A High Court judge is continuing to charge a jury before sending them to consider their verdict on a woman’s civil action for damages for assault arising from being allegedly raped by Conor McGregor in a Dublin hotel.
The eight women and four men will also decide Nikita Hand’s claim against James Lawrence (35), of Rafter’s Road, Drimnagh, over alleged assault of her through allegedly having sex with her without her consent in the Beacon hotel.
Both men deny the claims by the hair colourist (35) and have pleaded they separately had consensual sex with Ms Hand at the hotel on December 9th, 2018.
The jury has heard Ms Hand and a work colleague Danielle Kealey were driven to the hotel with Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence in Mr McGregor’s car, arriving at 12.30pm on December 9th. CCTV showed Mr McGregor leaving with Ms Kealey about 6.15pm and Ms Hand leaving with Mr Lawrence about 10.30pm.
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Ms Hand and Ms Kealey gave evidence they had been partying all night from the evening of Saturday, December 8th, into the morning of December 9th and had consumed alcohol and cocaine. Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence were separately partying in Dublin nightclubs and consumed alcohol. Mr McGregor said cocaine was also available. Mr Lawrence said he has never taken cocaine.
Ms Hand in evidence said she was raped by Mr McGregor who would “not take no for an answer”. She said she had no memory of having sex later with Mr Lawrence.
Mr McGregor denied rape and said he and Ms Hand had “fully consensual”, “vigorous”, “athletic” sex without using condoms. He said he was shocked when later shown photos of bruising on Ms Hand and said he had not caused it. Mr Lawrence said he had sex twice with Ms Hand using condoms and had seen no marks on her other than a small bruise which he said she had pointed out to him.
Mr Justice Alexander Owens today continued his charge to the jury.
He told them they will be asked to answer yes or no to separate questions concerning whether Mr McGregor assaulted Ms Hand and whether Mr Lawrence assaulted Ms Hand.
If they answer yes in the case of either or both men, they will proceed to assess damages under four categories: general damages for assault; special damages in the form of medical expenses; damages for past and future loss of earnings; and aggravated damages.
The purpose of damages is compensatory and damages are a matter for the jury, he said.
If they concluded Ms Hand was raped by Mr McGregor, she was entitled to more than nominal damages, he said. The more seriously a person has been assaulted, the more substantial the damages.
Obviously a rape is a very serious matter, rapes are “devastating” for victims, they have to live with them for the rest of their lives and rape trenches on dignity and mental health, he said.
Even if it was not proved a rape victim was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the jury could take it a victim would have to live with it for years to come, he added.
If they found Ms Hand was raped by Mr Lawrence, she was entitled to substantial damages against him even if she was unaware it had happened, he said.
If they found for Ms Hand against either defendant, they should consider general damages, which are compensatory damages for the harmful impact of the rape. If they found against Mr McGregor, that would include a sum for PTSD against him.
He said aggravated damages involve sums awarded on grounds including the conduct of the perpetrator, including their conduct of litigation, which shocks the plaintiff. Punitive or exemplary damages are a different level, they mark “particular disapproval” by the jury of defendant conduct. The jury could award punitive if they considered, for example, witnesses got together to concoct a story, including alleging that a plaintiff is a gold digger. Punitive damages are the “exception rather than the rule”.
The compensation should be appropriate to the damage inflicted and caused, he said. The jury should act proportionately and fairly in relation to all categories of damages.
The Judicial Council’s personal injury guidelines are not applicable to assault actions, he said. Nor are awards made in serious defamation cases, he added.
He told the jury, if they get to the stage of awarding damages, they have to forget considerations such as that Mr McGregor is a wealthy man and Mr Lawrence is not.
Should the jury find Mr Lawrence assaulted Ms Hand, the judge excluded them from assessing damages against him for post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by Ms Hand.
In her evidence concerning any damages, Ms Hand, a mother of one, said she felt uneasy about continuing to live in Drimnagh after the alleged assaults. She had bought a house in Drimnagh with her ex-partner before the alleged assaults but is now living elsewhere.
Ms Hand, whom the jury heard was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in December 2020, also said, due to the impact of the alleged assaults, she had been unable to return to her work as a hair colourist. She had part-time employment for some ten months as a cleaner, the court heard.
The judge, who began his charge after 4pm on Tuesday, continued it today.
He told the jury Ms Hand was drinking and also took cocaine through December 8th into December 9th. If they assumed she got up about 7am for work on December 8th, 2018, she was awake “for 33 hours on the trot” by the early afternoon of Sunday, December 9th. She had been taking alcohol from between 4-5pm on December 8th, had had no substantial food from Saturday evening until a burger in the hotel on Sunday night. From CCTV of the lift in the hotel, she was still in possession of a Bacardi bottle and a glass, he said.
Ms Kealey was out for a similar period of time and Mr McGregor and Mr Lawrence were also out partying through Saturday night into Sunday, he said.
He said the jury could apply their common sense when examining CCTV evidence of Ms Hand and Mr Lawrence in the hotel lift, including their “befuddled” shoving of buttons in the lift in their efforts to get it up to the seventh floor.
The jury should look at all the evidence and decided what bits of it they accept and what they reject. They should consider whether a witness has “an axe to grind” or is withholding something or could be “more forthcoming”.
He said witnesses are “notoriously inaccurate” about time “especially when they have jar on them”.
Other “silent” witnesses, such as CCTV, can be regarded as more reliable, he said. The jury should go through that, examine who is doing what, do they appear intoxicated or amorous.
The jury were not bound by counsels’ take on the evidence, he said.
“What you are concerned with here is not just truth and lies, but credibility and reliability,” he told the jury. Sometimes evidence cannot be relied on because it is lies, sometimes it is because things are misremembered, he said.
The defence case is that Ms Hand had to explain things to her boyfriend when she got home in the early hours of December 10th and had invented a story that she had been raped, that her accounts in the aftermath of the alleged rape were inconsistent and that her entire account was nonsense, he said.
Ms Hand’s case was that she was abused and “in bits” at the time she disclosed rape to her manager Eimear Brennan late on the night of December 9th/10th, that she was in fear and did not want to hurt her boyfriend by telling him the truth.
Earlier, during his charge on Tuesday, the judge addressed the issue of consent to sexual activity.
The jury should be cautious about drawing conclusions about what they think a person alleging sexual assault should or should not have done, he said. A person subject to stressful event such as rape may respond to that in ways that might seem irrational, especially if “befuddled by consumption of intoxicants”, he said.
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