Jonathan Majors, an actor whom Marvel had expected to anchor its tent-pole superhero franchise, manipulated, threatened and finally assaulted his ex-girlfriend inside a for-hire car in Manhattan, prosecutors said on Monday.
Mr. Majors’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, argued that it was her client who was assaulted in the March incident and that it was he who had emerged from the car bloody and hurt. She said that Mr. Majors’s ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, had accused him as revenge for ending their relationship.
The dueling accounts were presented to six jurors during opening arguments in an unusual trial in Manhattan, where the district attorney’s office has charged Mr. Majors with misdemeanor assault.
Trials on misdemeanor charges are rare, because a vast majority of defendants plead guilty to avoid risking harsher sentences. But the charges halted Mr. Majors’s speedy ascent in the film industry and have left him struggling to salvage his career and reputation.
A prosecutor, Michael Perez, said in his opening statement that Mr. Majors attacked Ms. Jabbari during a ride home in the early hours of March 25 after she saw on his phone a text from another woman. He slapped her face and grabbed her hand violently, Mr. Perez said, adding that the driver would testify that after she got out of the car, Mr. Majors threw her “like a football” back inside.
Throughout their relationship, Mr. Majors had shown a need to maintain control, Mr. Perez told the jurors, and in March, he had shown “no hesitation” in using physical force against Ms. Jabbari. The altercation resulted in a fracture to Ms. Jabbari’s middle finger on her right hand, as well as pain and swelling in her arm and right ear, Mr. Perez said.
Mr. Perez cast the assault as the natural finale of a relationship that became abusive shortly after it began, two years before the assault. He said that Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari met on the set of a Marvel film in 2021, and that they experienced a short-lived “honeymoon phase.”
“Just months into the relationship, the evidence will show that the defendant’s true self emerged,” Mr. Perez said, telling jurors that Mr. Majors would yell at Ms. Jabbari and during one argument had thrown household items at the wall, shattering glass.
Mr. Majors, wearing a dark suit with a gilded Bible and a large binder on the table before him, spent much of Mr. Perez’s argument facing the front of the courtroom, his face blank. A jury of three men and three women listened impassively. (Misdemeanor trials are typically heard by six jurors, rather than 12.)
Ms. Chaudhry, in her opening, echoed the prosecution in saying that the altercation had begun when Mr. Majors received a text. But she said that her client had been the victim.
He was, she said, “slapped, clawed and scratched by Grace Jabbari in a way that made the driver, the only witness to this event, describe Ms. Jabbari as ‘psycho girl.’”
As Mr. Majors left to spend the night in a hotel — texting Ms. Jabbari to end their relationship — Ms. Jabbari went out dancing with people she had met that night, Ms. Chaudhry told the jurors.
Video shows Ms. Jabbari letting people “twirl her ballroom style, while she spins on the very finger she now claims was freshly broken,” Ms. Chaudhry said.
She concluded by accusing Ms. Jabbari of seeking revenge for a shattered relationship.
“She made these false allegations to ruin Jonathan Majors and to take away everything he has spent his whole life working for,” Ms. Chaudhry said.
Mr. Majors filed his own complaint against Ms. Jabbari, and last month she was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and criminal mischief. The district attorney’s office declined to pursue the case, saying in a statement that it lacked “prosecutorial merit.”
During pretrial hearings, prosecutors asked the judge to stop the defense from mentioning Ms. Jabbari’s arrest. But Ms. Chaudhry argued that the case’s dismissal showed they had ignored Mr. Majors’s perspective.
The judge, Michael Gaffey, ultimately agreed to allow her to discuss Ms. Jabbari’s arrest, but called the situation “very unusual,” noting that Ms. Chaudhry had not filed a police report until three months after the altercation.
On Monday, Mr. Perez cast the police report as an extension of Mr. Majors’s attempts to control and manipulate Ms. Jabbari.
The pair met on the set of the movie “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” in which Mr. Majors played the time-traveling villain Kang the Conqueror. Mr. Majors, who had received an Emmy nomination for his role in the series “Lovecraft Country,” was on a fast rise toward A-list stardom. But the charges have placed his career on hold.
Before the proceedings Monday, Mr. Majors greeted several rows of supporters, leaning down and kissing at least six people. Several of Ms. Jabbari’s relatives were also present, though Ms. Jabbari herself, who is expected to testify, was not.