It’s a bit rich for firms to drop bad boy McGregor now

I once attended a fascinating lecture by a leading Irish lawyer and expert on defamation. She ran the class through some of the interesting cases in which she was involved and provided insight into how she approached each of them.

The one that stands out was in relation to a well-publicised act of public disorder in Dublin in the 1990s. Afterwards, one of the newspapers published an article about some of those who they alleged were involved and listed some of the trouble they had been in in the past.

Some of the details were wrong; several of these were hard cases who had served time for serious offences but the article only mentioned lesser crimes. Hilariously, some of them sued as they felt their status was affected by their being tarnished as petty thieves and so on; their peers had lost respect for them.

Now, in Ireland, a defamatory statement is defined as “a statement that reasonable members of society would think damages your reputation”. So, the defence countered that the prison lags and convicts whose opinion of these people had soured were not, in fact, “reasonable members of society” and, as such, no defamation had occurred. They were right and the case went nowhere.

I thought of this last week when, predictably, Conor McGregor was cancelled by the corporate world after being found to have committed sexual assault in a civil case. Now, let’s be clear – I have no sympathy for McGregor, the most odious character to rise to a prominent place in Irish sport in my view.

But I found it stomach-churning to see the big brands wash their hands of McGregor by removing the drinks he hawks from their shelves.

Asda, which made £1.1bn in profit last year, stopped stocking his Forged Stout brand, which it had been selling in 500 of its 1200 shops.

The company operating Costcutter and Carry-Out (Barry Group) and the parent of SuperValu and Centra (Musgraves) also ditched McGregor, as did Tesco.

A company that was developing a video game called Hitman, which included McGregor dropped references to him, too.

IO Interactive said in a statement on Twitter: “In light of the recent court ruling regarding Conor McGregor, IO Interactive has made the decision to cease its collaboration with the athlete, effective immediately.

“We take this matter very seriously and cannot ignore its implications. Consequently, we will begin removing all content featuring Mr McGregor from our storefronts starting today.”

It’s interesting that the video game people take this latest court ruling “very seriously”. The obvious inference is that they didn’t interpret his previous transgressions in the same way.

The list went on. The National Wax Museum actually removed its likeness – the word is open to interpretation in this instance – of McGregor, telling RTE: “We regularly review our exhibits to make sure they align with our values and the expectations of visitors and at the time we felt it was the right decision to make.”

That chimed with other statements explaining why McGregor was axed.

“This action,” stated Barry Group, after they severed ties, “reflects our commitment to maintaining a retail environment that resonates with the values of our customers and partners.”

Such corporate lingo was to be expected and rings hollow to me. We are expected to believe it is all about values and doing the right thing, that these companies care about aligning themselves with good people and all that malarkey.

It seems to me that, talking about “shared values” when big money is involved is the last refuge of the spoofer. The proof is in the fact that it’s only now, when McGregor has lost this case and the Rape Crisis Network has called for a boycott of his products, that these leading companies have decided that, you know what, we don’t want to be associated with this individual and profit off those links after all.

To go back to the aforementioned case of the cons and the “reasonable person” aspect to the definition of a defamatory statement, did any “reasonable person” honestly believe that McGregor was an upstanding individual prior to these latest court proceedings?

The truth is that they were quite happy to profit off the image that McGregor had created for himself, the loquacious, self-made upstart fighter who dared to dream, was full of defiance – “not here to take part, here to take over” – and whose wildness was part of his charm.

That was McGregor’s brand and what made him stand out and if he had run-ins with the law, what harm?

Proximo Spirits, a Mexican-based company, bought the Proper No Twelve whiskey brand off McGregor in 2021. One of the ads they used to promote it featured a smiling McGregor, with the headline stating: “FROM A PROPER IRISH MAN”.

One would like to think they are mortified by that now but we can only assume; the truth is, they seemed quite content with it up till the latest disgusting revelations.

Which is striking because, long before a civil jury decided he had committed a brutal rape, McGregor was no stranger to the courts. Just last July, he almost ended up behind bars after being convicted of a series of “appalling” dangerous driving incidents in Dublin. The judge described the offences as “persistent, prolonged and deliberate”, fining him €5,000 and banning him off the road for two years as well as handing him a suspended five-month jail term.

In 2016, he was investigated by Gardaí after posting a photo on social media wearing a balaclava and wielding what appeared to be a firearm – but the powers that be were satisfied in the end that it was effectively a toy gun.

Later, he would be convicted of several driving offences.

In 2018, he attacked a bus containing members of a rival UFC camp, throwing objects. Three people ended up injured and McGregor subsequently was directed by a New York court to undertake community service and attend anger management classes.

The following year, after an incident in Miami, he was charged with strong-arm robbery and criminal mischief after stamping on a fan’s phone; these charges were later dropped. McGregor, it was reported, reached a settlement with the fan.

McGregor was later convicted after an unprovoked assault on a 49-year-old man in a pub in Dublin, reportedly after the man declined to drink McGregor’s whiskey. The incident was caught on video; McGregor subsequently apologised.

There were numerous other accusations since. After none of these events did any of these major brands – who are all about good virtue and so on, remember - feel that McGregor’s values did not align with theirs. Or, if they did, they didn’t tell the world as much - they continued to profit off the back of the fighter and his carry-on.

Yes, dropping him is better late than never but spare us the stuff about principles. Their statements, and recent actions, suggest that a certain standard of behaviour is important to them; their inaction before the last fortnight indicates differently.

Despite the grandstanding of late, it seems to me that the only value that matters is the bottom line.