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Entering the second week of Jonathan Majors domestic violence trial, the Loki actor’s phone and texts have become central to both the prosecution and defense cases.
Put bluntly, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the defense team have very different perspectives on the allegedly assault by Majors in late March on his then longtime girlfriend. However, as was evident today and has been clear even before the trial began on December 4, both sides admit whatever happened that night erupted out of Grace Jabbari seeing texts on the actor’s phone from another woman that read “I wish I were kissing you.”
Things escalated quickly after that.
Today, with Majors in court at the defense table, the driver of the car the duo were in when Jabbari saw those texts recounted her version of what went down.
“The girl became very angry,” driver Naveed Sanwar told the court Monday with the assistance of an Urdu language interpreter. “The boy wanted to get rid of the girl and he opened the door,” Sanwar said of Majors and Jabbari’s fight over the texts and infidelity. Via the interpreter, Sanwar added he thought “the girl had hit the boy — because of the way that she was fighting, and the sounds produced.”
A jury of three men and three women will decide if Majors is guilty on misdemeanor charges arising from a late-night incident in and around the actor’s Chelsea apartment on March 25 with Grace Jabbari. NYPD officers on the scene at Majors’ pad found a number of marks, “a laceration” and a finger fracture on Jabbari and arrested Majors. Monday, Dr. William Chang testified about treating Jabbari later that day at NYC’s Bellevue Hospital and how consistence her injuries with someone who has been hit.
“He was saying, ‘Leave me alone. I have to go’,” driver Sanwar testified Monday to the jurors and Judge Michael Gaffey. “He was not doing anything, she was doing it.” That’s the near opposite of what Assistant DA Michael Perez said last week in his opening statement where he referred to Majors throwing Jabbari back into the car “like a football.” In her own testimony last week, Jabbari said that when she woke up the next day, she “felt like I had been hit by a bus.”
Through the interpreter, Sanwar today admitted he couldn’t recall how many times Majors had “pushed” Jabbari to try to her back in the vehicle,. The driver was allowed to leave after a very short cross-examination by the defense.
The actor has always said he is innocent, and that Jabbari, who Majors filed a cross complaint against in June, was the aggressor. If Majors is found guilty by the jury he could get up to a year behind bars in the Empire State.
In that context, Majors’ defense took a damning blow on Friday when texts were read out in court of the actor successfully convincing Jabbari not to go to the hospital in the UK for a head injury in September 2022. “They will ask you questions, and as I don’t think you actually protect us, it could lead to an investigation even if you do lie and they suspect something,” Majors told his then girlfriend.
“I will tell the doctor I bumped my head if I go,” a responding text from Jabbari to Majors said. “I’m going to give it one more day, but I can’t sleep and I need some stronger painkillers,” she went on to say.
“Why would I tell them what really happened when it’s clear I want to be with you,” Jabbari assured her then lover, who seemed to be the cause of the head injury in question last year.
“I’m a monster, a horrible man,” the actor, who was filming the second season of Disney+’s Loki at the time in the UK, added later on September 22, 2022. “I am killing myself soon. I’ve already put things in motion,” Majors threatened, as he had several times before.
Though there had been mention in an October filing by the DA’s office of “medical records from London related to an incident that occurred in September 2022,” nothing was ever said further of the matter. In late November, Judge Gaffey sealed evidence that he openly called “prejudicial and inflammatory” toward Majors. As reported before, Deadline has learned that the sealed documents at issue contain information on potential past incidents involving the actor both in the U.S. and the UK.
It was aggressive overreach by defense attorney Priya Chaudhry towards the testifying and sometimes tearful Jabbari on December 8 that “opened the door,” and saw Judge Gaffey suddenly unseal the texts – which were read out loud for the jury and onlookers first by Jabbar, and then, after she was unable to continue through her own crying, Assistant DA Kelli Galaway.
The texts appeared to offer back-up to the DA’s assertion in their opening statement of the “cruel and manipulative pattern of abuse Majors displayed towards Jabbari even before the March 2023 incident in NYC that led to his arrest and this trial. On the stand since December 5, Jabbari herself has testified that there were numerous occasions when Majors was allegedly emotionally, verbally and physically abusive to her.
“I was just scared of the consequences of it,” Jabbari told prosecutors last week of why she wasn’t forthcoming right away with the authorities of what supposedly went down between her and Majors in March. “I still wanted to protect him.”
It is still unclear if Majors will testify in his own defense over what is looking to be the last week of the trial.
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