Jonathan Majors’s Ex Testifies About His ‘Violent Temper’
“I felt scared of him,” the actor’s ex-girlfriend told the court in his domestic violence trial.
Jonathan Majors’s ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, took the stand in the actor’s domestic-violence trial on December 5 and described several incidents where she said Majors’s “violent temper” exploded over the course of their two-year relationship. Throughout two hours of emotional testimony, Jabbari said she felt isolated and afraid while dating Majors. The actor even called himself “a monster,” she said, while apologizing for one particular outburst that allegedly occurred months before his March arrest in Manhattan.
Jabbari, wearing a plaid jacket with shoulder pads, told the court that she felt 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.
She is the second witness to take the stand in the high-profile case, in which Majors faces two counts of misdemeanor assault and two counts of harassment for allegedly attacking Jabbari when she saw a text from another woman on his phone. Majors denies assaulting Jabbari, and his defense has argued that she actually attacked him in the March 25 incident.
Jabbari described herself as a professional dancer who met Major while working on the set of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in the fall of 2021. They began dating shortly after, 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 to his personality. In December of that year, Jabbari said, Majors became upset when she mentioned an ex-boyfriend and 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, she testified. During her annual trip to the Glastonbury music festival, the cell phone service was so bad that 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, “I wouldn’t go places like that with my friends and that he was my priority.”
The actor also got heated with her during a visit to his Los Angeles home in the summer of 2022, Jabbari testified. Majors threw candles in the bedroom and shouted in her face, she said, before he eventually calmed down and began crying. 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 after he’d scolded her for having drinks with a friend to help lift his tense mood. She ran into him at 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 out of fear when she heard Majors come inside. Jabbari said Majors 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 returned to their shared 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 that Loretta Scott King or 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 expressed these feelings to Jabbari, 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.”
Jabbari’s testimony will continue Tuesday afternoon.