Really hope whatever the fuck he sprayed her with was nothing dangerous

That woman telling her to go get checked immediately was right. It’s unlikely, but people have been killed like this before.

Yeah… but on the other hand I can see this becoming a common tactic to prevent people from speaking: spray them with water so they have to leave the event to get checked out, while the perpetrator faces relatively light charges because it wasn’t actually dangerous.

Wouldn’t work. Bring a fake bomb strapped to your chest to a town hall and you don’t get a lighter sentence just because it wasn’t a real bomb. Pretend terrorism is treated the same as real terrorism.

Because that’s an explicit threat. Spraying water is—at least on the face of it—a step below throwing rotten fruit or creme pies or fake blood: you can always claim it was meant to be symbolic.

Edit for clarification: The point is, you can deliberately make it as non-threatening as possible, and it may be obvious to everyone that it’s not a threat—but if there’s a protocol to always check anyway, you’re shutting the speaker down by exploiting the protocol rather than the threat.