A CUMBRIAN man who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman with a large carving knife has been found not guilty.

The verdict which cleared 59-year-old Michael Myers was delivered this afternoon at Carlisle Crown Court after a four-day trial which featured evidence from both the defendant and the alleged victim.

Earlier in the case, the jury heard that the alleged victim had arrived at Kendal Police Station in the early hours of September 18, 2021, and told the officers there that she had been “raped with a knife."

She told police that Mr Myers assaulted her after she refused to have sex with him.

Mr Myers, of Windermere Road, Kendal, who had been drinking with the woman on the night of the incident, told the jury he had no memory of what happened after he returned with the woman to his flat.

The jury was told that knife involved – a carving knife with an eight-inch long blade – had to be surgically removed from the woman by doctors at a Preston hospital. She suffered a small internal cut.

During his 64-minute-long police interview, Mr Myers said he had been drinking lager that evening and had no memory of going into his kitchen to get a knife, though he did accept the blade was from his kitchen.

“None of it makes any bloody sense at all,” he told police officers.

Mr Myers also said that he would deserve to be hanged if he had done what the woman had accused him of, adding: “It’s barmy.” He added: “I can’t say I’ve definitely not done it; but I’m not saying I have.”

The defendant insisted that he had no idea how the knife came to be inside the woman.

When challenged about his comment at the police station, when he told the police that he could not say he had definitely not used the knife on the woman, he said: “I was stressed out.”

The prosecution offered no evidence on a second allegation that Mr Myers had intentionally wounded the same woman. The identity of the alleged victim in the case is permanantly protected by law.