Jonathan Majors sat staring on Tuesday as, 20 feet away, his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari testified about the violent end of a nearly two-year relationship during which she said he screamed, scolded her and even hurled household items.
In a September 2022 recording that was played during his assault trial in Manhattan state court, Mr. Majors lectured Ms. Jabbari that she should care for him as Michelle Obama and Coretta Scott King — the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — cared for their husbands.
“I’m a great man. A great man. I am doing great things,” Mr. Majors said, adding: “The woman that supports me, the one I support, needs to be a great woman and make sacrifices.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Jabbari described more than half a dozen episodes that began in December 2021, months into her relationship with Mr. Majors, an actor who had been expected to anchor Marvel movies. But her testimony ultimately focused on the incident for which Mr. Majors was charged: a confrontation in a hired S.U.V. in the early hours of March 25 that was set off when Ms. Jabbari saw a text to Mr. Majors from another woman.
Prosecutors said during their opening statement this week that Mr. Majors had been abusive throughout his relationship with Ms. Jabbari, culminating in the March assault. Mr. Majors was arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with several misdemeanors for assault and harassment.
But Mr. Majors’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, argued that her client had been the victim in the altercation, emerging from the car scratched and bloody. The accusations against Mr. Majors were an act of revenge by Ms. Jabbari because he had ended their relationship, Ms. Chaudhry said.
In her testimony, Ms. Jabbari was calm as she explained to the crowded courtroom how she had grabbed Mr. Majors’s phone from him and how he had tried to pry her fingers away, twisting her hands and right arm. Suddenly, she said, came “a really hard blow across my head.”
Eventually, Mr. Majors asked the driver to stop the car in downtown Manhattan, she said. Video shown in court showed Mr. Majors jump out, followed by Ms. Jabbari, before he turned around, picked her up and pushed her back inside. He turned and ran, and she re-emerged to chase him.
Mr. Majors left to spend the night in a hotel, Ms. Jabbari testified, and she went dancing with people she had met that night because she didn’t “want to be alone at that point.”
As Ms. Jabbari answered questions about the incident from the prosecutor, Kelli Galaway, Mr. Majors looked at her, his head tilted and resting on his arm. Ms. Chaudhry objected often to Ms. Galaway’s questions and asked that Ms. Jabbari’s physical gestures be part of the trial record.
As Ms. Jabbari testified, her relatives sat directly in front of her in the gallery. On the other side, behind Mr. Majors, were several rows of his supporters.
Ms. Jabbari had smiled as she entered the courtroom in the morning, spoken directly to jurors and laughed nervously as Ms. Galaway asked her questions at the outset of her testimony.
But as she described how Mr. Majors had been upset with her for not being communicative while she was at a music festival, she asked for a tissue. She cried throughout the first half of her testimony, at one point leaving the courtroom for several minutes to collect herself.
Ms. Jabbari said that when she and Mr. Majors began dating in 2021, he was loving. But as their relationship progressed, Ms. Jabbari said, she felt “isolated” and frightened.
“It was confusing because I felt scared of him, but quite dependent on him,” she said. A year in, Ms. Jabbari said, she feared Mr. Majors “physically quite a lot.”
“I felt on edge,” she told the jurors. “Just worried that I could do something that could put him into this angry state.”
In September 2022, Ms. Jabbari said, she had a friend visit the couple’s home in London. Mr. Majors, who had returned from a day of filming, was in no mood for company. His anger lasted days, she said, with him confronting her when they ran into each other outside, pulling her headphones from her ears and stepping on them, then ordering her to move out.
In another incident, in July 2022, Mr. Majors “just exploded,” she said, and threw items, including a candle, at her in a fury, denting a wall near where she stood.
Misdemeanor charges like those Mr. Majors faces rarely go to trial, because a vast majority of defendants plead guilty to avoid risking a harsher sentence. But Mr. Majors is struggling to salvage his reputation.
The actor, who received an Emmy nomination for his role in the series “Lovecraft Country,” was on a fast rise toward A-list stardom as the center of planned superhero films. The charges have placed his career on hold.
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
