Law student is spared jail after smashing a champagne bottle into the face of male model
A WOULD-BE lawyer who twice ‘clubbed’ an aspiring male model in the face with a champagne bottle grinned gleefully after being spared jail.
Sarah McKenzie-Ayres, 19, left her victim streaming with blood as his forehead was cut ‘to the bone’ in the nightclub attack, a court heard.
The two blows caused permanent scarring which has wrecked his hopes of a modelling career. Yet despite a judge branding the violence ‘extraordinarily extreme’, McKenzie- Ayres walked free from court with a suspended sentence after claiming he had been bothering her.
McKenzie-Ayres, who is studying law in Leeds, was pictured grinning broadly as she left court.
The teenager was on a night out with friends at the Venus nightclub in Manchester in the early hours of September 14 last year.
She was standing near the dance floor close to a table where her unnamed 19-year-old victim’s group had a bottle of champagne, Neil Beckwith, prosecuting, told Manchester Crown Court.
McKenzie-Ayres started ranting and pushed a reveller. Then she turned on the victim and accused him of bumping into the back of her friend.
When he denied touching her, she ordered him to move. She then pushed him backwards and swung the champagne bottle into his face ‘like a club’.
‘He had a glimpse of her with the bottle of champagne in her right hand, raised overhead, and she then struck him to the forehead,’ Mr Beckwith said.
‘He noticed immediately blood was
‘Blood was pouring down his face’
pouring down his face, raised his hand and felt what he believed to be bone.’
But staff stopped McKenzie-Ayres and took her picture as she tried to leave. They showed it to the victim who identified her and she was arrested.
In a statement to the court, the father of the victim said: ‘He was looking to pursue a modelling career.
‘But he’s now lost any confidence in pursuing that and he’s very self-conscious of facial scars. The incident has traumatised him greatly.’
Virginia Hayton, defending, said she was remorseful. ‘It’s clear that this is very much out of character for this young woman,’ she said.
Sentencing her, Judge David Stockdale, QC, said the violence she used that night had been ‘extraordinarily extreme’.
McKenzie-Ayres, of Hyde, Greater Manchester, was spared jail after admitting grievous bodily harm and given 16 months detention, suspended for two years, with 150 hours unpaid work.
In an email to the Daily Mail, she claimed her victim ignored ‘multiple’ requests to move and said she felt threatened by him being ‘in my space and being so close to me’.