Jonathan Majors has been found guilty of reckless assault and harassment in his domestic violence trial.
A New York City jury of three men and three women just delivered the verdict on the Loki actor after less than three days deliberation. Once touted as an Oscar contender for his role in Searchlight’s now-shelved Magazine Dreams, Majors faces up to a year behind bars. The actor was up against four misdemeanor charges.
Sentencing has been set for February 6.
Arrested and promptly released on March 25 after the alleged assault on his then-girlfriend Grace Jabbari, Majors always has insisted on his innocence. Months ago, he entered a “not guilty” plea to the charges.
After eight days of testimony in Judge Michael Gaffey’s Manhattan courtroom, the jury was left to weigh starkly different accounts of what happened between Majors and Jabbari during a car ride home that instead ended at a downtown sidewalk in the middle of the night. They also heard very different versions of what went on in Majors’ Chelsea apartment with an apparently injured Jabbari on the night of March 24 and early morning of March 25, when NYPD officers responded to a 911 call from the actor himself – a call that led to Jabbari going to Bellevue Hospital and saying that Majors had struck her. Majors’ call to 911 also led to him being arrested and booked by police.
Following closing arguments by the defense and Manhattan District Attorney’s office, the jury went behind closed door around 3:30 pm ET on December 14. Later that day, the jurors requested to have the charges read aloud to them again, as well as have audio and video from the late-March incident between Majors and Jabbari played for them. After some confusion about exactly what video the jury wanted to see, Gaffey read the charges and the material was played in court on the afternoon of December 15.
Soon after beginning deliberations on December 18, the jury sent two notes to the court asking to reexamine some of the case’ evidence. Specifically, the panel wanted to again see video the couple fighting outside their chauffeured car on March 24, have some of the charges re-read to them and hear a portion of testimony from a friend of Jabbari’s of what went down in a nightclub after the incident with Majors.
Testifying for several days since the much-delayed trial officially started December 4, Jabbari told the court that Majors struck her in the head and violently twisted her hand and arm during a struggle for his phone on March 24. The British national explained the allegedly incident occurred after she had spotted a explicit text from another woman on the actor’s phone while they returning to his NYC apartment after dinner together. A hospital exam later that next morning, after the police came to Majors’ apartment and found a sleeping Jabbari in a small backroom, found that she had a fractured right finger and a laceration with dried blood behind her right ear, among other injuries and marks.
Still, with no video from inside the car, the jurors only had testimony from Jabbari and from the driver — both witnesses for the prosecution but with contradictory recollections — to go on. There was a lot of sometimes-subjective video of the couple on the street in the aftermath of the alleged incident, including Majors trying to push Jabbari back in the vehicle and Jabbari chasing Majors down the sidewalk.
“We didn’t cherry-pick witnesses,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Kelly Galaway said in closing arguments on December 14. “We want you to hear the whole truth.”
“Control, domination, manipulation and abuse” were how Majors kept Jabbari in check, Galaway added in her closing argument. On the defense side, Majors’ main lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, called Jabbari a “liar” in her closing argument and said that authorities “bought her white lies, her big lies and all her pretty little lies.” Stating that the accuser engaged in so-called “revenge partying” against Majors, Chaudhry added to the jurors: ”This entire case is built on Grace’s lies — and, boy, does Grace lie.”
Despite speculation right up until nearly the last day of the trial that Majors would testify on his own behalf, the actor did not. The trial’s last witness was Majors’ agent Elan Ruspoli from William Morris Endeavor. Even though Majors’ management and PR firms dropped him soon after the incident with Jabbari, along with several film roles and ad campaigns, WME has stayed with the actor over the months leading up to the trial amid scrutiny of his behavior and personality.
Majors and Jabbari first met in London in 2021 on the set of Disney/Marvel‘s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, with the actor playing villain Kang. Self-described “professional dancer” Jabbari was hired as the actor’s movement coach on the Ant-Man sequel. Intended to be a pivotal part of the next phase of the MCU, Majors’ Kang was one of many high-profile roles the Creed III actor has been getting in recent year as he was heralded as a bankable star of the big and small screen.
The verdict’s impact on what remains of Majors’ career prospects is uncertain, but what is known is that the trial itself revealed a trunkload of details that Majors’ lawyers had fought tooth and nail to keep private.
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.
Although 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 ever further was said about the matter. There also was a bevy of material related to Majors that was sealed late last month after the judge termed it “likely to be prejudicial and inflammatory.” 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.
Overreach by the defense in its questioning of an often-crying Jabbari saw Gaffey reverse himself and partially pull back the veil on the previously sealed evidence of past conduct by Majors. Four days after the trial began, Gaffey ruled that Chaudhry opened the door to the texts from 2022 when the couple were in the UK during the shooting of the second season of Disney+’s Loki because she “impugned” Jabbari during cross-examination.
During testimony on December 8, an expressionless Majors listened in court 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.”
A few days later, those texts as well as other video and audio evidence were released to the media and the general public.
Other witnesses in the nearly two-week trial included the police officers who arrested Majors, an emergency surgeon who treated Jabbari, a domestic violence expert, Jabbari’s nightclub companions after the fight and NYPD detective Ronnie Mejia, who investigated Majors’ domestic violence cross-complaint against Jabbari at lawyer Chaudhry’s urging.
Jabbari turned herself in to an NYPD police precinct on October to answer a so-called “desk appearance ticket” recommended by Mejia. The DA’s office said that it looked into the cross-complaint and opted not to charge Jabbari, calling the matter “closed and sealed.”
In terms of Jonathan Majors, with today’s verdict, things might just be beginning.
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Source: DLine
