Marvel actor Majors avoids jail time for assault conviction
Sentenced to domestic violence programming
NEW YORK — Jonathan Majors, a rising movie star who was found guilty last year of assaulting and harassing his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, was sentenced in Manhattan Criminal Court on Monday to 52 weeks of domestic violence programming, to take place in Los Angeles.
Majors had no immediate reaction as the sentence was announced. He could have faced up to a year in jail.
The sentencing hearing began with Jabbari standing to give a statement, saying that she had experienced “extreme physical and emotional pain” because of Majors and had been “held very tightly in the palm of his abusive hand.”
As she spoke, Majors, wearing a dark double-breasted suit and turtleneck, gazed down at a small leather-bound book that was open on a table before him.
Jabbari told the court that when she was with Majors she had become a “different person” — someone who was “small, scared, and vulnerable.” She added, “I have seen his physical anger, and he does not have control over it.”
The district attorney’s office asked Monday that Majors be sentenced to a year of domestic violence programming, with a prosecutor, Kelli Galaway, telling the court that his assault of Jabbari had been the “culmination of over a year of abuse.” Galaway added that Majors had shown a “complete lack of remorse.”
One of Majors’ lawyers, Priya Chaudhry, told the judge, Michael Gaffey, that her client maintained his innocence and planned to appeal his conviction.
Still, she said, Majors “is committed to growing and bettering himself.”
Majors’ conviction in December on assault and harassment charges — one misdemeanor and one violation — left his career in tatters. Marvel Studios dissolved its relationship with him. Searchlight Pictures said that it would not release “Magazine Dreams,” in which Majors played a fury-filled bodybuilder.
And after the verdict, two women who had dated Majors between 2013 and 2019 described him to The New York Times as a controlling, threatening figure who had abused them and isolated them from friends and career pursuits. Majors denied the allegations.
Jabbari met Majors in 2021 on the set of the Marvel movie “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” where she was working as a movement coach and he was playing a time-traveling supervillain named Kang the Conqueror.
The two lived together in London and New York, but their relationship splintered early one morning in March 2023. Majors and Jabbari were inside a hired SUV in lower Manhattan when she said she saw a text message on his phone from another woman. Jabbari has said that she grabbed the phone and that Majors tried to pry it from her hand, breaking one of her fingers. He was arrested later that day.