‘Justice has been served’ – Nikita Hand ‘overwhelmed’ by support as Conor McGregor told to pay her close to €250,000 in damages
‘Justice has been served’ – Nikita Hand ‘overwhelmed’ by support as Conor McGregor told to pay her close to €250,000 in damages
Conor McGregor (right) and partner Dee Devlin (left) leave court, followed by McGregor's father Tony (back, centre) after a jury found against the MMA star in a civil rape case taken by Nikita Hand. Photo: PA
A High Court jury has found Conor McGregor assaulted Nikita Hand, and has awarded her over €248,603 in damages.
It did not find she had been assaulted by his friend James Lawrence.
The verdict was arrived at shortly before 5pm today after the jury deliberated for six hours and ten minutes.
The jury awarded Ms Hand €60,000 in general damages and €188,603 in special damages.
Mr McGregor, who was surrounded by family and friends, sat with his head bowed as the verdict was returned.
Ms Hand burst into tears when the verdict was read.
Outside the court she said she hopes the case sent a message to victims of sexual assault that “you can stand up for yourself if something happens to you, no matter who the person is”. She added “justice has been served”.
Mr McGregor left the court in a chauffeur driven Rolls Royce without making any comment.
Ms Hand (35), a hair colourist from Drimnagh in Dublin, had sued Mr McGregor (36) and Mr Lawrence (35) for damages, alleging she was raped by both men in a penthouse suite at the Beacon Hotel in Dublin on December 9, 2018.
The verdict came after a three-week trial during which both Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence denied raping Ms Hand and insisted they had consensual sex with her.
When the verdict came down, Mr McGregor was accompanied in court by his fiancée Dee Devlin, with whom he shares four children, his father Tony, mother Margaret and sister Aoife. Also present was well known mixed martial arts coach John Kavanagh.
Ms Hand was accompanied in court by her mother Debbie and her partner, as she has been throughout the trial.
Afterwards she was very emotional as she thanked the judge, jury and gardaí for their efforts as well as the medical team who treated her.
Ms Hand said: “I want to thank my partner Gary who has been so supportive for the last four years and held my hand throughout this trial every day and every other day.”
She said has been “overwhelmed” by the support received and now hopes to “move on and look forward to the future with my family and friends and daughter”.
The mother-of-one had given tearful evidence that she was “brutally raped and battered” by Mr McGregor that afternoon after going to the hotel with him, Mr Lawrence and her work colleague Danielle Kealey.
She claimed he wouldn’t take no for an answer when she rejected his sexual advances, and that he choked her three times on a bed as she bit him and tried to fight him off.
“I just let him do whatever he needed to do so I could survive,” she said.
Ms Hand testified that at one point she thought she was going to die and never see her young daughter again.
The two women had been out all night at an alcohol and cocaine-fuelled Christmas party and wanted to continue partying into the next day.
Mr McGregor, who had also been out socialising all night, had picked them up from the salon where they worked around 10am that morning after an exchange of messages with Ms Hand on Instagram.
They knew each other as they were both from the same part of Dublin and moved in the same social circles. She had shared a photo of herself in a red jump suit. Mr McGregor said it was “a nice picture” and “slightly provocative”.
Ms Hand alleged the rape took place at the hotel some time between 12.30pm and 6pm.
The jury heard evidence that a tampon was wedged so far inside her vagina it needed to be removed with a forceps in the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit of the Rotunda Hospital, where she presented in a terrified state the following day.
They were also shown photos take by gardaí two days after the events in the hotel of Ms Hand’s badly bruised body.
Ms Hand said she had no recollection of having sex with Mr Lawrence after Mr McGregor and Ms Kealey later left the hotel. She described Mr Lawrence’s account as “a made-up story”.
Her lawyers put forward the theory that Mr Lawrence, who came forward to gardaí a day after they had interviewed Mr McGregor in January 2019, was lying and acted as a “a fall guy” or “patsy” the mixed martial arts star.
Both men rejected this theory. Mr McGregor denied they had been “in cahoots” but accepted he paid for Mr Lawrence’s lawyers.
Mr Lawrence had insisted “no man would put himself up for raping a woman”.
Mr McGregor also denied that he had booked the hotel suite so he could have sex with women after nightclubbing.
It was put to him that after the nightclub “girls” went home, Ms Hand became “the substitute”. The UFC fighter rejected this, saying he had often booked hotel rooms rather than going home so he could rest, freshen up, go to the gym and have breakfast.
Mr Lawrence gave evidence that he heard and saw Ms Hand having “pleasurable sex” with Mr McGregor in the penthouse bedroom while he and Ms Kealey had sex on a sofa bed in the adjoining sitting room.
The jury of four men and eight women retired to consider their verdict at 3.03pm on Thursday.
Just before they retired, Mr Justice Alexander Owens reminded them that the onus of proof was on Ms Hand, the burden of proof was the balance of probabilities and that in coming to the conclusions they were to look at the evidence.
The broke from their deliberations at 4pm yesterday and resumed again at 10am this morning.
The jury had four questions to answer. The first of these was: “Did Conor McGregor assault Nikita Hand?” The second was: “Did James Lawrence assault Nikita Hand?”
They were instructed that if the answer to either of these questions was “yes” they were to move on to additional questions about the assessment of damages under various headings – general, special, aggravated and exemplary damages in respect of Mr McGregor and general, aggravated, and exemplary damages in respect of Mr Lawrence.
It emerged during the trial that Ms Hand first contacted solicitors about bringing a claim in October 2020, some months after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to bring charges due to doubts that a criminal conviction could be achieved.
The DPP’s decision was based on concerns about the consistency and reliability of witnesses, the fact Ms Hand had no recollection of having sex with Mr Lawrence, the amount of alcohol and drugs she consumed, and her demeanour in CCTV footage.
Lawyers for Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence said her behaviour in the footage, where she was shown behaving affectionately towards the two men and Mr Lawrence in particular, was not consistent with someone who had just been raped.
Ms Hand’s counsel John Gordon SC countered that she had been “full of drink and drugs” and in a state of elation or delayed shock.
The defence in the case also zeroed in on lies told by Ms Hand to her then partner about her whereabouts and who she was with, inviting the jury to consider why she had lied to him.
They also highlighted inconsistencies in her story, including how she had told a friend she had fled fearing she would be gang-raped by McGregor’s security detail.
Ms Kealey appeared as a defence witness. She said Ms Hand and Mr McGregor went into the penthouse bedroom and that when they emerged later “everything was fine”.
She said she was surprised when Ms Hand told her the next day that she had been raped in the bedroom as she hadn’t seen anything.
Under cross-examination she admitted she had lied to gardaí by not telling them she had sex with Mr Lawrence in the other room of the penthouse.
She said she later “corrected this with gardaí” and hadn’t mentioned it initially because she didn’t feel it was anything to do with the case.
The court heard Mr McGregor told gardaí he was shocked when detectives showed him photographs of the extent of the bruising on Ms Hand’s body.
Eithne Scully, the paramedic who drove Ms Hand to the hospital, told testified that she hadn’t seen somebody so bruised in a long time.
Both Mr McGregor he and Mr Lawrence denied being responsible for the bruising and said Ms Hand did not have the injuries when they left her company.
But an expert on bruising told the court it could sometimes take between 24 and 48 hours for bruises to appear following a trauma.
Ms Hand’s GP, Dr Emma Quinn, diagnosed internal bruising on her neck ten days after the events in the hotel and said this was consistent with her account of being held forcibly.
Mr McGregor suggested bruising could have been caused by Ms Hand “swan diving” in the bath in the hotel or while she was celebrating her Christmas party.
The jury heard Ms Hand was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, had been unable to return for long to her work in a salon, felt unsafe in her native Drimnagh and no longer lived there.
Ms Hand’s psychiatrist, Dr Ann Leader described her and “a good communicator, a clear historian and a sincere person”.
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