Tyler Clementi.

This was no innocent college prank.

Prosecutors yesterday opened the sensational hate-crimes trial of a former Rutgers University freshman — who allegedly cyberbullied his gay roommate until the young man jumped off the George Washington Bridge — by describing him as a bigot whose actions were “malicious.”

“These acts were purposeful,” Middlesex County First Prosecutor Julia McClure told a rapt New Jersey jury hearing the case against 19-year-old Dharun Ravi.

“They were intentional. They were planned. And they were malicious.”

Ravi is facing felony charges of bias intimidation and invasion of privacy.

Prosecutors say Ravi went beyond the bounds of decency — and the law — when he remotely triggered his computer video camera in his dorm room two years ago, simulcasting a gay tryst between his roommate and another man for five other students, the prosecutor said.

Ravi then tweeted about the encounter, and urged dorm mates and friends to tune in for the next encounter two days later.

The roommate, tragic Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old aspiring violinist, committed suicide just two days after that second tryst — which was not, in fact, broadcast — as gossip about him spread through Rutgers’ Busch Campus dorm in Piscataway.

Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge in September 2010, after leaving a heartbreaking Facebook posting: “Jumping off the gw bridge, sorry.”

Ravi is not charged with causing Clementi’s death. The top charges, two counts of bias intimidation, carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.

“It was like opening the blinds to the window of that room,” the prosecutor told jurors. “And he left the blinds open, and he invited and encouraged others to view.”

Defense lawyers, in turn, are promising jurors that they’ll see no evidence of bigotry.

“He may be stupid at times, but he’s an 18-year-old boy, and he’s certainly not a criminal,” defense lawyer Steven Altman said in his opening statement in the Middlesex County Courthouse.

Defense lawyers effectively used the first three prosecution witnesses yesterday to help their case by getting each of them to say they had never heard Ravi utter a single anti-gay slur.

“He actually told me that Tyler is a nice guy,” the first prosecution witness, Austin Chung, a friend of the defendant, told jurors under cross examination.