Jonathan Majors’ ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari wiped away tears Tuesday as she described for a packed Manhattan courtroom the fear she felt during her tumultuous two-year relationship with the actor — which ended after he allegedly assaulted her during an encounter that’s now at the center of his criminal trial.
“He just exploded,” Jabbari, 30, testified of a July 2022 incident in which she said Majors, 34, smashed candles and other household objects against the wall of their bedroom in a fit of rage.
“His face just kind of changes when he gets into that place,” Jabbari recalled of the Los Angeles episode, after showing jurors a photo she snapped of a dent she said was left in the wall after Majors’ outburst.
“He’s a big guy… you just want to step back,” Jabbari added as Majors sat at the defense table with his head bowed and staring straight ahead as she testified in Manhattan Criminal Court.
Jabbari, a British professional dancer, described herself in that moment as “scared, and knowing that I needed to calm him down because I just wanted it to stop.”
Majors started “really crying, shaking and crying” and referred to himself as a “monster,” his ex added.
“I kind of held him and said, ‘This is ok,'”, she said.
Majors is on trial for allegedly assaulting Jabbari — yanking her hand so hard that he fractured her middle finger before striking her in the ear — during an encounter that erupted in a private car service driving over the Manhattan Bridge after Jabbari snatched away his phone after reading a flirty text from a woman named “Cleopatra.”
But the court allowed Jabbari, a movement coach, to bring up prior examples of what she called Majors’ alarming behavior for jurors to use as background information while they weigh whether to convict the actor on misdemeanor assault and harassment charges.
Using a tissue to wipe tears from her eyes, Jabbari had to leave the courtroom for a few minutes after describing a December 2022 episode in a London park in which she said Majors, holding a movie script in one hand, ripped her headphones out of her ears with the other and stomped on them after accusing her of being “embarrassing” and an “alcoholic.”
The actor’s alleged tirade came after Jabbari had met a friend at a nearby pub for two glasses of wine the previous night while Majors trained with his trainer at their shared home, she said.
“You better not be in the house when I get home,” Majors warned her at the time, she testified.
The next day, Jabbari made a recording — which was played for the six-person jury — of Majors screaming at her, “How dare you come home drunk and disturb the peace in our house!”
The actor then called himself a “great man” and lectured her that she needed to act more like the wives of other notable men like Michelle Obama and Coretta Scott King.
“I am a great man, a great man,” Majors said on the recording. “I am doing great things, not just for me but for my culture and the world.
“The woman that supports me… needs to be a great woman and make sacrifices,” Majors added. “Two nights ago, you did not do that.”
A day later, Majors sent her another text in which he threatened to commit suicide, Jabbari testified.
“He said that he is a monster and that he wants to kill himself and that he has put actions in place to do so,” she said through her tears.
Jabbari consoled Majors at the time and decided to stay with him despite her fears about his frequent outbursts, she said Tuesday.
“At that point in the relationship, I feared him physically quite a lot,” she told jurors. “I felt that I had to keep secrets from everyone.”
“It felt quite confusing because I felt really scared of him but quite dependent on him,” she added.
Jabbari testified that she met Majors in 2021 on the set of Marvel’s “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania,” — in which he starred as the villain Kang the Conqueror and he served as a movement coach — after his hairstylist slipped her his number.
At first, Majors was an “amazing, “really kind” and “loving” partner who left her handwritten notes and told him that he loved him early on in the relationship, Jabbari said.
“I felt really loved and cared for, really seen,” Jabbari testified. “I felt like he understood me and I understood him.”
But the actor first displayed anger toward her in December 2021 when — standing over her as she sat on a couch — he berated her for bringing up her ex-boyfriend, she testified.
“It was the first time I felt scared of him,” Jabbari said.
Majors erupted again in June 2022 when Jabbari was unreachable on her cellphone while going with friends to the Glastonbury Music Festival, where there was no phone service, she said.
The actor was stressed at the time while preparing for a role as a troubled aspiring bodybuilder in the film “Magazine Dreams,” she testified.
Jabbari said she consoled him after returning home and promised not to ever be out of reach again.
“I just tried to make him feel secure again, that I did love him… that I had misplaced his trust by going and that I would never do that again,” she testified.
“I promised I would never go somewhere without him… I just felt regretful that I upset him that way.”
Jabbari’s testimony is expected to continue Tuesday afternoon.