In your analogy, you assume that you already know a murder happened, and it's a question of who did it. Obviously words matter there.

But for antitrust it's using words to try to show that a crime even happened at all.

That's definitely weirder -- more like if Tom said he killed Fred, but we don't really know who Fred is or whether he is alive or not, and we still put Tom on trial using a series of his statements.