Man faces 6 months in prison for disagreeing with feminist on twitter (No joke..)

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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.”

At one point, he told the judge, “It may be that at that meeting, a conspiracy to commit a criminal offence took place — to criminally harass Mr. Elliott, to commit mischief and interfere with his ability to enjoy Twitter.”

Given that all this happened well in advance of the letter being sent — the judge’s announcement and the letter appeared to take both Murphy and Crown attorney Marnie Goldenberg completely by surprise — it renders at least some of the writer’s allegations relevant and appears to lend them a little heft.

Were the people at the meeting — all the complainants attended, remember — just talking about what they could do to stem the oft-misogynistic ramblings on Twitter or did they hatch a plan to target Elliott, to make an example of him?

Certainly, the self-possessed Guthrie has admitted to “outing” others she deemed to be creeps.

She was questioned extensively about her decision to publicly shame a 25-year-old man from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., who had invented a “beat up Anita Sarkeesian” video game, where users could punch an image of the feminist video blogger until the screen, and her face, turned red.

Guthrie had wondered aloud on the web if she should blow the whistle on the man, or, as she put it, “So I found the Twitter account of that f— listed as creator of the ‘punch a woman in the face’ game,” she tweeted. “Should I sic the Internet on him?”

When the answer was a resounding “Yes!,” she tweeted a link to the story about the game “to prospective Sault Ste. Marie employers” and the local newspaper.

As Murphy put it to her in January, “This was another case that rose to the level where you agreed with online vigilantism” and accused her of wanting to ruin the man’s life.

“I was simply making people aware,” Guthrie replied, but she acknowledged if others took action that ruined his life, “I would not feel sorry about that.”