A woman has told a High Court jury she thought she was going to die when Conor McGregor was “choking” her in a hotel bedroom.
“I just froze and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe. I just kept looking at the bedpost and thinking about my daughter, I thought I was going to die, I would never see my daughter again,” Nikita Hand said.
She said Mr McGregor let her go and she kept saying “sorry, sorry”, “to reassure him so he would not hurt me again”.
He had said “that’s how I felt when I was in the Octagon when I had to tap myself out three times”, she said.
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She said she promised him she would not tell anybody “and I just let him do whatever he needed to do so I could survive”.
She said “my mind was completely gone, I wasn’t myself any more”. He was “really aggressive” with her, pulling at her clothes and was pushing her head down “to do things”. He was trying to push her head down to his penis and she tried to move away, she said.
At some stage, her clothes were completely off and his were too, she said.
“He raped me,” she told the court, saying she had a tampon inside her at the time.
These events happened on December 9th 2018 and Ms Hand attended at the sexual assault trauma unit of Rotunda hospital on December 10th 2018 , the jury has heard.
Ms Hand said on Wednesday she made a statement to gardaí in January 2019 and was “completely devastated” when she was later informed the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had decided there was insufficient evidence for the DPP to prosecute Mr McGregor or James Lawrence on foot of her claims against them. Ms Hand sought a review of that but the decision was upheld on review, the jury was told.
The DPP correspondence referred to the case being complex and the director having concluded there was “no reasonable prospect” of conviction of either man.
Ms Hand was given breaks due to becoming very distressed after resuming her evidence on Wednesday, the second day of her civil action for damages over alleged sexual assault of her by Mr McGregor on December 9th 2018 in the penthouse suite of a Dublin hotel. She has alleged a separate sexual assault of her, on the same date, by James Lawrence, of Rafters Road, Drimnagh.
Both men deny the sexual assault claims.
It is alleged the assaults happened after Ms Hand and a female work colleague went to the hotel with Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence.
Ms Hand has said both women were at a Christmas work party the previous evening, they continued to party into the early hours and she had been in contact with Mr McGregor with a view to more partying.
She said she had consumed cocaine and alcohol and that Mr McGregor had given both women cocaine when they were in the car with him. She did not remember him or Mr Lawrence taking cocaine.
When the case resumed on Wednesday, Ms Hand was asked by her counsel Ray Boland SC to pick up her evidence from Tuesday where she had said Mr McGregor had pinned her down on to a bed in the hotel suite.
Becoming distressed, she said he “pressed his whole body down on top of me so I couldn’t breathe” and she had put her arms up in front of her chest.
“I couldn’t move or breathe, the more I tried to get away from him and struggle, the more he liked it,” she said. Mr McGregor had said: “Yes, I like that”, she said.
“The only thing I could move was my head so my defence would be to bite,” she said. She said she bit Mr McGregor, she could not remember exactly where. “He did not like that so he flipped me around.”
At that point, she became very upset and said to the judge: “I can’t do this, I can’t, I’m really struggling with this right now. I’m sorry.”
When Mr Justice Alexander Owens asked her if she would like a break, she said yes and the court adjourned for five minutes.
When it resumed, Ms Hand said she had tried to talk Mr McGregor “into stopping what he was doing” before he pinned her on to the bed.
She said she bit him “very hard” and was trying to fight as much as she could and he did not like that she bit him, she said. She said she was sitting on the bed at that point, he was behind her, put his arm around her neck “and choked me three times”.
She “just completely thought I was going to die.”
“When he was raping me, I was completely numb,” she said. She “just completely froze”.
She said he “just got off me” and it was done. She said she started to put her clothes on he told her lie down on the bed with him and she fell asleep.
When she woke up, she was panicking about time but the clocks on Mr McGregor’s watch and her watch were not working. She got her phone from her bag and texted her then partner that she was having a great time. “I just didn’t want him worrying.”
She said Mr McGregor was bringing her friend home in his car and she and Mr Lawrence went down with them to the car park and then went back to the room.
She remembered breaking down in the room and seeing her bruises and saying to Mr Lawrence: “Do you all put blind eyes to what Conor was doing.”
She said he had said “What are you trying to say, Conor did that to you?” and he put his hand to his head and said he could not believe he was in the hotel suite when that was happening in the other room.
She later went to a friend’s house, told her friend what happened and who was involved. Her friend was very upset for her and told her not to have a shower and to ring the Rape Crisis Centre.
Her friend was shocked at how much bruising was on her body, she said, getting very distressed. Her friend took photos of the bruising but she had told her the next day to delete them because she did not want anyone to know, Ms Hand said.
Mr Boland then took Ms Hand through text messages between her and her friend during Monday December 11th 2018. In those, Ms Hand told her friend, among other things, she had been raped.
The case continues.
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