Grace Jabbari, an ex-girlfriend of Jonathan Majors, filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing the actor of assault, defamation, and filing a false police report against her. The suit, filed in federal court in New York, comes three months after a jury found Majors guilty of assaulting and harassing Jabbari in March 2023. The complaint alleges that Majors and his legal team defamed Jabbari even though “they are keenly aware of Grace’s allegations that Majors has physically laid hands on her on more than one occasion.”
“It takes true bravery to hold someone with this level of power and acclaim accountable. Bravery that Grace Jabbari has demonstrated at every stage of the legal process,” a lawyer for Jabbari, Brittany N. Henderson, said in a statement. “We strongly believe that through this action, truth and transparency will bring Grace the justice that she deserves.” Majors’s team did not immediately respond to the Cut’s request for comment.
Jabbari’s lawsuit alleges that Majors engaged in a “pattern of pervasive domestic abuse” throughout their two-year relationship, which began after they met on the set of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in August 2021. The complaint describes several alleged bouts of physical violence, including a September 2022 incident in London in which Jabbari says Majors threw her onto the hood of a car and covered her mouth as she shouted for help. “He brought Grace back into their house and held his hands around her neck, stating that he wanted to kill her, and that he was going to kill her,” the lawsuit alleges. “Majors then started hitting Grace’s head against the marble floor while strangling her until she felt she could no longer breathe. After the incident, Majors texted Grace asking her not to tell anyone about what had occurred.”
Text messages following a September 2022 incident had been unsealed during Majors’s trial, showing that the actor had pleaded with Jabbari not to go to the hospital and threatened suicide. However, details of that incident were not shared with the public.
The lawsuit also points at the allegations brought forward by two of Majors’s former partners, Emma Duncan and Maura Hooper, who accused him of emotional and physical abuse in statements to prosecutors and interviews with the New York Times. The lawsuit says Duncan’s accusations showed “an eerily similar manner to the pattern” of abuse Jabbari allegedly suffered in her relationship. It also claims Majors’s legal team used “the exact same defamatory-type strategy” deployed against Jabbari in their responses to the Times, because they claimed Duncan and not Majors was actually the abuser.
Majors made defamatory statements on several occasions, according to the lawsuit, including an interview he did with Good Morning America in which he said he has “never hit a woman.” The complaint also alleges that Majors’s attorney, Priya Chaudhry, has “continued to double down on the defamatory attack,” citing an interview with The Cut earlier this year. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit,” Chaudhry said of those who criticized how she treated Jabbari at the witness stand. “The idea that I should coddle” Jabbari, she said, felt like suggesting “I should coddle the woman who accused Emmett Till.”
The complaint alleges that Majors also engaged in malicious prosecution by filing a police report against Jabbari, in which he accused her of being the aggressor in the March 2023 altercation in a chauffeured car for which he was charged. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Jabbari, and the lawsuit claims the police report was a “truly desperate attempt to discredit his victim before trial.”
Jabbari, who asked for a jury trial, is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Majors is due to be sentenced in the criminal case on April 8, after the actor’s legal time filed a motion asking the judge to overturn the verdict.