Jonathan Majors’ ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, shared her perspective about the events of March 25 and the aftermath in testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday. Majors faces charges of assault and aggravated harassment after an altercation between them in a moving vehicle. Both the prosecution and defense agree that Jabbari noticed a text message on his phone and then grabbed it from his hands. But Majors and Jabbari have differing accounts of how the altercation unfolded.
Jabbari testified that she noticed a message on Majors’ screen from someone called “Cleopatra” that read “Oh, how I wish to be kissing you.” Majors insisted that “it’s not what it looks like,” but Jabbari was “taken aback”: “Of all the problems in the relationship, I never thought that infidelity would be one of them,” she said (via Business Insider).
Jabbari grabbed the phone to see the messages, and then “felt the weight of him on top of me. I felt him trying to pry the phone away from me,” she recounted. “Next, I felt like a really hard blow across my head. It felt like a hard impact to the back of my head. I felt a lot of pain and I sat back and that’s when he got the phone back from my hand.” The defense has claimed that Jabbari was the aggressor and tore the actor’s jacket; Jabbari admitted that in the struggle “I grabbed him and pulled the button off his jacket and he yelled, became angry and yelled, ‘Look what you have done.’”
Jabbari said she tried multiple times to get out of the car, and in one instance Majors forcibly threw her back in “like a football.” When she finally got out of the vehicle, she left with strangers who promised to help get her a ride. She went with them to a birthday party, where she had some shots and bought her helpers champagne (per The Daily Beast). Majors, meanwhile, retreated to a hotel and texted her to break up.
Jabbari’s testimony indicates that both she and Majors were conflicted about the end of their relationship—he allegedly called to say he loved her and didn’t cheat, but said he’d deleted “Cleopatra’s” messages, so Jabbari hung up. She then felt she’d “been irrational” for cutting off their conversation and tried “for a really long time” to get back in touch. When he didn’t respond, she took sleeping pills to go to bed, but woke up a few hours later in “pain” and went to the bathroom. According to The Daily Beast, Jabbari testified that she passed out on the bathroom floor after throwing up from exhaustion and pain.
When she woke up, she was surrounded by law enforcement officers (as Majors had called 911 after returning to their apartment and finding her on the floor). “I was totally overwhelmed,” she said. “The last thing I had in my memory was being alone, being safe-ish. And this was so overwhelming. Being a woman, half-naked, and surrounded by strange men, was not the nicest feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
Jabbari, who is white, hesitated to fully explain the situation upon waking up: “I think just things he had told me in the past about not trusting the police and what they would do to him as a Black man, and I didn’t want to put him in that situation. I wanted to say, ‘Help me, please.’” She claimed she alluded to her trouble “in the safest way I felt possible,” but was aware of Majors being in the next room. “I didn’t want to say exactly what happened, but I also saw this as a moment to have a bit of help in leaving the relationship. I was just really scared.”
Even after she was taken to the hospital, and after she left the hospital, Jabbari says she felt “guilty” that she had told on Majors; when she found out he was arrested, she felt like it was “her fault.” “It was so confusing, and I loved him still. I felt like I should have lied and said nothing happened so that he wasn’t in trouble. I knew that he would be upset with me, and I just wanted to fix it.”
Jabbari reportedly cried as she reflected on the impact of the highly publicized case, as well as her own arrest (following Majors’ cross-complaint). “There’s just been a lot of unwanted attention about a very difficult period of my life,” she said (via People). “I’m a very private person. It’s been really hard, the show of it all. It feels like the abuse I was in hasn’t ended.”
