A few days before Conor McGregor’s big comeback fight in Las Vegas last month, his coach John Kavanagh cast the encounter as “a bit of a Rocky III moment” for the mixed martial arts (MMA) superstar who was found civilly liable for rape two years ago. In the 1982 hit boxing movie, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character returns to the ring in triumph after battling to regain the “eye of the tiger” edge he lost to fame and complacency. But there was nothing romantic about McGregor’s disastrous return to cage-fighting after a five-year hiatus, which ended abruptly with boos from the boisterous crowd. He suffered a technical knockout defeat to Max Holloway after a crippling leg injury ended the bout in 69 seconds. “This came out of nowhere. I am beyond dark here. I can only describe it as hell,” he said on social media. McGregor’s reputation is in shreds because of the November 2024 ruling of the High Court in the case taken by Dublin woman Nikita Hand. She was awarded nearly €250,000 in damages after a jury found that she had been raped in 2018 by McGregor in the penthouse suite of the Beacon Hotel in Sandyford, Dublin. McGregor, who denied the claims, now carries a message to “Pray EVERYDAY!” on his X profile, citing God, family, country and truth. The High Court verdict was upheld by the Court of Appeal and, later, the Supreme Court rejected his bid for a further appeal. It was a drastic self-inflicted fall for a man described by Forbes business magazine as one of the world’s highest-paid athletes in 2021 – behind footballers Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – with salary/winnings of $22 million and endorsements said to be worth some $158 million. The ruling led local and international business partners to spurn McGregor – and not a single Oireachtas member or county council endorsed his quixotic bid to contest the 2025 presidential election with his claims that “Ireland is potentially losing its Irishness”.But none of that has deterred him in the trash-talking world of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) combat sports nor dimmed him in the eyes of Donald Trump’s White House and Trump family members. The US president invited McGregor into the Oval Office for St Patrick’s Day 2025 – four months after the court verdict – and defence secretary Pete Hegseth brought him to the Pentagon. In high summer in Dublin only a few weeks ago, US ambassador to Ireland Ed Walsh dropped by McGregor’s Drimnagh pub, the Black Forge Inn.Nikita Hand, who was awarded nearly €250,000 in damages after a jury found that Conor McGregor raped her in a Dublin hotel. Photograph: Niall Carson/PA US president Donald Trump with Conor McGregor in the White House on St Patrick's Day last year, four months after McGregor was found civilly liable for rape. Photograph: X/POTUS McGregor himself is an adviser to and investor in a company called Mixed Martial Arts Group (MMA.Inc), which provides gyms and other sport participants with digital platforms and business tools. When Donald Trump jnr joined MMA.Inc last September, McGregor welcomed the president’s son to the advisory board. “Don is a globally recognised business leader with a deep passion for martial arts and for the coaches and small business owners who are backbone of this sport,” McGregor said, striking a distinct tone of familiarity. UFC also places McGregor in proximity to the organisation’s long-time president and chief executive, Dana White, a close Trump acolyte who spoke up for him at the pre-election Republican National Conventions in 2016, 2020 and 2024. White’s seat on the board of Facebook’s $1.59 trillion owner Meta – alongside Irish tech billionaire Patrick Collison – is a mark of how far the once-fringe sport has travelled to achieve mass appeal and political potency. [ Irish entrepreneur Patrick Collison donated $7m to group opposing California wealth taxOpens in new window ]Three decades have passed since the late John McCain, the Republican senator who became a bitter rival of Trump, branded MMA as “human cockfighting”. MMA was once banned in more than half of the United States. Now it is seen as nothing less than the sporting branch of Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, giving the president easy access to a sprawling political base that seems to lap up the casual violence in his rambling, blowhard rhetoric. As if to prove the point, Trump hosted a UFC fight night on the White House lawn in June to mark his own 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of American independence. White has said he and Trump were watching a Saturday night fight in New Jersey or Miami when the president leant over to suggest holding such an event. Preparations started two days later. “I’d make the case that for the vast majority of Donald Trump’s tenure in office, the UFC has been the sports arm,” says Egyptian-born investigative journalist Karim Zidan, author of The Ultimate Strongmen, a forthcoming book on how Trump weaponised MMA to rally a new constituency of young men. “When I say that, what I mean is it is not just some UFC officials here and there supporting him, some fighters here and there supporting him. It is institutionalised,” he adds, noting how UFC as a brand has moved on from spectacle and entertainment to become “politically viable” in its own right. UFC fight night on the White House lawn on June 15th. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AFP/Getty “This is the perfect sport for Donald Trump. In an administration, especially in the second administration, that has really sort of built itself around the ideology of might is right, this has true strongman appeal. “The UFC is simply the perfect organisation for that. It presents itself as a meritocracy where the toughest succeed, where your strength, your intelligence, and your skill is what’s going to lead you to victory. That is exactly the world that Donald Trump wants to occupy.” If the president was perturbed by the court finding that McGregor was liable for raping Nikita Hand it is not apparent. Trump himself has been judged liable by a federal jury for sexually assaulting writer E Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. He denied the charges. In July he paid Carroll $5.6 million in damages after the US Supreme Court rejected his latest attempt to appeal the verdict. “I’m not saying the two cases are identical, but they ended up in very similar positions,” says American combat sports analyst Luke Thomas of the civil rape proceedings against Trump and McGregor. “The idea that Conor’s conduct would be disqualifying to a man like that drains credulity, to put it mildly.” Thomas, who works for podcast producer All the Smoke, says it would be wrong to say the court findings against McGregor didn’t register at all in the lead-up to the Holloway fight. Still, the “pass” McGregor received in the MMA world was in contrast to the Irish response. Conor McGregor and host Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show on US television network NBC last month. Photograph: Todd Owyoung/NBC/Getty There was no mention of Hand’s case when Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s ritzy Tonight Show, gave McGregor a hero’s welcome on the programme in June. A pre-fight interview on the UFC website – titled The Mac is Back – referred only obliquely to “some of his issues away from the sport” and said McGregor “admitted” seeking help to get himself into a better, healthier place. “Fame has its pitfalls,” McGregor was quoted as saying. “You better move carefully in this world, for sure. Probably even more so now.”For all that, McGregor was asked at a media event before the fight whether he understood why some people felt the court case meant he did not deserve the UFC platform. “I’m an innocent man, and I’ll stand for my innocence until the day I go out,” he replied. In a statement sent from New Jersey-based public relations advisers, McGregor’s solicitor Ciarán Mulholland said his client “rightly stood up” against what he described as “the one-sided narrative” surrounding the case. “To be deemed liable in a civil claim should never equate to criminal guilt and circumvent due process, and it certainly doesn’t prevent Mr McGregor from pursuing his remarkable career as a fighter and entrepreneur,” Mulholland said.For all the public opprobrium he has faced and huge legal setbacks, the UFC can open up a lucrative seam of income. McGregor’s fee for the fleeting Holloway bout is reported in some quarters to be in the region of $30 million. But is this true? Karen Kessler, spokeswoman for McGregor, did not say. “His fight generated record viewership and, as per the UFC, sold out hotel rooms across Las Vegas,” she said. “His compensation, undisclosed and private, reflected his enormous appeal and draw.”Financial records for the McGregor empire are opaque at best, although they show plenty of money in circulation in the period before the High Court ruling.Conor McGregor after suffering a leg injury that ended his comeback fight in Las Vegas on July 11th. Photograph: Tom Hogan/Inpho Max Holloway lands a punch on Conor McGregor during their fight in Las Vegas. Photograph: Ian Maule/Getty Abridged unaudited financial statements signed off in November 2025 for his company McGregor Sports and Entertainments do not provide a detailed picture of its activities in 2024, the year that ended with the Nikita Hand case. Still, the statements showed this company owed €51.78 million to unspecified “Luxembourg Entities” and provided €18.56 million in unspecified services to related company Emrajare. A further €3.4 million of services were provided to another company, called Heron Bell.[ Trump and the Irish tech bros: How the ‘crypto president’ is winning over Silicon ValleyOpens in new window ]McGregor Sports and Entertainments also provided services worth €8.79 million in 2024 to his company Forged Stout Distribution, and services worth €8.54 million to another, known as Forged Stout Production. McGregor’s Forged Stout was one of the products delisted by multiple suppliers immediately after the Nikita Hand ruling in the final weeks of 2024.The drink was dropped from Tesco stores, and also from Barry Group (Costcutters stores and Carry Out off-licences), Musgrave (Supervalu and Centra) and BWG (Spar, Eurospar, Mace, Londis and XL). “His stout continues to be available in new markets throughout Europe,” Kessler said without specifying particular markets when replying to the question of how many pubs stock the product. Another casualty of the High Court decision was McGregor’s association with Proximo, the Mexican owner of Bushmills Irish whiskey and Tequila which bought his Proper No. Twelve whiskey brand for some $130 million in 2021. [ Conor McGregor Inc: the fighter’s potential losses in the fallout from civil rape case are enormousOpens in new window ]Asked whether McGregor was required to pay any termination fees when Proximo dropped him from whiskey marketing, Kessler said: “While no longer an active partner in Proper No. Twelve whiskey, he is proud of its success in the market and was paid out for his many contributions to its success.” Accounts signed off last September for Proximo’s Irish business, JC Master Distribution, said “Proper No. 12 saw negative results due to unforeseen circumstances” in 2024. The circumstances were not specified so it is unclear whether this was linked to the court case. None of that was good news for McGregor, whose image was also dropped from the Hitman video game franchise. Still, UFC’s willingness to give him top billing in a major fight event shows the mood was different in the world of the cage-fighting. Thomas, the All the Smoke analyst, says people in MMA tend not to consistently interrogate the background of fighters and others in the sport. “If you need to get your image improved, and especially if you have a lot of money and or fame, the very best place to do it is going to be combat sports,” he says. ‘Donald Trump understands that he can promote himself and present the very best version of himself by associating with the UFC’— Karim Zidan“They’re not going to ask a lot of questions at the door. Even if there are questions, they’re going to sidestep them or – you name it – it’s just [that] the premium is placed on the activity itself and who is good at delivering it. It’s very much a place where moral considerations, not exclusively, but predominantly, go to die.”Thomas notes how Trump himself used UFC for “image rehab” after the Washington, DC, insurrection of January 2021 when thousands of his supporters stormed the US Capitol, disrupting a joint congressional session to certify the result of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.“He actually does this over and over and over again and there is some evidence not that UFC by itself won him the [2024] election but that they were pretty instrumental in helping him access hard-to-reach portions of the electorate, like young men,” Thomas says. “They were very decisive in that particular regard. They helped return a guy to power who’s not merely a political extremist but tried to steal a presidential election.”Similarly, Zidan describes how Trump went to a UFC fight two days after he was convicted in May 2024 of 34 counts of falsifying records of “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. [ Dave Hannigan: Trump family go all-in with UFC’s in-house racist CovingtonOpens in new window ]“His first appearance post-that was at a UFC event. The same goes for when he started doing terribly in the polls because of launching these sort of tariff wars with his neighbours and allies around the world – he immediately attended a UFC event,” Zidan says. “So this is a clear pattern where Donald Trump understands that he can promote himself and present the very best version of himself by associating with the UFC.”As for McGregor, one question now is whether he can find a way back to fitness so he can complete the comeback he was “born” to do. “While disappointed and frustrated that he sustained an injury in his fight, Mr McGregor is looking forward to fulfilling his current UFC contract once he recovers,” Kessler said.Conor McGregor addresses the media in the White House press briefing on St Patrick's Day last year before meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty His next fight, if he makes it, will be the last under his UFC contract, fuelling some speculation about a possible tie-up with Netflix as it moves to stream big MMA fights. But a return to the cage will still be difficult. “He’s having knee surgery – that’s it,” White said, replying to questions about McGregor at a UFC event in Oklahoma.“I mean, the Conor McGregor discussion isn’t even worth talking about. He’s got to have knee surgery. He’s going to have to go through physical therapy. It’s all going to take time. And then when the doctor says you can start hard-core training again, then we’ll start talking about Conor McGregor again.” This was from the same man who lionised McGregor only a short time before the Holloway fight. Interviewed in May by the New Yorker, White compared him with the boxer considered the greatest fighter of all. “We have a guy named Conor McGregor, who I would say is like our Muhammad Ali,” White said, adding people were fascinated by their “incredible, magnetic” personalities. “Some have a thing that they turn on. Muhammad Ali was the same guy in the livingroom, with his wife and kids, that he was when you saw him on TV. And Conor McGregor’s same.”Needless to say, Ali-like greatness did not spring to mind after McGregor’s 69-second flop. Now Thomas believes some of those who previously had no issue with the court ruling may be changing their view because of his “dud” performance in the cage. “The attitudes towards him post-fight versus pre-fight are shifting rapidly,” he says, “The biggest part of it was that people had expected some big return and he didn’t deliver on that. But that it weirdly is now bleeding out into other areas that are making them kind of look at the state of Conor. “If you had brought up pre-fight something about Nikita Hand, you would get dogpiled online, and you still might. But if you brought up the fact that he got held liable for sexual assault post-fight, there’s a little bit – at least online anecdotally, is my experience – that there’s less resistance to it.”