Judge in Nikita Hand’s civil action against Conor McGregor delivered a masterclass in consent

Remy Farrell SC, a lawyer of precise and occasionally vivid language, chose what might have been an unfortunate phrase to describe his client Conor McGregor in his final summing up to the jury in Nikita Hand’s civil action for damages against the mixed martial arts fighter.
It might be a euphemism, he told them, to say that McGregor has a “forceful personality.”
It was surely not his intention, but that word – forceful – conjured up images he might have preferred to avoid. Images of Nikita Hand, fully dressed, and pinned to the bed by force by McGregor. Or Nikita Hand in a chokehold, as McGregor sneered “Now you know how I felt in the Octagon.” Or Nikita Hand “curled up” tight in an ambulance, “very upset and distressed”, in the words of the advanced paramedic who treated her for the effects of McGregor’s forceful personality. Nikita Hand in the sexual assault unit at the Rotunda, having a tampon removed from deep inside her vagina with a forceps, forced there by the man with the forceful personality. Nikita Hand deleting messages from her phone and reluctant to tell her then boyfriend who had done this to her, because she was afraid of how someone with McGregor’s forceful personality might respond.
Nikita Hand listening in court as McGregor tried to paint her as someone “full of lies” who “had sexual relations with multiple people multiple times”. Hand took her civil case against McGregor for damages for assault arising from alleged rape only after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute McGregor. Yet she found herself, as her lawyer John Gordon SC put it, portrayed as a “gold-digger and a fraud”.
[ ‘I know what happened in that room’: the full story of the Conor McGregor caseOpens in new window ]
The High Court jury awarded her damages of €248,603. It found she was not assaulted by McGregor’s friend, James Lawrence, against whom she also claimed damages. Lawrence had told gardaí he had consensual sex with her, but she said she had no memory of anything happening between them and believed it was a “made-up story”.
McGregor has already said he intends to appeal.
“Forceful” was not the only word which jarred over several days of often graphic, distressing testimony. At times, there was the disconcerting sense that the two sides were not just offering entirely opposing narratives, but speaking completely different languages.
McGregor, in his evidence, threw around words such as “party” and “joy” in a way that bore no relation to their normal meaning. “Party”, it transpired, meant cruising around Dublin with a hotel suite pre-booked for sex, desperate to find someone he could have it with. For a woman – or a “lovely lady” – to be demonstrating “joy” and “enthusiasm” it seemed she could be doing anything up to and including physically fighting him off. He painted a picture of a world shaped by the tropes of porn: a world where sex is a chip he can cash in any time he wants, where women are interchangeable commodities and other men are ciphers to make up the numbers, and bear witness to what he characterised as his “athletic” sex.
When the young women he was partying with in Krystle nightclub wisely decided to go home, he began messaging Hand on Instagram. After he had met up with her and another woman, the three called to the house of James Lawrence in Drimnagh. “I had two girls, two boisterous ladies full of energy and I needed to level it out and make it a party.” Lawrence initially had no intention of going along – he wanted to stay home and chill out, he had a girlfriend, he wasn’t even wearing shoes – but some words were exchanged, and soon he too was in McGregor’s big car with the tinted windows, being whizzed along to the Beacon hotel.
The events that transpired afterwards have been rehearsed – quite literally at times – ad nauseam over 12 days in court. They don’t need to be spelled out again here. They drank, and they “partied”, and at some point when he tried to take things further, Hand stopped consenting. McGregor did not stop.
The jury was forced to wade through a grey area between consent and non-consent, through conflicting accounts and confusing testimony. The words of the judge, Mr Justice Alexander Owens, as he guided them through the task, should be printed out and stuck up in the bathrooms of nightclubs and secondary schools. They are a masterclass on consent, as useful a primer on rape myths as anything I’ve ever read.
Submission is not consent – it is not necessary to prove a person resisted, tried to run away or raise the alarm, he told them. “You should be cautious about what you think about what someone who is a victim of sexual assault should have done. It does not follow they will complain to the person about what happened; they may respond to that event in ways that may seem irrational.”
The sending of a photo on Instagram is “not an invitation to be sexually molested”. And the fact that a woman engages in risky activity such as drinking or taking drugs “does not mean they are up for sex”.
Hand won her civil case, but her lawyer was wrong about one thing. She would, he said in his summing up, “always be a marked woman because she stood up to Conor McGregor”. I disagree. Like Gisèle Pelicot, like Hazel Behan, like Lavinia Kerwick, Hand joins an army of women who have handed the shame back where it belongs. She won’t be marked by this in the public’s eyes; she will be remembered as the brave woman who refused to give up and – when she felt let down by the justice system – pursued her case in the civil courts at incalculable risk and cost to herself. In the end, it wasn’t Conor McGregor who showed the world what it means to be a fighter. It was Nikita Hand.