Jonathan Majors‘ ex-girlfriend finished her testimony Friday — her fourth day on the witness stand in the “Creed III” actor’s trial for his alleged assault earlier this year. Two more witnesses, including the police officer who arrested Majors in March, also testified.
After the defense’s cross-examination on Thursday, Grace Jabbari returned to the stand for a short redirect by her lawyer Friday morning. On Thursday, she testified about her injuries after Majors’ alleged assault in March, saying that the “next morning is when [the pain] sunk in. When I woke up, I felt like I had been hit by a bus.”
Her friend and colleague Holly Blakey was next called as a witness. Blakey and Jabbari worked as dancers and choreographers together. Blakey had met Majors in London several times when he was dating Jabbari. Blakey said he was “sweet and charming” when she first met him two and a half years ago and that he and Jabbari were “very loving.” Blakey then noticed changes in Jabbari as the couple continued their relationship.
Blakey said Jabbari “would be in the house a lot more” and seemed “to have less interest in herself. She was working a lot less and was someone who’s very driven and has a lot of energy for life. I saw a lot of that disappear.”
Majors is accused of assaulting Jabbari in the backseat of a car on March 25. Jabbari testified on Tuesday that she saw a text message on Majors’ phone from another woman that read, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” She took the phone out of his hands to see who sent the message and he forcefully retrieved it, according to Jabbari. She said this caused bruising, swelling and “excruciating” pain and she had a swollen finger and a cut behind her ear.
Blakey testified that Jabbari called her the morning after Majors’ alleged assault and sent photos of her injuries. The two spent the day talking on the phone for several hours about what had happened.
“I’d never heard her like that before,” Blakey said. “Quite quiet, wrecked, in shock, like she’d been crying… In a way, it was an entirely different emotional landscape. It was different. She was very, very broken — a very traumatized person.”
On the morning of March 26, the day after the alleged assault, Majors called 911 regarding Jabbari’s mental state. In her testimony, Jabbari said she had taken sleeping pills the night before to help fall asleep, due to the pain she was in, and woke up on the floor of a walk-in closet in the apartment she shared with Majors.
The NYPD officer who responded to the 911 call and arrested Majors that same day testified in court on Friday afternoon. Officer Brendan Swayne, a domestic violence prevention officer in New York’s 10th precinct, identified Majors in court and reviewed his personal bodycam footage on the witness stand. The footage started by showing Swayne and another officer being escorted by Majors into his apartment where Jabbari was laying on the floor of the closet.
Swayne testified that he had noticed Jabbari’s middle finger was bruised and that she had a cut behind her right ear that was an inch and a half long. His bodycam footage showed EMTs and more officers arriving to the apartment. Swayne took Majors into another room to ask Jabbari privately what had happened to cause her injuries.
“She whispered saying that she didn’t want him right outside the room,” Swayne testified. “She seemed scared and started to cry.”
Swayne had taken photos of Jabbari’s injuries, which were shown to the jury, and said, “based on what we had so far, I knew bare minimum there’d be a domestic incident report filed. There was a domestic incident that had occurred.”
Majors’ attorney Priya Chaudhry has alleged it was Jabbari who assaulted Majors in the vehicle that night and not the other way around. The defense has also argued that Jabbari fabricated the allegations to get back at Majors after their breakup. They met in August 2021 on the London set of Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and dated for two years before Majors ended the relationship on the night of the alleged assault.
Majors is on trial for three misdemeanor counts of assault and harassment, to which he’s pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face up to a year in prison.
