Jonathan Majors, who was certainly one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising stars earlier than dealing with misdemeanor domestic-violence costs in Manhattan, was discovered responsible of assault and harassment on Monday for attacking his girlfriend in a automobile.
The six-person jury discovered that Mr. Majors was not responsible on two different counts that had required prosecutors to indicate that he had acted with intent — certainly one of assault and certainly one of harassment.
However the verdict, which arrived after greater than 5 hours of deliberation over three days, thwarted Mr. Majors’s hopes of salvaging his profession by proving his innocence within the March altercation. His future within the movie business, already beneath menace, is now unclear, and he might face just below a 12 months in jail. His sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 6.
Mr. Majors, 34, sporting a grey swimsuit and grey suede sneakers, didn’t visibly react to the decision, aside from to squint barely and to wrinkle his brow. One among his representatives didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark, nor did a spokeswoman from the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace.
The jurors discovered Mr. Majors responsible after a whirlwind two-week trial by which the actor, like most defendants, didn’t testify. As a substitute, the courtroom heard from his now ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, who described intimately the altercation that left her ear bloody and finger fractured.
On her first day of testimony, she gave jurors a full account of what occurred, talking publicly for the primary time concerning the episode. She stated that Mr. Majors had obtained a flirty textual content from one other girl, and that she had grabbed his cellphone out of his hand. First, she stated, he tried to pry her fingers away; then he twisted her hand and her arm.
“Next,” she stated, “I felt like a really hard blow across my head.”
The Manhattan district lawyer, Alvin L. Bragg, stated in an e-mail that the trial had demonstrated the psychological and emotional abuse that’s “far too common” in home violence instances. He thanked the jury for its service and Ms. Jabbari “for bravely telling her story despite having to relive her trauma on the stand.”
Mr. Majors’s attorneys had argued that it was Ms. Jabbari who had assaulted their consumer, they usually unleashed a fusillade of assaults on her earlier than and in the course of the trial, casting her as a liar who sought revenge on Mr. Majors after he strayed.
These arguments appeared to fall flat with the jury — and a decide prevented the actor’s attorneys from detailing the proof that satisfied at the very least one detective that there was possible trigger to arrest Ms. Jabbari in October, months after the incident.
A consultant for Mr. Majors didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In a press release, a lawyer for Ms. Jabbari, Brittany Henderson, stated that the decision had proven that “no abuser, no matter how powerful they may seem, is above the law.”
“Ms. Jabbari hopes that her actions will inspire other survivors to speak out and seek justice,” she stated.
It was an uncommon continuing — few defendants charged with the crimes that Mr. Majors was dealing with select to go to trial. However the actor had held out hope that his identify could be cleared.
The blended verdict did the other, including to the injury attributable to a ream of embarrassing proof.
The courtroom heard a recording that Ms. Jabbari stated she made by which Mr. Majors directed her to deal with him like Michelle Obama and Coretta Scott King had handled their husbands. Jurors noticed a text exchange by which Mr. Majors urged Ms. Jabbari to not search therapy for a head wound and threatened suicide.
The prosecutors, Kelli Galaway and Michael Perez, used that proof to argue that Mr. Majors had been a controlling and manipulative boyfriend and that the assault within the for-hire S.U.V. in March was the fruits of two years’ price of abuse.
Ms. Galaway, in her closing argument final week, urged the jury to imagine Ms. Jabbari, asking jurors what she stood to realize as she lived via assaults on her character.
“She would not be able to fabricate this story,” Ms. Galaway stated.
