Jonathan Majors’s ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, teared up on the stand in the actor’s domestic-violence trial as she described his “violent temper” over the course of their two-year relationship. During two days of testimony, she recounted in vivid detail the night she alleges Majors assaulted her, saying that the actor twisted her right arm behind her back until she was in “excruciating pain.” Jabbari also raised several incidents in which she said Majors “exploded” at her, only to later apologize and call himself “a monster.”
Majors faces two counts of misdemeanor assault and two counts of harassment in the high-profile case. He denies assaulting Jabbari, and his defense has argued that she actually attacked him in the March 25 incident.
Jabbari, wearing a plaid jacket with shoulder pads, spoke softly as she walked the court through the night she alleges Majors assaulted her. In her telling, the relationship was going well at the time: She had moved from London to New York to live with the actor a few months prior; he had picked out an engagement ring for her; and they were talking about having kids. But she felt something was off with Majors the night of the incident. Jabbari said that when they left their Chelsea penthouse to go to dinner and a show in Brooklyn, Majors asked her to do up one of her shirt buttons. The actor told Jabbari over dinner that “he was going to kill himself,” she testified, because she had divulged details about their relationship to his manager. By the time they got in an Escalade to return home, Jabbari said, they’d each had about five alcoholic drinks.
Then, while holding Majors’s hand in the back of the car, Jabbari said she saw a few text messages from someone named Cleopatra on the actor’s phone. The first was a link to the song “Lady” by D’Angelo. The second read, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” Majors suddenly became alert and told her “it’s not what it looks like,” according to Jabbari’s testimony. She says she asked to see the text messages, grabbed Majors’s phone with both hands, and turned away from the actor. Majors then tried to pry the device from Jabbari’s fingers, she said, twisting her right arm behind her back until she was in “excruciating” pain. “Next, I felt a hard blow across my head,” she said. Majors took his phone back and then pressed down on Jabbari’s arms and chest as she tried to slap his arms away, she said. Majors, who kept his eyes down throughout Jabbari’s testimony, glared up at her as she described the scene.
Jabbari said she asked Majors if he was cheating on her, and instead of answering, he asked the driver to stop the car and got out. She claims he pushed her back inside the car when she tried to follow him. The prosecutor then played sidewalk surveillance footage that showed Majors repeatedly picking up Jabbari and putting her back into the Escalade. “My body always felt very light in his hands,” she said. “I would never fight back.”
Majors ran away from the car and Jabbari chased after him, saying she wanted an explanation for the text message. After losing sight of him, she said, she approached three strangers who were standing outside of an apartment building. Jabbari told them she found out her boyfriend was likely having an affair, that she’d left her phone and bag in his car, and that she needed help getting home. Majors walked by the group as the strangers called Jabbari a car, she said, and she followed him, suggesting they talk in the car. The couple briefly sat in the Escalade before Majors became heated again and tried to leave. Jabbari testified that she grabbed at his shirt to keep him inside and a button came off. “‘Look at what you’ve done,’” Jabbari said Majors shouted in the street, before running away again.
Jabbari testified that she then sought refuge with the three strangers, who invited her to a birthday party. A few hours later, Jabbari said, she returned to the Chelsea apartment and got a text from Majors in which he said he loved her but didn’t think the relationship was going to work out. She called him multiple times, did not get an answer, and then took two sleeping pills. “I couldn’t lie on the right side of my body at all,” she testified. “The back of my head hurt. Everywhere hurt.” She noticed that her hair was stuck behind her ear and that there was dried blood. “My finger had turned black at that point,” she said.
Jabbari then took multiple photos of her injuries, which were circulated to the jury. She next locked the bedroom door, hoping to sleep. “I was scared he was going to come back,” Jabbari said of Majors. She went to the bathroom to vomit, then decided to sleep on the floor of a walk-in closet. When she woke up, Jabbari said a group of police officers was standing above her. She was wearing nothing more than a sweater. “It was so overwhelming being a woman half-naked surrounded by big men,” she said.
The officers’ questions led her to believe they thought she’d harmed herself. Jabbari says she alluded to the alleged assault “in the safest way possible,” given that she could hear Majors in the other room. “I wanted to say, ‘Help me please,’” she said. “But I felt scared to do that.” The officers took Jabbari to the hospital, where she said a doctor cleaned the injury behind her ear and “wanted to stitch it back together.” An X-ray showed that her right finger was fractured, and she left the hospital in a splint. Jabbari said she didn’t tell hospital staff what had happened between her and Majors because “I loved him still. I didn’t want to get him in trouble.”
Earlier in her testimony, Jabbari told the court that she felt isolated and like she was “walking on eggshells” around Majors during their relationship. She claimed Majors berated her, called her names like “idiot” and “alcoholic,” broke candles and a mug around her, and knocked headphones out of her ears. “I felt like I had to be perfect,” she said. “If I did one little thing, or said the wrong thing, the temper would show. I wanted to avoid it.” Jabbari then began to cry, shielding her eyes with one hand and apologizing to the jury.
Jabbari described herself as a professional dancer who met Majors while working on the set of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in the fall of 2021. They began dating shortly afterward, she said, and their relationship moved fast. While Jabbari said Majors was “loving and caring and wrote me poetry” at first, she soon saw a different side of his personality. In December of that year, Jabbari said, he became upset when she mentioned an ex-boyfriend, and Majors stood over her yelling while she sat on a couch. “It was the first time I felt scared of him,” she said. “And I knew never to mention my ex.”
Majors lost his temper again the following summer, Jabbari testified. During her annual trip to the Glastonbury music festival, the cell-phone service was so bad the couple couldn’t easily communicate. She said Majors texted her that he was mad she wasn’t there for him during a stressful week of filming on the Disney bodybuilding drama Magazine Dreams. Jabbari ended up driving back early from the festival, and Majors told her she had betrayed his trust. In an attempt to improve his mood, Jabbari said she promised Majors that she “wouldn’t go places like that with my friends and that he was my priority.”
The actor also got heated with Jabbari during a visit to his Los Angeles home in the summer of 2022, she testified. Majors threw candles in the bedroom and shouted in her face, she said, before he eventually calmed down and began crying. She added that Majors then called himself “a monster” and apologized to her. Jabbari showed the court a photo she took during the incident and pointed to a dent in the wall and glass on the floor. “I just wanted to remember,” she explained. “I kept forgiving him, but I wanted to have a bit of a memory of it.”
The most physical incident Jabbari described happened in September 2022 when the couple was living together in an apartment in London while Majors was filming a movie. Jabbari picked up coffee and breakfast one morning to help lift his tense mood after he had scolded her for having drinks with a friend. She ran into him on Hampstead Heath while on the phone with her parents and asked if he was okay. Majors got upset, she testified, and called her an “alcoholic” and an “idiot.” Jabbari said he tore her headphones from her ears as she walked away, stomping on them and shouting, “You better not be in the house when I get home.” Two strangers came over to ask if Jabbari was okay as she picked up the broken headphones.
She went back to the apartment to pack her belongings and froze in fear when she heard Majors come inside. Jabbari said he put her stuff in trash bags and broke a coffee mug she had recently bought him. After she escaped to a friend’s house, Majors asked Jabbari via text that she not tell anyone about the incident. “I want to marry you, and this will ruin it if you say anything,” Majors purportedly said. “I love you, and I’m going to put everything back and make it nice.”
Jabbari said she believed the actor, but once she had returned to the apartment, she found he was still angry. Majors shouted at her that she was “an alcoholic and an embarrassment” who needed to focus on supporting his career. The prosecution played a recording of this incident, in which Majors can be heard calling himself “a great man” who needs a woman to make sacrifices for him the way Coretta Scott King and Michelle Obama did for their husbands. Jabbari said she took the blame to keep the peace.
“I fear him physically quite a lot,” she testified. Her breathing shortened as she described feeling isolated and entirely dependent on Majors. “I loved him,” she said. “I just felt small and felt like I’m not good enough for him.”
Later that month, Jabbari said, Majors told her over text that “he wants to kill himself and that he had put actions in place to do so.” It wasn’t the first time he had expressed these feelings to her, she testified, and she tried to dissuade him. Jabbari started confiding in Majors’s manager about his behavior, thinking the manager already knew, but the actor was angry when he found out. “I felt responsible and bad,” Jabbari said. “Like I needed to reassure him I wouldn’t tell anyone else and that I loved him.”
At the end of her direct examination, Jabbari said the case has brought her “a lot of unwanted attention over a really difficult period in my life. The show of it all — the stuff that’s been said about me being untrue and having to take it — felt like abuse that I was in has not ended.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Coretta Scott King’s name.
