A children's football coach has won a £112,000 payout after a vindictive bouncer threw him out a bar "like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon".
Lee Jarvis was left unable to train kids after the seemingly unprompted assault at McQueen's bar in London's trendy Shoreditch left him with a badly injured knee.
The 40-year-old had been minding his business having a drink with a pal back in 2012 when he claimed a doorman marched up from nowhere and chucked him out onto the street via a fire escape.
Lee's injuries caused "massive disruption" to his career, he said, and the coach - who runs AJ Soccer in Harrow, north London - had to give up "hands-on coaching" due to his "very significant, intrusive and disabling symptoms".
A judge branded the assault, which was captured on CCTV, as "unjustifiable", likening it to something from "an excerpt from a Tom and Jerry cartoon".
The security firm which employed the bouncer, M Zurich Europe Ltd, was ordered to shell out £112,000 in damages to Mr Jarvis over the assault at Central London county court this week.
The court heard Mr Jarvis feared losing his livelihood altogether following the assault, for which he himself was prosecuted over the bouncer's very different version of events.
Mr Jarvis had thrown a punch at one of the bouncers after getting up from the ground, but a magistrate in April 2016 accepted that he was acting in lawful self-defence when he did this, finding him not guilty of assault.
His barrister Adam Samuel said the entire case had resulted in "humiliation, distress, indignity and injury to his feelings".
In the county court hearing, Judge Nigel Gerald said: "That caused him unnecessary stress because he was literally fighting for his livelihood and a job for which he had a great passion".
The fracas resulted in a mensical tear to Mr Jarvis' left knee, forcing him to stand down from active coaching and slashing his income.
"He suffered from a significant adjustment disorder with anxiety, which was acute for six months, and exacerbated temporarily - with the stress of criminal proceedings - giving rise to a total of nine months clinically significant symptoms in total", Mr Samuel added.
M Zurich Europe Ltd was found liable for his injuries at a previous civil trial in April 2019, but - until Judge Gerald's ruling - still disputed the amount of compensation claimed.
Judge Gerald - presiding over the damages trial - said he had seen CCTV footage of the ejection incident which showed Mr Jarvis being chucked out "like something out of a cartoon".
He said he would try the case on the basis that Mr Jarvis acted in self-defence when he lashed out at the doormen, adding: "I will proceed on the basis that the defendant and not Mr Jarvis was at fault, and I will proceed on the basis that the defendants acted improperly in assaulting him".
And he concluded that Mr Jarvis had been on the receiving end of an "unwarranted prosecution" and that he was "put through the wringers" by M Zurich Europe.
"Mr Jarvis feels deeply wronged by the defendants," said the judge.
"It seems very obvious that the reason he feels so deeply wronged isn't just because the career he loved in life was taken away from his by an unjustifiable assault - but also because he then had his whole career challenged by an unwarranted criminal prosecution, and then by a trial on liability on an issue which had no proper basis."
