What was judge’s purview?

Why would a veteran judge tee off on a man he was convicting of sexual assault and rail against him as though he were indistinguishable from a vicious serial rapist like Paul Bernardo?

Was there something inherently sneer-worthy about the man or his story?

Was the man’s version of events — that the sex between him and the victim had been consensual — so outlandish that it was worthy of contempt?

The answers are: Who knows, no and no.

Having sat in Ontario Court Justice Marvin Zuker’s courtroom in downtown Toronto one day each this week and last — Monday, he revoked Mustafa Ururyar’s bail and sent him off to jail to await his sentencing this fall, and the previous Thursday, he convicted the 29-year-old Ururyar of raping 28-year-old Mandi Gray — I was curious.

I feared I was operating in the dark.

The massively scrutinized sex assault trial of former CBC star Jian Ghomeshi had begun in the same building on the same day Ururyar’s trial started. There were huge lineups outside the building, but not for Ururyar’s case.

Like most of my colleagues in the press, I covered the Ghomeshi trial.

So when I heard Zuker twice go out of his way to berate Ururyar, I thought perhaps I’d missed something significant by not hearing the evidence, and that the clue to the judge’s fury would be there.

I ordered the transcripts of every day of the trial before Zuker (court sat most of six full days) and of the bail revocation hearing. I have now read every word that was said in court.

In fact, the Ururyar-Gray case was entirely typical of a crime about which only two people usually know the truth — and in my own experience, sometimes not even them.

The two were both PhD students and teaching assistants at York University on Jan. 31 last year, when the assault took place. They had a two-week consensual, casual sexual relationship that consisted mostly of infrequent texts to arrange hookups.

She said it all turned sour during a night of drinking after a union meeting (York’s TAs were about to go on strike). Ururyar had agreed she could stay over at his flat, she said, but when in the wee hours they closed the last bar and a girlfriend didn’t join them at his place and instead hopped a cab, he turned furious.

He’d wanted a threesome with her friend, she said, and in his anger, called her a needy, drunken slut and on the 20-minute walk to his apartment, stripped her of self-esteem.

Once they were in the door, he forced her to perform fellatio and then raped her, telling her, “This is the last time I’m going to f--k you and you’re going to like it.”

Drunk, vulnerable, crying, Gray fell asleep. Nonsense, said Ururyar. Gray invited him to the bar, sending a text that said, “Come drink and then we can have hot sex.”

Once he got there, he said, Gray was fondling his leg under the table. Public displays of affection weren’t his style, and he asked her to stop. She did, but at the next bar, groped him again, and again, he asked her to stop.

They walked to his apartment, and once there, Gray crawled into bed first and he joined her. He told her, he said, that they should be friends from now on, that his girlfriend (with whom he had an “open” arrangement that allowed them to see and sleep with others while she was living in Montreal) would be returning to Toronto in April and their sexual relationship would end then anyway.

Gray was upset, he said, but they kissed and then she performed fellatio and they had sex.

The only evidence supporting either of their stories — and arguably, it supported both versions — were some texts Gray sent a friend the next morning.

“Why do I meet abusive psychos?” she wrote the woman. “Last night, Mustafa f--ked me and I didn’t want to.

“Like, if you don’t consent to sex but you don’t not consent, I don’t know what that is.”

“That’s rape, for real,” said her friend.

(This is an abbreviated version of the texts. Gray also told the friend Ururyar had wanted a threesome.)

Within two days, Gray duly got a rape kit test done at hospital, took the emer-