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Jonathan Majors did not commit assault against his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, during a March 25 car ride in Manhattan, but he is on trial for it because police and prosecutors decided against all the evidence that the woman accusing him was the real victim, a defense lawyer told jurors in the first closing argument at the Marvel actor’s domestic violence trial in New York City.
”This entire case is built on Grace’s lies — and, boy, does Grace lie,” lawyer Priya Chaudhry told jurors in the first closing argument at the actor’s domestic violence trial in New York City.
Jurors will decide whether Majors is guilty of inflicting injuries on his Jabbari during a chauffeured ride home from a night out in Brooklyn and Manhattan on March 25. Both sides agree that a dispute broke out inside the car when Jabbari spotted a text from another woman on Majors’ phone and tried to grab the device. Jabbari testified that during the struggle Majors struck her in the head and violently bent back her right hand.
The driver stopped and the dispute spilled out of the vehicle onto a street corner in Chinatown. Surveillance video seen by jurors showed Majors forcing Jabbari back into the car — which Chaudhry said was to protect her from traffic. It’s the only video of the incident, and their driver testified that he didn’t see Majors assaulting Jabbari.
She was treated hours later at a hospital in Manhattan for a fractured finger and a laceration behind her ear, after police had found her in Majors’ apartment in Chelsea lying inside a wardrobe closet. Jurors saw police body-camera video of the encounter.
The hours between the fight and a 911 call from Majors that brought the NYPD to the home were a focus of the defense, because Jabbari went nightclubbing with a group of people she met on the street after exiting the vehicle. Majors had checked into a hotel and texted Jabbari that he was breaking up with her. He went to the apartment in the morning and called 911, fearing that Jabbari was suicidal based on a string of texts she had sent him after the fight, Chaudhry said in her opening statement.
Chaudhry said that her client is the innocent victim of a vengeful ex who attacked him in the car and, after he broke up with her, set out to ruin him personally and professionally. The defense lawyer showed jurors video from inside the club of Jabbari dancing, touching people, reaching into her purse, and holding a handrail with her right hand — not the actions of someone nursing a head injury or a fractured finger, according to Chaudhry.
Chaudhry, who unsuccessfully defended writer-director Paul Haggis in a civil sexual assault trial, also oversaw an effort to get the NYPD to investigate Jabbari for domestic violence against Majors. The actor filed a cross-complaint with police in June accusing Jabbari, a London-based choreographer who met Majors on the set of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, of domestic violence.
After Jabbari turned herself into a police precinct in October, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said it had looked into the matter and would not bring a case, calling the matter “closed and sealed.”
The prosecution put several witnesses on the stand, with Jabbari’s own emotional testimony covering parts of three days. Jurors also heard from the couple’s driver that night, NYPD officers who interviewed Jabbari at the apartment and arrested Majors, the physician who treated Jabbari at Bellevue Hospital, and an expert on domestic violence.
The defense called three witnesses in their turn on Wednesday, the trial’s last day of testimony: the NYPD detective who pursued an investigation of Jabbari; an emergency surgeon who, as an expert witness, testified that Jabbari’s injuries were not consistent with her allegations; and Majors’ talent agent, who the actor called that morning in March.
Majors did not testify. He spent the first eight trial days in Judge Michael Gaffey’s Manhattan courtroom seated between his lawyers, sometimes taking notes, as various members of his family members and his girlfriend, Meagan Good, looked on from the public gallery. A ceramic cup and a bible with gold leaf pages that Majors brought to court every day rested on the table in front of him.
Whether or not he is convicted, Majors was depicted by the prosecution as troubled and volatile, with his accuser on the stand saying he veered between fits of jealous rage and threats to take his own life. “It felt like I was walking around on eggshells,” Jabbari testified.
Prosecutors used Majors’ own words against him to try to persuade the jury that he abused Jabbari physically and emotionally during the couple’s two years together, and on March 25. The three-man, three-woman jury heard Majors say that he needed a partner worthy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama, and then castigate Jabbari for her shortcomings in audio that Jabbari recorded without his knowledge in London in 2022.
“I’m a great man … doing great things,” Majors said on the recording. “The woman that supports me …needs to be a great woman and make sacrifices.”
Majors sat stone-faced in court on Dec. 8 as texts between him and Jabbari about an incident in London — six months before his arrest in New York — were read aloud. “I will tell the doctor I bumped my head if I go,” Jabbari wrote of plans to get painkillers from a hospital. Majors wrote back that going to the hospital would “lead to an investigation even if you do lie and they suspect something.”
With his career hanging by a thread, his lawyers fought to keep those texts out of the record. They succeeded at first in a case marked by delays, closed-door hearings and months of legal maneuvering over misdemeanor criminal charges that normally end in plea deals, and rarely culminate in a jury trial. Judge Gaffey ruled, however, that Chaudhry opened the door to the texts because she “impugned” Jabbari during cross-examination.
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