I never thought I’d be writing this sentence but Livia Firth – you know, married to Colin Firth, romantic hero of the wet white shirt in the lake and the Bridget Jones movies – has accused an Italian childhood friend of stalking her after they’d had an extramarital affair.

This could be a classic ‘he said, she said’ (Marco Brancaccia accuses Livia of inventing the stalking claim to stop him squealing about their liaison) but there’s one critical difference.

This is the #MeToo era. When a woman says a man has done something – almost anything – it carries the thudding inevitability of a jury responding: ‘Guilty!’ It’s trial by hashtag, almost a sentence in itself.

Livia Firth (pictured with husband Colin Firth) has accused a childhood Italian friend of stalking her after they had an extramarital affair

Livia Firth, 48, alleges Marco Brancaccia (pictured) threatened her through telephone calls and texts

In his defence, Brancaccia claims he only sent a couple of texts to Mrs Firth after she ended their affair and one email to her husband (Mr Darcy was ‘understanding’, apparently), but if the case ends up in an Italian court and he is found guilty, he could go to prison for four years. Four years!

Meanwhile, William Freeman, a former director of the Northampton Water Ski Club, has been ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register after planting a kiss on a woman friend’s shoulder and one on her head.

The woman (who cannot be named, as is the way of these things) was pointing out a wasps’ nest when Mr Freeman made his clumsy pass. She recoiled; he apologised. No harm done, you would think. You would be wrong. This is the New Salem, a foreign country where, as my husband puts it, ‘men risk going to prison for being men’.

William Freeman, a former director of the Northampton Water Ski Club, has been ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register after planting a kiss on a woman friend’s shoulder and one on her head

The wasp-nest woman reported Mr Freeman to police and he was arrested. He denied a charge of sexual assault but on the first day of trial he changed his plea to guilty.

The lady judge praised him for ‘accepting responsibility’ and thus sparing his accuser the agony of a trial (the irony…). If I were a man, I would never approach a woman again, let alone try to kiss one.

Consider what the judge told Mr Freeman, a man of such unblemished record that he’d never even had a parking ticket. ‘This was an impulsive act. You have had a very serious lesson taught to you – you do not make advances towards women who don’t want you to.’

I know this will not endear me to the sisterhood so soon after we’ve celebrated International Women’s Day. But it’s Mothering Sunday too, and as the mother of two adult, unmarried sons who do not, so far as I know, have the gift of telepathy when it comes to determining all the opposite sex’s devices and desires, this makes me want to launch the Royal Society for the Protection of Men.

For one thing, the judge in the Freeman case is setting an alarming and impossible precedent. She seems to be ruling that every single woman in receipt of an unwanted advance could result in the giver being placed on the sex offenders’ register.

The problem is, it is a truth universally acknowledged by both sexes that nobody really knows whether an advance is wanted or unwanted until somebody (still usually the man) has made a first, tentative move.

No wonder male-female relations feel so fraught and fragile.

Justice must be done. Women’s voices must be heard. But when women weaponise their voices it can have devastating consequences, and a nasty climate of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ prevailing. If there’s to be a genuine and lasting truce in the Battle of the Sexes, and no backlash, it’s very important that life in the #MeToo era is fair and just to men as well as women. After all, total equality is supposed to be the founding principle of feminism.

The struggle for women’s rights is not over by a long chalk, and I am a proud and active feminist. But I’m a mother too, and I will not stand by and see men persecuted for being men. If you tolerate this, your sons could be next.