Jonathan Majors made his first appearance in a Manhattan court on Tuesday.
via: Insider
The Marvel star wore a rumpled, brown linen suit over a white dress shirt and did not speak during or after the five-minute hearing, except to say “good morning” to the judge.
His lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, told Insider that the star had hoped the misdemeanor-assault charges would be dropped by Manhattan prosecutors.
But she said that Majors was still eager to prove his innocence to a jury.
Majors is known to movie audiences as the Marvel supervillain Kang the Conqueror and also stars as a boxing prodigy in “Creed III,” which was released in theatres in early March and is his latest movie role.
It was just three weeks later that Majors was arrested on suspicion of hitting his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, in a fight on a Chinatown street corner.
“Ms. Jabbari claims that Mr. Majors assaulted her in a car in Chinatown around 12:00 a.m. on March 25, 2023, and during this incident, Mr. Majors broke her finger and lacerated her ear,” Chaudhry wrote in a letter to Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Rachel S. Pauley that was released April 8.
“We have proof that this is a complete lie,” Chaudhry told the judge, detailing a trove of defense eyewitness interviews, phone records, credit-card statements, and hours of surveillance and police body-camera video.
Chaudhry alleged in the letter that this evidence suggested that Jabbari injured herself some seven hours after that midnight fight when Jabbari took a fall while alone in Majors’ penthouse apartment after drinking and taking sleeping pills.
The evidence Chaudhry shared with Insider did not show how Jabbari was injured or the entirety of the fight between Jabbari and Majors that is at the center of the misdemeanor charges. It did however appear to support the lawyer’s contention that Jabbari’s ear and finger were uninjured in the hours after the fight.
Chaudhry continued in the letter that Jabbari had said “‘I don’t know’ nineteen times” when asked by arriving medics and cops how she was injured, citing police body-worn-camera footage taken at the penthouse and turned over to the defense by prosecutors.
The letter alleges that the NYPD footage showed the lead officer “coaching Ms. Jabbari to accuse Mr. Majors of assault.”
She said in the letter that the arrest was “racist” and showed the officers questioning among themselves how Majors — who they didn’t recognize as a famous actor — could afford to live in a luxe penthouse.
Chaudhry told Insider that all six of the responding officers were white.
“Even though Ms. Jabbari admitted to drinking to the point of throwing up, taking sleeping pills, and having no idea how she woke up in a closet with a cut on her head and injured finger, the police jumped to the conclusion that Mr. Majors (the young, tall, strong, rich Black man) must have ‘done this’ to Ms. Jabbari,” Chaudhry’s letter alleged, citing the NYPD footage.
Prosecutors charged Majors with six counts of assaulting and three counts of harassing Jabbari, a London-based movement coach who had worked alongside Majors on the set of this year’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment. Efforts to reach Jabbari by email and social media were not successful.
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