Two months after Jonathan Majors was convicted of recklessly assaulting his ex-girlfriend, two more women have come forward in a New York Times investigation to accuse the actor of physical or emotional abuse in their relationships. The women who spoke to the Times described a pattern in which the actor initially showered them with love and called them “Mrs. Majors,” before isolating them and allegedly turning violent or emotionally abusive.
Emma Duncan and Maura Hooper had provided prosecutors with written statements about their experiences with Majors ahead of the trial, according to the Times. However, there is a high legal bar for allowing testimony about past behavior, known as Molineux evidence, into court, and the judge sealed this information from jurors. Majors’s lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, recently submitted a motion to the judge asking that this evidence be permanently kept from the public.
The most serious new allegations come from Duncan, a fellow actor who was engaged to Majors for four years. According to the Times, Duncan’s statement to prosecutors describes a series of violent incidents that she alleges took place over the course of their relationship. In 2016, the statement says, Duncan discovered text messages between Majors and another woman. Shortly after, she began packing up her things at a hotel they were staying at in Sante Fe, New Mexico. Majors then allegedly “pushed Ms. Duncan into the couch and began to choke her,” “threw her body across the room,” and said, “‘I’m going to make sure you can’t have children,’” according to the statement. Chaudhry did not immediately respond to the Cut’s request for comment, but told the Times that the incident in Santa Fe “did not happen.”
Duncan’s statement describes a second incident later that year in which Majors allegedly “slammed her body into their mailbox” at their shared Harlem apartment, bruising her back and arms. A year later, in a third incident, she alleges Majors threw her to the ground, leaving a bruise on her forehead. Chaudhry told the Times that in the second incident, “Ms. Duncan was physically trying to stop him from harming himself and during this, they both fell into a mailbox”; she denied that the third incident happened.
Hooper and Majors began dating in 2013, when they met at the Yale School of Drama, according to the Times. In her statement to prosecutors, Hooper alleges Majors’s emotional abuse began with isolating her from her classmates. When she got pregnant and scheduled an abortion, Hooper claims Majors did not pick her up when she called him for a ride home after the procedure. (Chaudhry told the Times that Majors and Hooper had agreed she would find another way home.) After the couple had split up, in 2016, Hooper’s statement alleges Majors berated her for dating someone they knew, calling her a “whore” and saying, “I’m going to rip you out of my heart the way they ripped our baby out of you.” (Chaudhry told the Times that while it was a “mutually intense conversation,” Majors does not recall those specific details.)
The Times also reported that Majors behaved in a volatile way toward some female co-workers on the set of the HBO series Lovecraft Country. Two female directors say he confronted them — criticizing one woman’s work and making a “derogatory racial remark” about the other’s looks — and that they complained to the network about this behavior. Chaudhry told the Times that Majors did not make a racist comment and that he had “never been told that anyone objected to his behavior.”
Majors said in a recent Good Morning America interview that he plans to work in Hollywood again. But his career is currently in tatters: Marvel dropped the actor post-conviction, and while he received critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival last year for his performance in the film Magazine Dreams, its release date has been indefinitely postponed. While Chaudhry has filed a motion to throw out the verdict in his domestic-violence case, Majors is scheduled to be sentenced on April 8. He faces up to a year of jail time.
