a woman who has been violently assaulted. He appeared not to comprehend that a woman might behave differently in assessing danger, safety, and risk. He appeared not to comprehend that she might have a more attuned ability than him to read the signs of danger, that that this woman had accurately assessed the defendant as a tinderbox man, prone to unpredictable explosive violence.

As this woman pointed out through her evidence, the defendant knew a lot about her and her movements. She knew he would be able to find her, and she worried that if she cut him off cold he would show up in her life. Encountering a violent man on a Tinder date is a modern form of risk. We need to be able to turn our heads towards understanding what survival skills would look like in that particular kind of mediated relationship. As this woman later placated him, keeping him at a safe distance, while managing to avoid him in person, she was able to diffuse or delay the risk of him stalking her or turning up in person in her life. These actions make perfect sense as a modern form of self-defence for our modern technology-mediated social world.

Near the end of the trial, I heard a man leaving the public gallery say that the lack of evidence of defensive wounds on Grace's body was a major problem for the Crown's case. For him to have been able to infer that this might suggest she was consenting to being strangled was for me the final straw in showing how little is understood about men's violence against women. As defence lawyers would know, lack of evidence of defensive wounds does not mean a woman did not attempt to defend herself physically. But we also know that women cannot always defend themselves physically because they are literally paralysed by terror. We also know that sometimes in the face of violence a woman will attempt to survive by going still in the hope that the man attacking her will have a change of heart or think his job's done and stop in time. Anyone who can put themselves in the shoes of a woman who is being restrained and strangled by a man who is much bigger than her should be able to understand these things.

In delivering their unanimous guilty verdict, the jury in this case made the right decision. The evidence was substantial, intricate and compelling. But in my view the smoke and mirrors defence, which has been broadcast around the world, stands in the public record as a shameful repository of ignorance about the intricacies of sex, gender, power and violence. Sadly, that works against the very progress we need to eradicate patriarchal messages about men's sexual dominance and entitlements that help to create tinderbox men in the first place.

That is why, despite the risk adding to the unfair scrutiny on Grace Millane's life and the women who gave evidence in this trial, I am writing about it. Not only did they not deserve the convicted man's fatal and life-threatening violence, they also did not deserve to be met by such ignorance and disrespect in a court of law.