Inside the wild night out that led to a jury finding that Conor McGregor DID sexually assault woman: How a flirty comment on Instagram escalated into a 9am rendezvous with his rape accuser – before things went ‘badly wrong’

Meeting up with MMA star Conor McGregor must have seemed to Nikita Hand like a good idea at the time – but it is a choice she has come to regret deeply.

In December 2018, the then 30-year-old McGregor was at the peak of his fame, having shot to success by notching up two Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) titles.

Just the year before, he’d made an estimated $130m having challenged Floyd Mayweather Jr to a boxing match. He narrowly lost, but his ‘Notorious’ persona had garnered fans worldwide.

Ms Hand, then 29, didn’t really know McGregor, she told the court. She and McGregor were both from the same Dublin area and they moved ‘in the same circles’. Her boyfriend was friends with the brother of Dee Devlin, McGregor’s long-term partner, now fiancée and mother of his four children.

There had been a bit of back and forth in recent months between the two via Instagram, she said. She’d made a comment on his @thenotoriousmma page about wanting one of his bottles of own-brand whiskey – he said she could have ‘anything she wanted’.

When she shared with him what he described as a ‘provocative’ picture via Instagram, she was wearing a scarlet jumpsuit.

He told the court he’d liked what he saw, and asked her where she was.

The answer was at Ayrfield, at a circus-themed Christmas party on Saturday, December 18, attended by lots of office groups, including her own salon in Goatstown, Dublin, where she worked as a colourist, and its sister salon in Naas, Co Kildare.

That was the end of the contact between the two, until early the following morning.

By that time, Ms Hand had been out for 24 hours without sleeping. She’d left the house in Drimnagh she had recently bought with her partner, gone to work and then had pre-party drinks in the salon.

She and around seven workmates went to Ayrfield, where they drank some more, before returning to the Goat pub, opposite the salon. When that closed, sometime after 12.20am, they carried on drinking in the salon. She also took cocaine, she told the court.

By the time she messaged McGregor for his number, it was sometime between 7am and 8am on the Sunday, and just she and Danielle Kealey were left in the salon. She did not know Danielle very well, as she worked in Naas, but the pair wanted to continue partying, she said.

Meanwhile McGregor had spent Saturday morning working out in the gym, before relaxing on the sofa in his house in the K Club estate, keeping his options open about how to spend his evening. An opportunity came up in the form of a closing party for the District 8 nightclub in Dublin.

He asked his driver-come-security guard to drive him in, bringing another car and driver with him as he usually picked up friends during a night out, he told the court.

Photos were taken of him on stage at the club, before he and his friends headed on to Krystal nightclub. Two women were in the group, he agreed, and they shared a table, where he bought rounds of drinks. He took cocaine, he said.

At around 4.30am, he asked his security guard to book him a hotel room. City centre hotels were full, it being the busy Christmas party season, but a ‘penthouse suite’ – two adjoining rooms on the seventh floor – was available at the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford.

At 7am they left Krystal, and everyone gradually peeled off and went home, including James Lawrence, who told the court he was drunk when he got back to his mother’s apartment, and went to bed with his girlfriend. The two women also left, one of whom McGregor dropped home to Clontarf.

According to Ms Hand’s barrister, John Gordon, McGregor had booked the hotel on a quest for sex, and Ms Hand was to be the women’s replacement.

McGregor denied this – although he agreed he booked hotel rooms routinely, and that if he was ‘lucky’, there would be sex.

McGregor got in touch with Ms Hand, and met her and Ms Kealey at the salon after 9am. He told the court he thought he was going to an afterparty at the salon – they said they thought he was taking them to a party elsewhere.

They all agreed that they drove around for a while in the back of the luxury black saloon car, collecting James Lawrence, who Ms Hand ‘knew of’. She said McGregor went into his house and came back with Mr Lawrence, and a bag of cocaine.

She and Ms Kealey shared the cocaine, and some drink they had brought from the salon.

At a little after 12pm – the time the suite had become available – they arrived at the Beacon.

As Ms Hand’s barrister put it, Ms Hand had been ‘out for a good time…but things went badly wrong, as far as she was concerned, having gone to the hotel with Mr McGregor and his friend’.

Viewing CCTV footage of herself in a hotel lift with McGregor, shortly before and immediately after she claimed she had been brutally raped by him, she said: ‘I see a very vulnerable woman, a drunk woman who did not know what she was doing, who should have been looked after, who should have been taken home in that state.’

She has little recollection of time, but on her evidence there was time for drinks to be ordered up to the suite – full sized bottles of Bacardi, vodka and mixers – while music played via Bluetooth on the hotel television. On McGregor’s recollection, there was time for he and Ms Hand to start kissing and touching.

It is from that point on that their accounts differed drastically.

McGregor painted a picture of ‘athletic’, ‘enthusiastic’ sex in which Ms Hand was a willing participant, having first made a move on him while he was in the bathroom. He vividly expanded on the ‘multitude of positions’ the pair were in, and stated categorically that she did not have a tampon in, adding that it was ‘broad daylight’.

He said they could hear Ms Kealey and Mr Lawrence having sex, through the open interconnecting door, and that there was ‘a bit of giggling back and forth, and banter’.

‘It was all good hearted. All happy. There was no issue,’ he told the court.

Mr McGregor said he fell asleep, and that on waking he decided he wanted to leave, but that Ms Hand initiated sex for a second time. He then left, he said, giving Ms Kealey a lift home to Naas on the way.

Asked by his own barrister if Ms Hand was in distress, he replied: ‘Not at all. Not an iota of distress.’

Contrastingly, Ms Hand told the High Court she didn’t want to have sex, and that she had tried to ‘talk him around’ by telling him she knew about his partner, Dee Devlin.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer, she said.

She said she did not feel comfortable when she found herself alone with him.

‘I remember just standing beside the bed. He was standing here,’ she said, gesturing to a space next to her.

‘He started to try to kiss me. He was rubbing my face. I knew what he was looking for… I didn’t want to have sex. I was there to have a party and to have a good time.

‘He just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He pinned me to the bed. He kept telling me ‘Relax, baby, relax’ and rubbing my face.’

Describing her attack, Ms Hand said: ‘He pinned me down to the bed and pressed his whole body down on top of me and I couldn’t breathe. I had my two arms up.

‘I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe. The more I tried to get away or struggle the more he liked it.’

She continued: ‘The only thing I could move was my head, so my only defence was to try and bite.’

Asked if she did bite him, she replied: ‘I did, yeah. I don’t know exactly where, but I know he didn’t like it so he flipped me around and had me by the neck and tried to choke me.’

She said she froze, and thought she was ‘going to die’ as he grabbed her neck in a chokehold.

Ms Hand continued: ‘I just let him do whatever he decided to do after that, so I could survive.’

‘He let me go. I remember saying sorry to him. I kept saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I felt like I had done something wrong. I kept saying sorry to reassure him I wouldn’t tell anyone, so he wouldn’t hurt me again.

‘Then he said, ‘That’s how it felt in the octagon, and I had to tap myself out three times.’

‘I just thought, that’s a weird thing to say.’

Challenged about this on the stand, McGregor agreed that he had forfeited a major fight in October 2018, having been held in a neck crank by his opponent – which he said would look like a head lock ‘to the untrained eye’.

However, he denied her claim that he told her she now knew how he had felt during a fight in the octagon, when he had to tap out.

But he said: ‘No prideful person like me would highlight my shortcomings. It’s not in my nature. It’s a full-blown lie.’

Ms Hand’s counsel John Gordon asked: ‘You are saying she is so devious she made up a patent lie?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It’s a lie, and it’s almost a fantasy. In my head, it feels like a fantasy.’

Ms Hand had bruising all over her body after the incident, she told the court, and a scrape across her breast caused by her gold Michael Kors watch, which was handed to the jury as an exhibit.

Asked if he had been listening to the medical evidence about bruising around Ms Hand’s neck, he said he had heard the ‘SATU guy’ – the doctor from the hospital’s sexual assault treatment unit – say that a mark on her neck ‘could have been a love bite’.

Ms Hand said that when she started to put her clothes back on, McGregor told her to lie down with him, and that she fell asleep.

She woke up in a panic, she recalled, and got her mobile phone to check the time.

She sent a text message to her partner, explaining: ‘I was worried because I’d fallen asleep and obviously wasn’t keeping in contact.

‘I said, ‘I’m having a great time, I’m so drunk’. I just didn’t want to worry him.’

CCTV footage and phone records showed this text being sent from the hotel car park, with Mr Lawrence. She appeared to do a celebratory dance afterwards, prompting the defence to claim that, far from being distressed or unable to function, she was able to lie to her boyfriend to continue the party.

However, Judge Owens reminded the jury that people can behave erratically following a sexual assault, especially if they have taken drink or drugs. Memory lapses were also not unusual, he said.

Ms Hand continued: ‘I was confused. When I woke up, everyone was leaving…I said why is everyone leaving? Let’s have a drink.’

She said she remembered McGregor and her friend leaving in one car, and herself and James Lawrence remaining at the hotel.

She said she broke down, as she looked at her bruised arms, adding: ‘Things were coming back to me…Reality was kind of hitting.’

She asked Mr Lawrence how he and the others could ‘turn a blind eye’ to what Mr McGregor had done.

‘I remember he said, ‘I can’t believe I was here when that was happening to you.’

She told the court that Mr Lawrence had tried to calm her down, and had ordered food and drinks.

She did not recall leaving the Beacon, and only remembered waking up in a taxi.

She said she did not want to go home and ‘face reality’ and tell her then-partner what allegedly happened.

Instead, she went to the home of her salon manager, Emer Brennan, and told her what happened.

‘She just was really upset for me and told me not to go home and have a shower, to ring the rape crisis centre,’ she recalled.

When she did get home, at 2am, she broke down in tears and told her boyfriend, Ste, of the rape. He recorded the harrowing conversation, which was played to the court, in which he repeatedly tried to find out who was behind the attack – and if the other women she said she had been with were safe.

She wept as she told her boyfriend that she couldn’t name the man who had raped her, as ‘he’ll f***ing kill me’.

He responded: ‘This isn’t a shut up and say nothing situation. This shit doesn’t happen anymore. This thing about keeping quiet about stuff is not f***ing happening.’

Her mother shared the same view. On seeing her daughter the next morning, she called both the gardai and the ambulance.

Eithne Scully, an advanced paramedic with Dublin Fire Brigade with over 16 years’ experience, told the court: ‘I haven’t seen somebody so bruised in all my time.’

Dr Daniel Kane, a gynaecologist who examined her at the hospital’s sexual assault treatment unit, said she had extensive bruising over her body, at a moderate to severe level only seen in 10% of his patients in the unit.

Dr Ann Leader, a psychiatrist who told the court she had seen over 5,000 cases of alleged sexual abuse, said that following the attack Ms Hand was showing classical symptoms of someone who had been traumatised, and who was suffering from PTSD, including suicidal feelings, panic attacks, flashbacks, depression and anxiety.

The gardai having become involved, Ms Hand ultimately made a lengthy statement in January 2019.

McGregor responded with his own two-page statement, this one pre-prepared with the aid of his solicitor. He described how he and Ms Hand had consensual sex at the Beacon hotel – something the judge said the jury must decide to be true, or merely a ‘lurid and degrading pornographic fantasy’.

McGregor said he was ‘terrified’, and wanted to get everything out in the open. He then replied ‘no comment’ to over 100 further questions from gardai.

However, having seen photographs of her bruises, he questioned whether she could have been with another man, before finally, shortly after 1am, telling them she had slept with his friend, James Lawrence.

Lawrence, instructed by the same solicitors, with his legal bill paid for by McGregor, came forward as a witness the following day, and confirmed he had sex with Ms Hand twice, in the hotel suite, after McGregor had left.

This came as a shock to Ms Hand, who knew nothing of this. She hoped he would also be charged with rape, on the basis that she was incapacitated by drink and unable to consent. However, while she was on the stand in the High Court she accused him of lying.

The jury heard how she only moved to sue the two men when it emerged that the DPP would not be pressing charges against them in court.

Ms Hand had appealed this decision, but the DPP was adamant that there was insufficient evidence for a strong chance of a conviction.

In closing, her barrister suggested that McGregor and Lawrence had ‘colluded’, to make the woman accusing him of rape appear to be a ‘hussy’ and to ‘confuse the narrative’.

He called McGregor a ‘devious coward’ who would not own up to what he had done.

The High Court jury of eight women and four men have now given their verdict, finding that McGregor did assault Ms Hand – but dismissing her claim against Ms Lawrence.

Speaking outside court, she said she hoped that her case would stand as a reminder ‘that no matter how afraid you might be, speak up, you have a voice and keep on fighting for justice’.