'I’m not asking you to like him': Jury hears closing speeches in Conor McGregor civil case
The barrister told them that Conor McGregor’s actions and the way he phrased certain things on the witness stand may not have endeared him to them. Photo: Niall Carson/PA
“I’m not asking you to like Conor McGregor. I’m asking you to consider the evidence, not invite him to Sunday brunch.”
Senior counsel Remy Farrell was acutely aware of how his client, Conor McGregor, may be perceived by the jury as he set out to give his closing statement in the high-stakes civil case before Mr Justice Alexander Owens in the High Court.
“Some people love him,” Mr Farrell said of the MMA fighter sitting a few feet away from him in court room 24. “Some people very much do not love him.
“It may well be the case, some of you, a lot of you, most of you, all of you may well have negative views about him before you sat on this jury. Some of you may actively dislike him. Some of you may loathe him.”
The barrister told them that Mr McGregor’s actions and the way he phrased certain things on the witness stand may not have endeared him to them.
He said a man who leaves the family home on a Saturday night, stays out all night and ends up back in a hotel penthouse, may not have sat well with the jury.
“We do have ears,” Mr Farrell said.
“When Mr McGregor refers to ‘two lovely ladies’, we do hear the intake of breath from the jury box. We understand some of you weren’t hugely taken with him.”
But this wasn’t about a “gut feeling” or a “hot take”, he said.
It was about the evidence, and what the highly experienced senior counsel then did is spend the next 90 minutes or so going through it all at great length.
Mr Farrell used the words “lie” or “lies” dozens of times when going through Nikita Ni Laimhin's account of what happened on December 9, 2018, when she said Conor McGregor raped and battered her in the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford in south Dublin.
He referenced “islands of fact”, independent sources of evidence that the jury could rely on as a starting point in their deliberations.
Facts like the CCTV footage from the Beacon and text messages produced as examples of such "islands".
These couldn’t be dismissed as “just noise”, he said. There were lies she texted to her then-boyfriend on the day, he said. He said there was one thing clear from all of the CCTV, that was there was “no discomfort of any sort” that day.
Mr Farrell said: “When you look at CCTV what did she do? Do you see someone who knows what she wants? Do you see somebody who’s well able to lie?”
Meanwhile, the court heard that the evidence of Ms Ni Laimhin's work colleague Danielle Kealey “doesn’t back up” Ms Ni Laimhin's version of events of what happened on the day.
An inescapable part of this case, according to Mr Farrell, is who his client is.
In his parting words to the jury, he said: “If it was anybody other than Mr McGregor, would the door hit you on the backside before you were out to dismiss the case?”
Throughout the speeches of Mr Farrell and John Fitzgerald, senior counsel for co-defendant James Lawrence, Ms Ni Laimhin looked directly at them.
She did the same when her own barrister, John Gordon, stood up after lunch to make his closing speech on her behalf.
Mr Gordon didn’t mince his words.
Mr McGregor, he said, was not a man but a “devious coward”.
“The liar here is Mr McGregor,” he said. “Who doesn’t have the courage, doesn’t have the decency to own up to what he did.”
He took up Mr Farrell’s “islands” analogy and said there was a “rock” sitting in the middle of the case.
“The rock is that on the evening of 9th December 2018 my client was beaten up,” he said. “Badly beaten up. And the best that Mr Farrell can come up with is to suggest there are inconsistencies and lies in relation to her account with her partner.”
He said Mr McGregor “let the mask slip” during his testimony and launched a “stream of invective” aimed at Ms Ni Laimhin. He urged the jury not to let themselves be “sold a pup by this arrogant man”.
Having stared steadily at Mr Gordon, Ms Ni Laimhin then began to cry silently as he described the effect this has all had on her as she “lives in fear”.
“There is no magic wand, [but] receiving vindication from you is of course a huge step,” he told the jury.
“But it doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change the fact she will live with this for the rest of her days.
“She will always be a marked woman because she stood up to Conor McGregor.”
Mr Justice Owens will continue to charge the jury on Wednesday, before they retire to consider their verdict.
Before finishing for the day, he told them: “It’s a question in my view of truth or lies”.
“One side or the other is telling lies in relation to what happened in the Beacon Hotel,” he said.
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