Hours after she was allegedly attacked by ex-boyfriend Jonathan Majors in the back of a car, Grace Jabbari said she was “totally overwhelmed” when she woke up and found several officers inside her apartment.
The choreographer admitted to jurors on Wednesday in Manhattan criminal court that as officers began asking questions about her injuries and the attack, she was cagey out of fear for the actor’s safety.
“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,” Jabbari tearfully testified on Wednesday as Majors looked down at the defense table. “I wanted to say, ‘Help me, please.’”
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Even at the hospital, she had trouble describing the full extent of the March 25 domestic dispute to doctors examining her injuries, which included a fracture on her right finger and bruising, she said. When she found out Majors had been arrested, Jabbari said she felt “anxious” because she believed it was all “her fault.”
“It was so confusing, and I loved him still,” she said on the second day on the stand. “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.”
Majors has pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanor charges, including harassment and assault, in connection with the March 25 incident. He has long denied any wrongdoing, and his defense lawyers argued that he emerged from the car with a “bloody gash, scratch, and scared.”
Jabbari’s description of the aftermath of the assault is starkly different from the picture Majors’ defense team painted to jurors earlier this week. Defense attorney Priya Chaudhry said that Majors called 911 after finding an injured Jabbari half-naked inside a walk-in closet in their Chelsea apartment. Chaudhry said that Majors called authorities because he believed that Jabbari was suicidal.
Jabbari, however, said that she was found on her heated bathroom floor “in the jumper” that she had put on to sleep. She said that she had fallen asleep after throwing up from exhaustion and pain.
“I was totally overwhelmed,” she said about the moment she woke up to officers in her apartment. “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.”
On Tuesday, Jabbari said the assault began after she saw a flirty text conversation between a “Cleopatra” and Majors. “Oh, how I wish to be kissing you,” Cleopatra had texted the actor.
Stunned, Jabbari said that she immediately grabbed Majors’ phone. She testified that Majors threw himself on top of her to try to pry the phone away from her before he grabbed her arm and placed it behind her back. During the altercation, she said, Majors also twisted her arm and finger.
“He was trying to hurt me,” she said on Tuesday. She said that the altercation continued when Majors got out of the car to get away from her. Prosecutors allege that Majors shoved Jabbari multiple times to try to get her to stay in the car and threw her “like a football” before he ran away. During cross-examination, Jabbari added that she hit the back of her head against the SUV’s door frame as Majors pushed back into the car.
Jabbari and Majors ultimately went their separate ways, with Jabbari heading to a birthday party with some strangers who offered to help her find a ride home, while the actor went to a Manhattan hotel. While out, she said, she had a couple of shots and bought the group a bottle of champagne as a thank-you.
Around 3 a.m., Jabbari left the club for home, and on her way there, noticed that Majors had sent her a text breaking up with her.
“It’s not working, I don’t know what to do,” Majors wrote in the text shown in court on Wednesday.
“The message said, ‘I wish I was kissing you,’ and you went crazy when I asked to see it,” Jabbari responded. “I’m not an idiot. Have fun with her…I’m worth more than that. I’m going now.”
Back at their Chelsea apartment, Jabbari said she spoke with Majors on the phone and he insisted that he did not cheat and that he loved her. When she asked to see the messages, he revealed that he’d deleted the text thread, so she hung up the phone.
“I felt like I had been irrational by hanging up and I wanted to continue the conversation,” Jabbari said on Wednesday, stating that she then texted and called Majors “for a really long time” to speak to him again.
When he didn’t answer, Jabbari told jurors she took off her makeup and tried to go to bed. She took two over-the-counter sleeping pills to help her get some shut-eye amid the “pain,” she testified. She said that she had taken the pills multiple times before.
Jabbari said that when she woke up about three hours later in pain, she started to realize the full extent of her injuries. She said she felt dried blood on her right ear and her right finger had turned “kind of black.” In the bathroom, she took photos of her ear to get a better look.
As Jabbari detailed her injuries and teared up at least once, Majors stared at the defense table. While showing Jabbari pictures of her injuries during cross-examination, Chaudhry asked why there were no photos of the dried blood behind her ear. Jabbari responded that she believed she cleaned her ear with water before authorities woke her up.
Prosecutors say Majors later went back to his apartment the next morning, where he found Jabbari and called 911. Jabbari said that she alluded to officers “in the safest way I felt possible” about the assault, but that she felt nervous when she heard Majors 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,“ she said. “I was just really scared.”
Jabbari said she was taken to a local hospital because authorities thought she had self-harmed. She was released, she said, after telling a staffer that her boyfriend had “hurt me and that I hadn’t done anything to myself.”
Even after the attack, she said, she felt “guilty” about Majors’ arrest. She said she texted him to “reassure him that I didn’t want them to arrest him” and that she loved him. “I wanted him to know that I wasn’t trying to get him in trouble,” she said, adding that she was “trying to fix the situation we found ourselves in as best as possible.”
She was granted an order of protection from Majors in April. In June, Majors filed an NYPD domestic violence counterclaim against Jabbari, alleging that he was the victim that night and that she stole things from their apartment. Jabbari received a desk appearance ticket on misdemeanor charges, but the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges against her for lack of “prosecutorial merit.”
Before concluding her direct examination with prosecutors on Wednesday, Jabbari began to cry as she explained the emotional toll the trial and media attention have had on her life, which she normally keeps very private.
“It’s a lot of unwanted attention over a very difficult part of my life. I had to tell friends and family everything and that has been really hard,” she said. “It felt like that abuse that I was in has just not ended.”
