What part of ‘not guilty’ is unclear?

How fitting that the year should end just as it began, with trial by social media, institutional failure, and the cries of the discredited being treated as serious and worthy.

Jian Ghomeshi, meet John Furlong; Furlong, meet Ghomeshi.

Both men had their proverbial day in court, Ghomeshi in the criminal courts last February at Old City Hall in Toronto, Furlong a few months earlier in Vancouver, when in the fall of 2015 B.C. Supreme Court Judge Catherine Wedge sharply dismissed a defamation lawsuit that had been brought against him by freelance journalist Laura Robinson.

In the former case, Ontario Court Judge Bill Horkins acquitted Ghomeshi of a raft of sexual assault charges with cutting words for his three accusers, who revealed themselves at trial as duplicitous and dishonest and, in the case of two of them, colluding witnesses.

(A fourth case, with a different complainant, was later resolved with a peace bond that saw Ghomeshi apologize for his conduct at the CBC offices.)

In the Furlong matter, Wedge criticized Robinson for acting more as an activist than a journalist in her reporting of allegations of sexual and physical abuse against First Nations students in northern B.C. schools decades earlier. The judge said, of the purported multiple declarations from alleged indigenous victims of Furlong’s alleged abusive conduct, only three had ever been “even minimally tested in a way that we, as a society, believe our system of justice requires when a citizen faces such serious and devastating allegations.”

One of those complainants couldn’t keep her story straight; names and dates changed with every RCMP interview. Another B.C. Supreme Court judge later concluded the woman never attended the school where she says Furlong abused her.

A second woman dropped her civil claim after her criminal complaint was deemed unfounded.

The male complainant, it turned out, already had been compensated to the tune of $120,822 from Ottawa for similar abuse allegedly committed by another man at another school in a different town during the same time period he said Furlong had abused him.

But as Ghomeshi’s ringing acquittal hardly varied the public narrative of #BelieveThe Women, neither did Furlong’s winning of that case, nor the denunciation of his accusers and the writer who had told their story.

Because of what appears to have been a single complaint from sexual assault activist Glynnis Kirchmeier, the University of British Columbia cancelled his planned keynote speech in February.

The university had asked him to speak at the ZLC Millennium Scholarship Breakfast, a fundraising event to finance scholarships for its varsity athletes.

Then, on Dec. 19, Kirchmeier, a UBC alumna who apparently has got the patent on sex assault at the school (her Twitter handle is UBCSexual Assault@ U BCGlynnis) tweeted out her complaint to UBC president Santa Ono and the board of governors.

(Kirchmeier is also a complainant about the school’s handling of sexual assault reports at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal; indeed, her Twitter feed would suggest the issue of sexual assault utterly consumes her.)

Her complaint about Furlong — she demanded the school drop him as the speaker and wants him banned from campus altogether — is simply astonishing.

It’s as if Judge Wedge’s findings never existed. It’s as though Furlong had been found guilty of defaming Robinson (by calling her reckless), or worse, as though he’d been convicted of the purported abuse.

There, attached to Kirchmeier’s three-page letter, among 50-odd pages, are some of the discredited sworn declarations, including the one from the woman whose criminal case was dismissed and who consented to her civil case also being dropped.

The letter itself includes an excerpt from that declaration, and Kirchmeier wrote, “There has never been a forum in which the allegations were tested.”

The woman’s complaint was investigated and police couldn’t substantiate it, in large part because her story shifted so often. That decision was reviewed by the Alberta RCMP, lest the B.C. Mounties had goofed.

The other woman had testified in discovery for her civil claim; at one point, Judge Wedge said, she listed all the schools she’d attended and the one where she alleged Furlong had abused her wasn’t among them. The school register didn’t show her name. The male complainant, attempting to be paid twice, was clearly riding the residential school train.

Yet there was Kirchmeier, coolly asserting that this wasn’t so, and asking, “Why does UBC want to associate with a man whom at least 45 people say abused children,” and worse, far worse, there was UBC cravenly caving to her demands within days.

It is shocking and disgraceful, but hardly surprising, as Jian Ghomeshi could probably tell you. It used to be that even the convicted, the guilty, were deemed worthy of a second act, a second chance. Now, even the acquitted and the vindicated don’t get one.

IT’S AS THOUGH FURLONG HAD BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF DEFAMING ROBINSON.