A MARKETING executive has been cleared of attacking and humiliating a businesswoman who met him on a dating website.

John Scott lied about being a former paratrooper in his profile on the Bumble app when he started a seven-month relationship with 48-year-old software entrepreneur Sarah Dodd.

It ended with him giving her a bloody nose and smashing his way back into her home in Newton Abbot by hurling a rattan chair through the glass patio doors after she locked him out.

She fled into the street and was filmed on a police bodycam holding a tissue to her nose. On her 999 call she was recorded screaming with fear and pleading with Scott not to kill her cocker spaniel dog Ronald.

She alleged he had attacked her that night and on two previous occasions over the previous three months.

She told Exeter Crown Court that he had grabbed her wrists and twisted them during an argument at his home in Cornwall and poured wine over her during an earlier row at her home in March.

Ms Dodd also alleged that he tried to poison her dog with chocolate and ripped out internet cables in the earlier incident.

She told the jury that during the final argument he hit her in the face threatened to bury her in the garden, and cut an apron into strips while threatening to tie her up.

Scott, also known as John Hall, aged 43, of Beacon, near Camborne, was cleared of three counts of assault but pleaded guilty to damaging her patio doors and will be sentenced later.

He was acquitted after it emerged Ms Dodd had carried on seeing him after the final argument in April last year and had written two statements asking the police to abandon the case.

The police bodycam footage from the night showed her telling an officer that Scott had hit her in the face as she tried to protect her dog from him

He told the jury the allegations were ‘rubbish’ and ‘ludicrous’ and the injury to her nose happened accidentally as he was trying to get the dog off her bed.

He said he smashed the door when he was locked out of her house because his computer and phone were inside and he needed them to run his six marketing businesses.

Scott accepted his claim to be an ex para was false but described it as a ‘white lie’. He alleged Ms Dodd was drunk during all the arguments, including the incident which led to his arrest.

Judge David Evans told him: ‘My provisional view is that you broke the window because you were attempting to stop her calling the police and I note you received a caution in the past for a domestic assault.

‘The jury have acquitted you of assault and so the criminal damage is the only offence I must sentence you for.’