MANHATTAN (CN) — A jury of six New Yorkers will begin deliberations Thursday afternoon on whether “Creed III” actor Jonathan Majors criminally assaulted his ex-girlfriend during a domestic altercation in the back of a taxi last March.
Invoking the underlying racial implications of a criminal trial where the Black actor was arrested for allegedly striking a white woman, Majors’ defense attorney told jurors during closing arguments Thursday that “his fear of what happens when a Black man in America calls 911 came true, and now we’re here.”
Majors, who played supervillain Kang the Conqueror in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” faces up to a year in prison on multiple misdemeanor counts of assault in the third degree and aggravated harassment in the second degree, accusing him of injuring British dancer/choreographer Grace Jabbari in a fracas inside and outside of the SUV.
“We’re here because the police made up their minds on sight,” Majors' attorney Priya Chaudhry told jurors.
“They took a look at Mr. Majors and they made up their minds. They decided who was the victim and who was the criminal, and then they asked Grace if Mr. Majors had done this to her,” she said.
“They bought her white lies, they bought her big lies,” Chaudhry continued. “Who else bought her lies? These prosecutors bought Grace’s white lies, her big lies and all her pretty little lies.
“Context is everything,” Chaudhry said. “You heard from the driver who told you that Grace had attacked Jonathan all night, that Jonathan asked to stop the car, that Jonathan was trying to get rid of her, that he was trying to get her to leave him alone.”
Testimony from the hired driver, called as a prosecution witness, appeared to corroborate Majors’ claims that his ex-girlfriend had assaulted him in a blowout because he refused to let her look at his cellphone after he received a salacious text message from another woman.
Speaking through an Urdu language interpreter on Monday, private black car driver Naveed Sarwar testified that he kept his eyes “straight ahead” on the road as the couple began fighting in the back as the SUV was crossing the Manhattan Bridge onto Canal Street, but had “a feeling the girl had hit the boy…because of the way that she was fighting, and the sounds produced.”
Majors' defense team had countered that Jabbari was in fact the aggressor during their domestic spat in the back of the hired Escalade, and fixated at trial on the English dancer’s drinking on the night of the incident and in general throughout their relationship.
Majors’ defense lawyers argued that Jabbari’s injuries were not caused by him striking her, but more likely from falling down drunk on alcohol and sleeping pills at his apartment at the end of the night.
"She was revenge partying and charging champagne to the man she was angry with," Chaudhry said as she showed jurors images from Jabbari reveling at a Lower East Side nightclub after the separating from Majors for the night after the incident.
Chaudhry told jurors that the prosecution had not met their burden to show proof beyond reasonable doubt that Majors had caused Jabbari’s injuries.
“Videos prove that is not true. Their own witnesses prove that that is not true. The medical evidence proves that that is not true,” she said. “You can’t believe anything that Grace says about what happened in that car, let alone all of it.”
Chaudhry urged jurors to weigh “the utter absence of blood from a head wound that would have immediately turned Grace’s shirt into a crime scene,“ in considering if the laceration behind her ear had been caused by Majors hitting her earlier in the night.
“There was no blood in Grace’s hair,” she said. There’s no blood on Grace’s fingers as she keeps touching her ear. There’s no blood anywhere.
“Grace bends reality and these prosecutors contort themselves to keep up,” Chaudhry said.
Chaudhry appeared to choke up in tears as she delivered the final crescendo of her 70-minute closing summation. "You are here to end this nightmare for Jonathan Majors. You are here to see what is obvious,” she said. “Jonathan Majors is innocent."
Majors embraced the attorney in a hug afterward as she returned to the defense table.
Prosecutors say Majors caused fractured finger on Jabarri’s right hand and a cut behind her right ear by prying her fingers off his cellphone and then twisting her arm behind her back, “causing excruciating pain,” and later by violently pushing her in and out of the car.
Majors faces three misdemeanor counts for charges related to accused conduct inside of the car, and one count for accused conduct outside of the car on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan.
The prosecution’s closing argument on Thursday afternoon was handled by Assistant District Attorney Kelli Galloway.
“Because we have a video showing the defendant repeatedly shoving Ms. Jabbari against the black Escalade, we know the defendant is guilty of assault in the third degree,” the prosecuting attorney told jurors.
"You didn't see any evidence that defendant was attacked," she said, refuting Majors’ counterclaims that Jabbari was the aggressor and he was the victim.
Galloway said Majors exerted textbook tactics of intimate partner abuse — “control, domination, manipulation and abuse” — against Jabbari throughout their relationship and on the night of the incident.
Prosecutors say the assault on March 25th, 2023, was not an outlier in their relationship but rather the latest flareup in an apparent pattern of Majors' violent temper and emotional abuse of Jabbari.
Across three days of testimony, Jabbari recalled the relationship Majors as “amazing, really kind and loving,” at the beginning but said the actor’s pattern of manipulative jealousy and mood swings later took over their relationship.
“I just felt like I was existing in his world, emotionally and physically, in all these ways that didn’t fulfill my autonomy,” she said last week.
Majors has denied the assault and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He opted not to testify in his own defense.
The Yale Drama School graduate has been set to reprise his role as Kang in future Marvel Cinematic Universe movies “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” (2026) and “Avengers: Secret Wars” (2027), but his future with the blockbuster comic book movie franchise hangs in limbo the wake of the criminal charges.
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