From the Irish Independent, copied the article as it's behind a paywall.
Dee Devlin gave us her best Carmela Soprano this week and hit almost every victim-blaming trope known to womankind
Ellen Coyne
Today at 02:30
Carmela Soprano was being moralised by the therapist, who was putting it to her plainly. Her man had done bad things, he’s prone to anger and he’s been unfaithful.
“Is that your definition of a good man?”
One of the most iconic episodes from The Sopranos is when Carmela is forced to rationalise out loud her reasons for staying with her husband. The scene has it all, every cliched excuse adored by women in denial: the unqualified assumption that men become good when they become fathers; that there is valour for women who stay loyal to bad men; and the time-honoured, hackneyed delusion that she could change him, that she was even going to try.
On Instagram this week – the national cathedral for Ireland’s idolaters of spin and aesthetics – Dee Devlin gave us her best Carmela Soprano.
She used a picture of her own children as “testimony” to the man her long-term partner Conor McGregor is. She made reference to the “beautiful life” of wealth and plenty they’ve built together.
All we know about McGregor and Devlin’s relationship is what they choose to present to us. But in posting an appalling broadside against Nikita Hand that hit almost every single victim-blaming trope known to womankind, Devlin put forward an argument that has been eagerly repeated by some of McGregor’s most devoted supporters.
The problem with McGregor, Devlin and all his supporters is that they think the former mixed martial arts fighter is exceptional. The way Ms Hand has been savaged since she won her civil sexual assault case against McGregor proves that those on McGregor’s side have been conscripted into believing the most boring, predictable, moronic and sexist rape culture myths.
Like how being a mother damns Ms Hand, but being a father exonerates McGregor. Comments made by Devlin, and echoed by McGregor’s supporters, condemn Ms Hand for the original sin of being a mother who did not live a cloistered existence and had a weekend on the tiles. It seems people tend not to be as preoccupied with fathers who admit taking cocaine on a night out while their pregnant partner is at home with his children.
Devlin tried to protect her relationship with a garbled reference to a Bible verse – “They without sin cast the first stone” – all the while joining in with those firing rocks at Ms Hand.
Bear in mind that even before he lost his civil sexual assault case, McGregor was in hot water with the authorities for everything from driving offences, smashing a phone and trying to throw a trolley at a bus window.
And in the days before his partner gave birth last year, he was busying himself on social media pouring fuel on a fire that almost burnt down Dublin. But because he has a devoted fiancee and children, he gets to be a rich, complex and flawed character.
Ms Hand, despite winning her case, is unfairly cast as history’s favourite garden variety villain: The Bad Mother.
With no respect for the verdict, McGregor’s backers have declared “I believe him, a gendered twist on the slogan of solidarity that has long been the sole comfort of some of the women who have been brave enough to go up against rich and powerful abusers.
Winning her case has only made Ms Hand more of a target. Blind with aggression, McGregor’s supporters are trying to turn her into a scary bedtime story for those who find it easier to live in an imaginary world where women invent allegations, rather than the real one where men they may know or admire are capable of abuse.
McGregor’s servile supporters have been attacking Ms Hand for going out in an attractive outfit, for sending McGregor pictures of herself and for getting drunk – a line of thinking that follows the cues of McGregor and Devlin’s commentary. Unless McGregor, his fiancee and their fans have been cryogenically frozen since the 1970s, there is no excuse beyond clinical stupidity for anyone to still believe in 2024 that the way a woman dresses is a licence to assault her.
Many of McGregor’s supporters are from the kind of intellectual stock that tends to see wives and children as assets and character references for men, rather than people in their own right.
No woman should be liable for the appalling behaviour of her partner. But in Devlin’s case, she has chosen to help cultivate and defend the “family man” image McGregor seems to want far more than he seems willing to earn.
Carmela Soprano found her excuses in the wedding band on her finger. Where did Devlin find hers? In the cushioned seats of a Bentley, in the lining of a Dior bag? Or in the eyes of someone who has managed to convince her he’s a good man, just because he has been good to her?
Supermarkets and retailers have dropped McGregor’s brands like a hot snot. There is one rape culture myth that McGregor and his supporters don’t seem to have invoked so far, and that’s the claim that an assault allegation can ruin a man’s professional life. It’s almost always not true, as many awful men have proved. Maybe this time Conor McGregor really deserves to be the exception.