NIKITA HAND HAS spoken in her first ever interview about the trauma she suffered at the hands of former MMA fighter Conor McGregor, after a jury found him liable for sexually assaulting her in a Dublin hotel in 2018. 

Speaking to Brendan O’Connor on RTÉ Radio 1, Hand said that there are “two Nikitas.” 

“Nikita before that night had so much confidence… after that night, I lost a big huge part of my life,” she said. 

Hand said that today she’s “okay”. 

“I’m not going to say I’m absolutely perfect, you know, I still live with the trauma of what happened to me throughout the years,” she added. 

The interview comes with the release of her book ‘Not the Perfect Victim’, in which she paints a graphic picture of the suffering she has endured as a result of the assault itself, and the years-long process of reporting McGregor, and eventually going through a civil case before a jury. 

Speaking to O’Connor, Hand explained that she knew McGregor “to see” from her local pub, and from growing up in the same part of Dublin. 

On the night in question, she messaged him on social media after being out with a friend at an event, and he came to pick them both up in a car. 

Hand explained that both women believed that they were going to “a party”, but that after being driven around in the car with him for a long time, they eventually went to a penthouse hotel suite. 

She was candid about the fact that she was intoxicated at the time, as she’d been drinking and had taken some cocaine. 

Hand said she ended up in a bedroom with McGregor, and that the memory of what occurred there more fully returned to her afterwards when she saw the bruising on her arms later that night and panicked. 

“I tried to reason with him as nicely as I could, but there was no reasoning with him, you know? You know, he just wasn’t taking no for an answer, and you know, he pinned me down. I tried to fight. I couldn’t overpower somebody like him,” she said. 

Hand described the sexual assault as extremely violent. 

“He choked me three times, and my fight completely gave up. I remember the third choke [that] lasted the longest, and I remember just seeing my daughter Freya’s face, and surviving became bigger than you know, fighting back,” she said. 

Asked if she thought she was going to die, Hand said: “Absolutely, yeah.”

The longtime hairdresser and mum of two said that after the assault she felt “ashamed” and “dirty”. 

She said that she was thinking,”If I had went home and didn’t send him that DM? If I didn’t drink so much, if I didn’t take cocaine”, and added that she was initially blaming herself. 

Hand didn’t immediately want to report the assault but said that her mother convinced her that she needed medical attention and to report the incident, and she said that in doing so, her mother “saved” her. 

She also spoke about being “devastated” when the Director of Public Prosecutions did not go forward with prosecution of the case. 

“The only way I could get my day in court was to take up a civil case,” she explained. 

“I just couldn’t let it go,” she said.

“If I had have walked away from this, I would have seen him in the newspaper, I would have seen him on TV, I would have heard about him. It would be in my face. It is in my face all the time, you know. And I just knew I wouldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do everything in my power to try to seek justice.”

She said that she was unable to work following the assault, was unable to look at herself in the mirror for a period of time, and experienced distress to the extent that she began to pull her own hair out. 

Hand described the three-week trial that took place as an “absolute nightmare”. 

She added that winning the case has “helped” her, but that it hasn’t taken away “the nightmares, or the anxiety, of the PTSD”, as she continues to experience panic attacks to this day. 

Hand said that she hopes her book will help “young girls and boys”. 

“I hope it does educate people on consent. You don’t have to be the perfect victim. None of us are. Humans aren’t perfect. We’ve all made bad decisions,” she said. 

Hand said that she does not forgive McGregor, and she had nothing to say to him via the interview. 

Speaking of her own feelings of shame, however, she said that finally, her “guilt is gone”. 

“I know it wasn’t my fault what happened to me,” she said.