Brave Nikita Hand has described in harrowing detail how she believed Conor McGregor was going to kill her as he raped her.
Nikita’s powerful tell-all memoir ‘Not The Perfect Victim’ which charts the rape claim she made against the UFC fighter, her civil vase victory against him and the aftermath, has been released today.
In the book the Dublin woman speaks about contemplating suicide in the days after she made a formal complaint to gardai – and details how she believed McGregor was going to kill her during the attack in a Dublin hotel in December 2018.
She tells of turning to alcohol to cope with the trauma of what happened, running from a Garda station after changing her mind about making a criminal complaint, and ultimately finding the strength to do so.
Opening up in the book, published by Hachette, Nikita tells of the moment McGregor brought her to the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford and eventually raped her in the bedroom.
Nikita Hand new book ‘Not the Perfect Victim’ (Image: Nikita Hand)
Stating that it was her “sole conviction that McGregor could’ve killed me,” Nikita tells how she did not scream during the attack, but fought back – only for him to choke her in a violent and sustained assault.
Describing her “terror” in that moment, Nikita writes: “The truth was that I never screamed. I knew I didn’t. There were many things that I remember but I did remember being quiet. Why didn’t I open my mouth and tear my throat raw?”
“I did fight at first. I fought hard. But when his elbow closed around my neck, when his arm flexed, all of that disappeared. My body made a decision to stop fighting and survive.”
She claims in the book that McGregor “did not listen to reason or to my pleading,” and that as soon as he choked her she went “quiet and small and distant.”
Nikita Hand spoke to Brendan O’Connor on RTE Radio 1 on Saturday morning
“I had a daughter at home and all I could see was her face when I thought he was killing me. Sickening memories rolled around in my head. I berated myself. I tried to reason with him but he did not listen. I decided to live.”
She describes the aftermath of the incident as feeling like a “lump hammer” had hit her or that she had been run over.
Later in the book, Nikita describes how her whole body “convulsed” as she told investigating gardai in January 2019 that she told McGregor ‘No,’ but he continued to attack her.
She told gardai: “I thought if he choked me one more time that he was going to kill me. He was really angry, he was really rough.”
Describing the interview with gardai as like opening a wound, Nikita adds that detectives asked her if the fighter might have thought the sex was consensual.
“I fought and fought him, I argued. He’d have never choked me if I hadn’t fought. What man would think a girl gave consent after choking her?” she writes.
She also describes how in the moments that followed, she immediately thought that no one would ever believe her account.
She also feared they would judge her decision to drink and take drugs that night.
“Who would believe me? I was a mess who had made a catalogue of bad decisions. I was drunk, I took drugs, I had left a cherished daughter and a good partner at home. I had gone drunk to a hotel room with a man I barely knew and I hadn’t screamed. If I was picking apart every choice I made, how could I expect anyone else not to do the same? If I blamed myself everyone else would too,” she writes.
Conor McGregor and Dee Devlin leaving the High Court in Dublin(Image: Brian Lawless/PA)
Speaking about the moment she called to her mother’s home in the early hours of the morning after the incident Nikita said: “I thought I might be dying and it was too late to go to A&E anyway.”
She also pleaded with her mother, Debbie, not to alert the authorities, as she feared McGregor would only come after her.
“You’ll bring the guards down on me and he’ll kill me,” she writes.
Later in the book the mother-of-one gives a horrific account of how the toll of everything led to suicidal thoughts.
After being told by gardai in February of 2019 that McGregor’s friend James Lawrence had told them she had consensual sex with him too, Nikita says she struggled to cope with the claims, which she believed were made up.
She tells how while drinking wine at home she eyed her container of antidepressants and a “steel knife that lay on the chopping board from earlier.”
“My mind felt strangely calm as if the fog had faded and left only two doors both waiting for me to choose. I wondered how many pills it might take to do the job,” she writes.
She writes however, that she ultimately thought of her young daughter and her mother, and how she did not want to leave them in this way.
At this time she had not told her then partner Stephen about James Lawrence’s claims of consensual sex with her. Nikita’s relationship with the father of her child had become strained by that point, she writes, and they ultimately broke up.
During that time she says she experienced “terrible thoughts, suicidal ones,” which came in waves.
Another revelation in the book is that Nikita says she thought of McGregor’s partner Dee Devlin and her children when considering making a statement to gardai at Christmas time in 2018.
Having initially refused to make a statement, Nikita writes that she considered doing so during Christmas – and ultimately decided to do so after thinking of her own daughter.
“I asked the Gardai to let me get through Christmas. It sounds unlikely but I thought of McGregor’s partner Dee and her children too. They didn’t deserve to have their Christmas upended because of what he did,” she writes.
“But as I watched Freya tend to Nannies grave with my Mam that day the thought arrived cold and clear. What if some man ever does the same to her? I shuddered. Christmas was just days away and the world continued as if nothing had changed. And maybe that was the problem. These vicious assaults would keep happening while women like me stayed silent. I felt fragile and sick but looking at Freya I knew I had to find the strength to stand up to McGregor somewhere.
“I owed it to myself and to Freya to face him,” she writes.
Describing McGregor as “famous, rich, powerful and vicious,” she writes how she had no witnesses and initially believed she would have a hard time being believed.
She reveals she attempted to make a statement in Crumlin Garda Station in December – concealing as best she could her identity, for fear of being spotted going inside.
“The guards had advised us to conceal ourselves in case someone was watching the station,” she writes.
But upon entering the interview room, it all became too much.
“I scrambled to my feet and bolted through the door and back down the corridor and out into the night air. My head was spinning and I needed to throw up. I couldn’t go back there,” she writes.
Nikita’s journey to be heard was long and arduous, with her ultimately having to wait six years to have her day in court after the Director of Public Prosecutions refused to charge him.
Eventually a civil jury would award her €250,000 in damages after finding that they believed her account of rape and that he assaulted her.
Nikita’s book charts in vivid detail her going to the Sexual Assault Trauma Unit in the Rotunda Hospital where she was examined immediately following the incident at the Beacon.
Gardai gathered evidence of a tampon which had been shoved up so far that Nikita feared she might die of toxic shock syndrome. She was also covered in bruises which were photographed by officers before Nikita eventually gave a formal statement.
Over the course of the book she also chronicles flashbacks she experienced over the weeks and months that followed, and how she struggled to sleep for years afterwards, describing herself as a “broken” person.
McGregor, she writes, was someone she knew of growing up. He was “the boy next door, the guy down the road.”
She messaged him on social media while on a work Christmas night out, a decision she says was the worst mistake of her life.
You can read the full powerful story ‘Not The Perfect Victim,’ which is available in all bookstores and on Audible now.
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