Nikita Hand wept as she told her boyfriend that she couldn’t name the man who had raped her, as ‘he’ll f****** kill me’.
Ms Hand, 35, a hair colourist and mother-of-one from Drimnagh, Dublin, has accused both MMA star Conor McGregor and another man, James Lawrence, of raping her in the penthouse suite of a hotel in the capital when she was drunk and on cocaine.
Both men deny the allegation, and claim that the sex in December 2018, the day after the alleged victim’s work Christmas party, was consensual.
A harrowing recording of her 2am conversation was played to the High Court during the third day of Ms Hand’s civil case against Mr McGregor.
In it, her boyfriend tells her: ‘This isn’t a ‘shut up and say nothing’ situation. This s*** doesn’t happen any more. This thing about keeping quiet about stuff is not f****** happening.’
He also said he was concerned for the ‘other girls’ she told him she was with.
Nikita Hand (pictured) wept as she told her boyfriend that she couldn’t name the man who had raped her, as ‘he’ll f****** kill me’
Conor McGregor (pictured) allegedly raped the hair colourist at a hotel
During Ms Hand’s cross-examination, Mr McGregor’s barrister, Remy Farrell, said he was going to play an audio recording made by her then-partner Stephen Redmond after Ms Hand returned home.
In the recording, Ms Hand could be heard sobbing and in a highly distressed state, telling her boyfriend she had been raped.
She also wept in the witness box as the tape was played to the court, holding her head in her hands and screening her face with her hair.
On the audio, in a muffled voice, she was heard to say: ‘I told him no. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’
Her partner replied: ‘Just tell me what happened. Tell me.’
Ms Hand is heard responding: ‘In the Morgan… in the penthouse. He choked me. I can’t tell you who it was yet.’
The court has heard she believed she was at the Morgan Hotel in Temple Bar, when she was actually in the Beacon in Sandyford.
During Ms Hand’s cross-examination, Mr McGregor’s barrister, Remy Farrell, said he was going to play an audio recording made by her then-partner Stephen Redmond after Ms Hand returned home
In the recording, Ms Hand could be heard sobbing and in a highly distressed state, telling her boyfriend she had been raped
She said she was with a number of girls from the salon, but refused to say whose apartment she was in.
‘I can’t tell you who it was. He’ll f****** kill me,’ she said.
Mr Redmond responded: ‘Nikita, you’re going to have to.’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘He told me he’d kill me.’
Mr Redmond said: ‘Look at me for a second… I’m not giving out’.
Ms Hand told him she had been to her salon manager Emer’s house before coming home, and that she had told Emer who had raped her, and Emer had taken photos of her body. Mr Redmond insisted: ‘You have to tell me where you went.’
She replied: ‘I don’t want to. I’m frightened.’
He said: ‘Nothing is going to happen.’
She responded: ‘It is. He told me he’d kill me’, adding later: ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.’
Mr Redmond said: ‘You’re after telling me you’re after being raped.’ He asked who she met in town.
Mixed Martial Arts fighter Conor McGregor outside the High Court in Dublin, where he is due to appear for a personal injury case against him
‘No please, I can’t face it,’ she replied.
He continued: ‘I’m going to call the guards.’
‘Don’t do that, please,’ Ms Hand said. ‘Just look after me. I’ll sort it out.’
Mr Redmond replied: ‘This isn’t a ‘shut up and say nothing ‘situation. This s*** doesn’t happen anymore. This thing about keeping quiet about stuff is not f****** happening.’
He asks if the girls she was with are still in town.
‘How do you know if something is going to happen to them?’ he asked.
She told him they had gone home. He replied: ‘I want to know where you were tonight. Stop leaving out details and changing things. I want to know where you were.’
Ms Hand told him she went into town at 1pm from the salon, and went straight into an apartment at the Morgan.
‘So you’re there all day?’ he asked, again asking her who she was with.
Co-defendant of mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, James Lawrence, arrives at High Court in Dublin, where Nikita Ni Laimhin, who is also known as Nikita Hand, is claiming civil damages against the fighter and Mr Lawrence, alleging she was sexually assaulted in December 2018
Lawrence is accused of attacking Nikita Hand
‘I can’t say who, Steve,’ Ms Hand said. ‘He warned me.’
Her boyfriend replied: ‘I don’t give a f*** who warned you or threatened you, I just want to know where you were.’
He continued: ‘Listen to me for a second. You’re going to fall asleep, you’re going to wake up and you’re only going to remember half of what you did and that’s a big f****** problem.
‘You’re obviously very drunk… Please tell me what happened. I’m begging you, I’m your fella.’
He said he was trying to ‘figure out’ what had happened and who had brought her to the penthouse.
‘How do you think I feel right now?’ Ms Hand is heard to respond.
‘Look at my knuckles from fighting back. He was choking me and I couldn’t breathe. He choked me three times.
‘Just be there for me. Who cares who it was. It doesn’t matter. He still hurt me.’
Nikita Hand (pictured), who is also known as Nikita Ni Laimhin, is claiming civil damages against Mr McGregor and another man, alleging she was sexually assaulted in December 2018
She told Mr Redmond there were two men present.
She said: ‘I was there for a party and coke and drink. That’s why I was there.’
‘It doesn’t sound like a party,’ he replied.
At a later stage in the recording, he asked why she could not tell him, when she had told Emer.
‘Emer is not going to say anything,’ Ms Hand responded. ‘You will. You’ll tell the nation.’
She also told him: ‘I’m after being f****** sexually abused… I’m after being raped and all you care about is you. Putting your arms around me and asking me am I okay is what you should be doing.’
She can also be heard asking: ‘Why me? Why me? Why me?’
Mr Redmond told her: ‘We need to do something about this’ and: ‘This is not being kept a secret.’
Earlier in the cross examination, Mr Farrell had said he would put his client’s version of events to Ms Hand, some of which he warned might find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
The proceedings are expected to last two weeks and the judge has asked the jury to make themselves available for three weeks
The former UFC champion arriving at the High Court on Tuesday
He asked her if she remembered Mr McGregor chatting up and ‘flirting’ with her friend, Danielle. She said she could not remember.
‘Was James chatting her up?’ he asked. ‘I don’t have a clue,’ she replied.
Mr Farrell continued: ‘So I’m going to suggest to you, you and Mr McGregor started kissing and that he had his belt of his jeans open at this stage because he was using the toilet.’
Ms Hand responded: ‘I don’t agree.’
Mr Farrell said: ‘You largely took your own clothes off and he took his off and you’re both sexually excited… You started to give Mr McGregor oral sex and then went and had sex on the bed.’
Ms Hand said: ‘No’ and: ‘I don’t agree’.
Mr Farrell said that Danielle and Mr Lawrence were having sex at a similar time, and that at one stage Ms Hand had walked in and was ‘messing and slagging them’.
‘That’s disgusting. I don’t agree with any of that,’ she replied.
She also denied the description of the sex she was said to have had with Mr McGregor.
The woman making the claim said the incident occurred at Dublin’s Beacon Hotel
A spokesperson for McGregor at the time claimed it was a ‘rumour’ and ‘absolutely false’
‘No. None of this is true…This is like a made-up story,’ she said.
McGregor’s barrister has told the woman who has accused the fighter of rape that CCTV evidence ‘flatly contradicts’ her ‘story’.
However, Nikita Hand said the footage shows a vulnerable, drunk woman ‘who should have been looked after’.
‘It does not take away from what happened to me in that room with Conor. I know what happened to me. I was brutally raped and battered,’ she claimed.
During her cross examination at the High Court, on day three of her civil action against Mr McGregor, the 35-year-old hair colourist wept as she viewed the images of her riding up and down in the Beacon Hotel’s lift.
The footage included images captured after her alleged rape by Mr McGregor at the hotel’s penthouse suite in December 2018, and appeared to show her kissing his arm and hugging him.
Ms Hand said: ‘I remember we went down [in the lift]. I don’t remember what we were doing or saying. It is very hard to watch… 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.’
Mr Farrell said part of the footage appeared to show her kissing Mr McGregor’s arm.
Nikita Ni Laimhin (centre) outside the High Court in Dublin on Tuesday, where Mixed Martial Arts fighter Conor McGregor is appearing for a personal injury case against him
Conor McGregor was seen arriving in court on Tuesday over a civil assault claim stemming from an alleged rape at a hotel in Dublin in 2018
‘I can’t remember that. I don’t know what I’m doing at that stage,’ she said.
Mr Farrell said Ms Hand told the jury on Wednesday that she was not looking for ‘sexual activity or romantic entanglement, or anything of that sort’.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she replied.
He stated: ‘From the CCTV, and I want to put this as delicately and inoffensively as I can, it would appear that you were interested in a romantic entanglement.’
She answered: ‘Yeah, but I don’t remember anything.’
Mr Farrell said: ‘Everything in that CCTV footage flatly contradicts the story you have told.’
She replied: ‘I don’t agree. It does not take away from what happened to me in that room with Conor. I know what happened to me. I was brutally raped and battered. I know what happened to me, and the CCTV footage does not take away from what happened to me.’
Mr Farrell put it to her that she had spent 20 to 30 minutes going in and out through the doors from the car park to the lift, before returning to the hotel room with Mr McGregor’s friend James Lawrence, of Rafters Road, Drimnagh, whom she has also accused of rape.
Nikita Ni Laimhin, who is also known as Nikita Hand, at the High Court in Dublin on November 6
‘You have no memory of that?’ he asked, referring to the footage. She answered: ‘It was a very hard watch. I don’t want to go through another 40 minutes of it. I can’t remember. It’s not my character. I can see how vulnerable I am. I am very drunk. I am stumbling. That’s not my character. I don’t want to have to look at it again. It is very disturbing for me.’
Mr Farrell challenged her loss of memory, saying that at 6.18pm, ‘you say you were black and blue, you were violently raped with your tampon in situ, you were nearly strangled to death and thought you would never see your daughter again – but you have forgotten all of that when you got out of the lift?’
She replied: ‘I forgot I was after being raped when I woke up. It did not hit me until I was back in the room with James.’
She has told the court that she was confused and ‘not in my right mind’ when she woke in the room, and her immediate concern was to contact her partner.
‘I can’t remember every detail,’ she said. ‘I was drinking a lot. I had drugs in my system.’
Mr Farrell asked Ms Hand if she had not been concerned for her friend, Danielle Keely, who the CCTV showed left the party in a car with Mr McGregor.
‘It is clear that the last you see of her is her getting into a car with a man who [you say] violently raped you,’ he said.
Conor McGregor (second right) with his father Tony McGregor (second left) outside the High Court in Dublin on November 6
McGregor has been in a relationship with Dee Devlin since 2008. They have four children
‘You then go back to the hotel, remember you were violently raped by this man – were you at any point concerned about what would happen to Danielle?’
She replied: ‘No, when I got back to the hotel that’s when things were slowly coming back to me.’
She said she first contacted Danielle from the Sexual Assault Treatment Unit (SATU) at the Rotunda, which she attended the next day.
Ms Hand agreed she had sent texts to her then partner, which were not truthful.
In one, which she sent after waking up next to Mr McGregor in bed, but which Mr Farrell said was sent from the hotel car park, she told her partner that she was great, very drunk, and in the Goat pub.
She also admitted to deleting text messages to friends, and asking them to delete them, but said she did this because she did not want to press charges, and she was ‘afraid for my life’.
Judge Alexander Owens has told the jury that correspondence between Nikita Hand and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), which they were shown on Wednesday, should not be considered evidence.
The letters explain why the DPP did not pursue criminal charges against either Conor McGregor or James Lawrence following Ms Hand’s allegation of rape.
Judge Owens said: ‘You are here to decide the evidence that you hear in court.
‘The DPP’s view is about as useful as my view or my judicial assistant’s view, that is to say, no use at all. So the DPP’s view and the reasons for the view you can forget. They have nothing got to do with the trial. If we wanted to do it that way, we would have a jury of five DPPs with their files before them.’
He said the DPP’s opinion was not evidence relating to the potential unreliability of the witness, Ms Hand, and was instead only before the jury to indicate that Ms Hand had not sought to take her own civil action before she heard that the criminal case would not proceed.
‘It is only relevant to the applicant’s state of mind, and as to whether in effect she is a chancer and if she went to a solicitor to vindicate herself or engaged in a try-on,’ he said.
The trial continues.