LAST UPDATE | 19 Nov
CONOR MCGREGOR’S BARRISTER has told a High Court jury in the civil case against him that he is not asking them to like his client, but that he is asking them to “look at the evidence” in the case.
Nikita Hand (Ní Laimhín) alleges that McGregor “sexually assaulted her, and in effect, raped her” in a hotel penthouse in Dublin on 9 December 2018, and that a second defendant, James Lawrence, of Rafter’s Road, Drimnagh, “did likewise”, Mr Justice Alexander Owens told the jury on the first day of the civil trial.
The allegations in the action, which were brought against McGregor in 2021, are fully denied.
The evidence in the case concluded last week, and both sides began their closing arguments in court today.
Beginning his closing argument, Remy Farrell SC, for McGregor, invited the jury to consider the evidence in the case.
He told the court that the case was not about “some kind of hot take” or “what colour writers in newspapers will say it’s about”.
“This case doesn’t get reduced to a soundbite. This case is about the evidence and nothing but the evidence,” Farrell said.
He said the jury could not give a verdict on their feelings or on the fact that they “may not like Mr McGregor”.
He described McGregor as somebody who is probably hard to avoid and somebody who elicits strong views.
“Some people love him, some people very much do not love him, there’s no getting away from that,” he said.
He also described McGregor as someone who is not hesitant in coming forwards with his own views.
“Some of you, all of you for all I know, may have negative views about Mr McGregor. You may have an active dislike of him, some of you might even loathe him, there’s no point in suggesting the situation may be otherwise,” Farrell said.
The barrister also said that the great strength of a jury is that “we don’t question your views”.
He said that when McGregor gave his evidence and referred to “two lovely ladies, we do hear the intake of breath from the jury box”.
Farrell said the jury may have wondered at the “apparently self-effacing version of himself that he’s a prideful person” and that they may not have appreciated the hand gestures in relation to what he said was a provocative picture that was sent to him by Hand.
He said the jury may be unimpressed with the picture of a man that leaves his family home on a Saturday and ends up drinking with women in hotel penthouses.
“These are all aspects of Mr McGregor’s behaviour that might not endear him to you,” Farrell said.
“I’m not asking you to like Mr McGregor. I’m asking you to look at the evidence. Should it matter that Mr McGregor might be somebody that some of you, maybe all of you, don’t like?
“Does it mean you don’t give his case the same consideration that you might give to other cases?
“If there’s one thing you listen to, and you listen to nothing else, I ask you to work your way methodically through the evidence.”
Farrell urged the jury to look at the CCTV that was shown in court and suggested that it may be useful to cross-reference the footage with the text messages that were sent by Hand on the day of the alleged assault, “and work out exactly what is happening at different points in time”.
“These are the bits in the case that cannot be contested,” he said, adding that it was “a useful place to start”.
Farrell said that the jury should not be “concerned with the consequences” of the outcome of the case.
“If you find for Mr McGregor, that will be devastating for Ms Hand. If you find for Ms Hand, that will be devastating for Mr McGregor. There’s no getting away from that,” he said.
“The reason I’m saying you have to ignore the consequences is because this is about the evidence, the evidence, the evidence.”
He said the jury can’t approach the case “by thinking ‘who would I like to win’”.
“It’s not easy to ignore what the consequences of your decision might be, but that goes with the oath,” he said.
Farrell told the jury that the first question that they must consider goes back to what John Gordon said on the first day of the trial, when he said that the case was “really very simple”, that there was a single issue of rape and that there was “a lot of noise surrounding” the case.
“Having heard the evidence, do you think that’s right? Do you think all the other stuff is just noise?” Farrell asked.
He said that the CCTV, the texts from Hand to her former partner, the evidence from Danielle Kealey and from James Lawrence was not “just noise”.
He said he was sure that some of the jurors would have asked themselves what the position would be in the case if the CCTV hadn’t been there and if Gardaí hadn’t realised that the hotel in question was the Beacon and not the Morgan.
Farrell said that it is a fact that in her text messages to her former partner, Hand is lying about the events take took place. He said it is “a notable feature” of Hand’s case that her former partner was not called to give evidence.
He told the jury to consider “the sheer number of lies” in the recording that Hand’s former partner made when she returned home on the night of 9 December 2018.
He said that Hand had said in her evidence that it is “not a crime to lie to your boyfriend”. He said that we all lie, but “what I suggest to you is much more interesting is why somebody is telling a lie”.
He asked the jury to consider why Hand had told her former partner she was going into town and why she said she was in the Morgan Hotel. He said that throughout that exchange with her former partner, Hand “is clearly aware she’s telling lies”.
He told the jury that they are in a privileged position because they can “actually observe the plaintiff direct for yourselves on the CCTV in the aftermath of what she alleges happened”.
He said the CCTV is not just the immediate aftermath, “it’s for hours, several hours”.
He asked the jury: “Which is more useful to you in terms of assessing the plaintiff’s consistency and credibility? The CCTV from immediately after the events she alleges and for hours after, or the CCTV from the ambulance? What is more indicative of what’s said to have occurred? Is the CCTV from the Beacon noise and the ambulance not noise?”
Farrell said it is “quite apparent” from Hand’s evidence “that she sought to airbrush Danielle Kealey out of the evidence”. He said that Hand declined to name Kealey when speaking to Gardaí and when she was at the Rotunda Hospital Sexual Assault Treatment Unit (SATU).
He put it to the jury that Kealey told the court during her evidence that Hand wanted to remain in the Beacon Hotel. “Is all that just noise or is it evidence?”
Farrell told the jury that they had heard about a scratch on Hand’s breast that was caused by a watch. He said this was presented to the jury “as if it was an obvious and devastating point”.
He said that when Hand made a statement to Gardaí, she couldn’t remember if she was wearing a watch or not. He said the watch was a detail that had been “latched onto” Hand’s case.
Referring to Hand asking friends to delete their text messages, he asked the jury if it suggests “an awareness on the part of Ms Hand to destroy evidence, or at least curate it?”.
He said that Hand not wanting to press charges against McGregor initially is “not an excuse that stands up to scrutiny”.
“Somebody who doesn’t want to press charges, that’s a woman’s decision. Why would they need to go around deleting text messages?”. Farrell suggested to the jury that it was “curious” which text messages were not deleted.
Farrell told the jury that the question of memory is “fundamental” to Hand’s account. He said that Hand had told the court during her evidence that there “are just certain things that I remember and then there are certain things that are just gone from my brain”.
Farrell said he was suggesting to the jury that Hand has given “a very carefully curated account”. He said it is “probably improbable” that somebody remembers an assault but fails to remember all of the other bits and pieces around it.
Concluding, he reminded the jury of his point at the beginning of his closing arguments that many of the jury members may not like McGregor.
“If this was anybody other than Mr McGregor, would the door of the jury room hit you on the backside before you were out to dismiss this case?”
In his closing remarks, John Gordon SC, for Hand, told the jury that they had witnessed “a lot of evidence”. He said they had witnessed some anger, some vitriol and “what I would suggest to you is serial lying”.
Gordon told the jury that there is “a rock sitting in the middle of this case” which both defendants’ counsel have “sailed around because they can’t face the rock”.
“What is the rock? On the evening of 9 December 2018, my client was beaten up. Badly beaten up, and the best that Mr Farrell can come up with is to suggest that there are inconsistencies and lies in relation to her account to her partner, etc.,” Gordon said.
He told the court that initially, McGregor, “seemed to be making the case that this was just fun, athletic sex”.
“But of course, in the course of his evidence to this court, he changed his story. His evidence now is – and he said it more than once – there was no tampon. None of this happened,” Gordon said.
“There was even a little trip into the possibility of a third man, maybe this all happened somewhere between the hotel and when she ended up in Eimer’s [Brennan] house.”
He said it is “extremely significant” that so much of McGregor’s evidence “wasn’t put to my client, which is normally what you’re supposed to do”.
Gordon said that McGregor “obviously thought as the case approached that there was going to be a problem over the tampon and the severity of the injuries”.
He told the court that during his initial interview with Gardaí, McGregor made a short statement which had been prepared with a solicitor, and that it wasn’t until he had seen photographs of Hand’s injuries that he returned to give another statement.
Gordon said that in this statement, McGregor said “he was shocked at the injuries, he didn’t do it and he speculated that somebody else did”.
“Because of course it was at that point that McGregor, for the first time, had to face up to what he had done. Because he did it, and what he did was savage.”
Gordon reminded the jury of the evidence given by Eithne Scully, the paramedic who attended to Hand in the ambulance on the morning of 10 December 2018, who told the court that she hadn’t “seen somebody so bruised in a long time”.
He also referred to Dr Daniel Kane’s evidence, where he said he had never encountered someone with a tampon “wedged” in their vagina after sexual intercourse in the 340 forensic examinations that he had performed.
“Let’s put it this way: somebody did it. It happened in the Beacon Hotel. It was Mr McGregor,” Gordon told the court.
He said that during the course of McGregor’s evidence, “you will have noticed that at one point having given very bland evidence for quite some time, the mask slipped”.
“He lost his temper, and what did we witness? You witnessed it. A stream of invective aimed directly at my client across the courtroom. What does that tell you about Mr McGregor?”.
Gordon told the jury that they were not just making a decision based on the documented evidence, but on their assessment of the demeanour of the witnesses.
Gordon told the jury that Hand “was no angel” and that she was out to have a good time until “things went badly wrong”.
He said that Hand told McGregor that she did not want to have sex with him as she had a tampon in.
“She said in her evidence she would not have sex during her period and she would not have sex with a tampon in,” Gordon said, telling the jury that McGregor “wouldn’t take no for an answer”.
He said McGregor had a plan to rent the room for the purposes of bringing girls back to have sex and that it was a plan that he had made earlier that day. He said that when McGregor was out partying on the night of 8 December 2018, he was with a group of friends, including two girls.
Gordon told the court that these girls went home and that Hand was “the substitute”.
He told the court that McGregor had to move from his account of athletic sex because he realised that that didn’t really answer the case and he had decided to “jot some more possibilities into the equation”.
“These are possibilities that he kept to himself until he was here in court,” Gordon said, citing McGregor’s evidence that Hand had taken a “swan-dive” into the bathtub in the penthouse suite and that she “was out for three days and she probably got knocked about”.
“Thank goodness you have the common sense to realise that you’d been sold a pup by this arrogant man,” Gordon said.
He said that McGregor, “far from dealing with it, in fact has run away from it in his first statement to the guards and he ran away from it again in this courtroom, because there is no answer to his appalling behaviour”.
Gordon said there is a “litany” of “corroborative evidence” and “professional evidence” which confirms his client’s story, what has happened to her and the effect it has had on her.
He referenced to evidence given by her GP, Dr Frank Clarke, and psychiatrist Dr Ann Leader, who each told the court that Hand suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“What causes PTSD? A violent assault. That has not been challenged so you leave here on the basis that my client suffered PTSD, on the basis that that was caused by a violent assault. The defendants did not call a psychiatrist. They could have. The defendants did not call the vocational assessor. They could have. I suggest to you the only reason they didn’t call any of these professional people is that they knew they would agree with my professional people.”
Gordon said the facts in the case “are straightforward and simple and incontrovertible”.
“Insofar as there has been any attempt at dealing with this case, it is built on trying to throw as much dust in your eyes as possible,” he said.
He told the court that Lawrence came forward after McGregor’s interviews with Gardaí. He told the jury that they know Lawrence went to the same solicitors as McGregor and that McGregor has paid his legal fees. “So we may assume that Lawrence was in cahoots with McGregor from the word go,” he told the jury.
“But even though he went to the solicitors within a couple of days, he didn’t actually turn up to give a statement until 18 January 2019. At that point, he drops in a little hand grenade that he had sex with my client as well.”
Gordon told the court that Lawrence described this in his statement to Gardaí as “soft sex”, before asking: “Why would you throw in the word soft? You’d throw it in because you are now aware, you’ve seen all the photographs, that this lady had been badly beaten up and you throw in the word soft to distance yourself, but at the same time, confuse the narrative. Make her out to be an even bigger hussy that you’re trying to say she is anyway. That’s dreadful conduct.”
He told the jury that it is “quite clear” through using their common sense “that these two chaps have been in collusion throughout, and they are continuing to be in collusion to give you the impression that my client, in some way, was completely unaffected by her encounter with Mr McGregor and therefore, really nothing happened”.
“Of course, that flies in the face of the rock of what actually happened,” Gordon continued.
He told the jury that Lawrence “seems to have bought into this idea” by McGregor that Hand was not wearing a tampon, and that he “made it a big issue” in his evidence to the court, telling the court that there was no tampon and it was “broad daylight”.
“He made it a cornerstone of his evidence – evidence that was never put to my client by Mr Farrell. A whole new version of events, and it has to be a lie,” Gordon said.
He said that rather than calling Hand a liar “venomously and otherwise” in the course of his evidence, “the liar here is Mr McGregor, who doesn’t have the courage, who doesn’t have the decency to own up to what he did”.
“This is a man who lives by the media, who thrives by the media. What he should have done, I would suggest, if he was a man at all, is apologise to my client for what he did to her. But he’s not a man. He’s a coward. A devious coward, and you should treat him for what he is.”
Referring to his client’s evidence, Gordon said that McGregor put Hand in a stranglehold three times and said “now you know what it was like in the octagon where I tapped out three times”.
He said two months before the alleged assault, McGregor had lost an MMA fight in Las Vegas where he was beaten in the match because his opponent put him in a stranglehold and he had to tap out.
“So you can imagine what was going through Mr McGregor’s mind when he said that. He was in some temper and he was taking it out on my client, come hell or high water,” Gordon told the jury.
He said that Hand was “all over the place” when she arrived at Eimer Brennan’s home on the night of 9 December 2018. “Of course her account was a bit all over the place when she finally gets to talk to somebody,” he told the court. “How would you feel if somebody had done that, would you be cool, calm and collected? Of course you wouldn’t.”
Gordon said it was clear from the recording of Hand that was made by her former partner in the early hours of 10 December 2018 that both of them were beside themselves. “She was determined not to tell him [who had assaulted her]. She was frightened and the fact that she was frightened came up again and again in the course of the evidence,” he told the court.
He said that Hand had deleted text messages and photographs taken of her injuries by Eimer Brennan because she was frightened and wanted to “forget about the whole thing”, but she couldn’t because Gardaí were now involved. He said Hand gave Gardaí her phone and “did everything she could” to try and assist them even though she was frightened.
He said that whatever the jury might think of Hand’s social habits or other aspects of the case, “the one thing you know is that she has courage. She had the courage to see it through.”
He said she was disappointed when the DPP decided not to prosecute and it was only in 2020 that she instructed her solicitors to take steps to form a civil case.
“This was and remains her only avenue to vindication,” Gordon said, adding that if anybody is to be vindicated, “it’s my client”.
He told the jury that the abuse of his client “didn’t just happen in the hotel” and that it had continued throughout the court hearing where there was “arrogant, distasteful and dishonest testimony from the defendant”.
He told the jury about how the defence had been framed and how they claimed that the case had been taken in bad faith and was “extortion”.
He told the jury that they had heard that Hand no longer lives in the same area. “You know that she lives in fear and you are entitled to consider that as part of your assessment of damages”.
He said there is “no magic wand” and that receiving vindication from the jury is a huge step, “but it does not change the fact that she will live with this for the rest of her days. It doesn’t change the fact that she will always be a marked woman because she stood up to Conor McGregor”.
Mr Justice Alexander Owens’s charge to the jury began this afternoon following closing arguments.
He told the jury that their role is as judges of fact in the case. He said they must be objective, eliminate bias and look calmly at the evidence.
He told the jury that everybody who comes into the court is equal in accordance with law and deserves to be treated with respect and cannot be viewed with any prejudice.
Mr Justice Owens explained to the jury that they are being asked to decide if Conor McGregor assaulted Nikita Hand, and equally if James Lawrence assaulted Nikita Hand.
He said Hand is claiming damages for the tort of assault. A tort is a civil wrong, and a claimant who proves that they were assaulted by a defendant is entitled to damages, he said.
He said that as Hand had brought the action and made allegations against McGregor and Lawrence, the obligation to prove the case was on her.
He said that they must decide if the evidence that they have heard represents “the objective truth of what happened”.
Mr Justice Owens said the jury must decide if the evidence proves that Hand was assaulted by McGregor in the penthouse of the Beacon, and if the evidence proves that Hand was assaulted by Lawrence. “Those are the beginning, middle and end of the case and everything else rotates around that, just like the Earth rotates around the sun,” he said.
He said the jury must consider if Hand’s account that she was raped by Conor McGregor is more likely than not to represent the objective truth. “If not, you proceed no further.”
He said the first question on the issue paper presents the simple answer of yes or no. He said that the standard of proof in a civil action is on the balance of probabilities. He said that something is proved on the balance of probabilities when you decide on the evidence it is more likely than not to have happened.
He explained that there are two versions of evidence for the jury to consider, and that they are not entitled to introduce a third version into the case.
“Stick with the evidence, never engage in speculative conclusions. You work on what you have and not on what you do not have,” he said.
Mr Justice Owens said the case “really boils down to who you believe”, adding: “In my view, one side or the other is telling lies about what happened in the Beacon hotel room.”
In relation to Lawrence, he said it was his view that “one side is telling lies in relation to this”. He said it would be improbable that one person who has just told a person that their friend had assaulted them would then go on to have sex with them twice.
He said that Hand is inviting the jury to conclude from the evidence that she was too drunk to consent to sex with Lawrence, and that the jury are being asked to infer that Lawrence was aware of her condition and took advantage of her. “Does the evidence support that inference?”
Mr Justice Owens said the actions against McGregor and Lawrence are separate and it does not follow “that because you reach yes or no for one that you must do so in relation to the other”.
“You have to decide each of the two cases separately, even though they are being tried together and the evidence is common to both,” he said.
He said that damages must also be assessed separately, and that some issues in relation to damages only relate to Hand’s claim against McGregor, such as her having PTSD.
Mr Justice Owens said that Hand has no memory of having sex with Lawrence and her personal belief is that she did not have sex with him and that it was made up to damage her character. He said there is no basis to award damages for PTSD against Lawrence, and that the jury were not being invited to award special damages against Lawrence.
Referring to drunkenness, Mr Justice Owens said that so much of the case may or may not be explained by the consumption of alcohol.
He said people can and do have sex when they are intoxicated but the position is different when a person is so intoxicated that they can’t express free and voluntary will. He said it may mean that a person is so out of it that they have no idea what they are about.
He said that drunken consent can still be consent and that the jury would have to examine the evidence in relation to this.
He told the jury to be cautious about what they think someone who is a victim of sexual assault should have done. He said it does not follow that a person who was sexually assaulted must complain to the first person they see about what happened, and said they may behave “in a way that was strange and irrational”, especially if alcohol or drugs is involved. “That’s just my observation in relation to things,” he said.
Mr Justice Owens also said that wearing certain clothing that may be revealing or sending a photograph to someone “does not mean consent to be sexually molested”.
He said that a man might be attracted to woman but if they want to take it further, it requires consent. He said the fact that a woman engages in “risky behaviour”, like drinking or taking drugs, does not mean they consent to sex.
He said that while excessive alcohol can lead to disinhibition, you cannot engage in a presumption that the women who engage in this behaviour are promiscuous, warning against lazy assumptions and victim blaming.
Mr Justice Owens also said there can be a prejudice against people with some form of mental illness and the reliability of their evidence. He said that lots of people suffer from anxieties and depression and so forth, and that that approach in relation to evidence of a witness has no evidential basis.
He said the jury should ignore evidence about Hand’s panic attacks and the medication she was taking for depression, saying that there was no evidence that this could interfere with her recall.
The civil trial continues tomorrow.
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