SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS claiming to show CCTV footage of Nikita Hand and James Lawrence have appeared online this week. Reporters who covered the case in court have said the claim is false. 

One post on X by an account called UPFRONT MMA shows CCTV footage of two people who the poster claims are Nikita Hand, who a High Court jury recently found had been sexually assaulted by MMA fighter Conor McGregor, and James Lawrence, another defendant in the case who the jury found did not sexually assault her. 

That post appeared on X yesterday and has been seen more than 350,000 times, according to the platform’s figures. The same user has posted a video on YouTube going through the misleading footage. In other cases, similar posts on X have been deleted. 

The video shows grainy footage of a man and a woman with a date given as 14 December 2018. A jury found Nikita Hand was sexually assaulted in the Beacon Hotel in Dublin on 9 December 2018. 

The footage in the X post also has a caption in the top right corner that says: “Crt Exhbt M-13”. The video also lacks a time stamp.  

The post also credits RTÉ News but does not link to an RTÉ article.  

A spokesperson for the national broadcaster told The Journal, “This claim is completely false and RTÉ have already reported it to X/Twitter”.

Our reporter Jane Moore was in court for the trial and was present while sections of the CCTV were being played for the jury. She told us the footage in the X post did not appear during the case. 

“That’s definitely not Nikita Hand or James Lawrence – the clothes are different and the date is wrong in the timestamp,” she told the FactCheck team. 

Jane also told us that Nikita Hand was wearing a black jumpsuit on the night in question. 

The woman in the footage posted on X is wearing a dress, not a black jumpsuit. 

In addition to our own reporter, the Sunday Independent’s Mark Tighe – who also covered the case - said in a post on X: “This is not Nikita Hand and it’s not the CCTV from the Beacon and the Conor McGregor case. It’s a deliberate attempt by someone to mislead.”

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